Working with Hull and East Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership and their Humber Digital Skills Partnership, Hull City Council will create a digital tool which can assess an individual's digital skill level, and assign a digital skill 'profile' to the user.
The tool will be easily and readily accessible to complete online, and data captured will be held safely and securely, accessible only by appropriate officers within Hull City Council.
The tool will also insights and date that can be used to provide rich demographics and allow for bespoke follow-up support with those in need of digital inclusion offers .
Leeds City Council’s 100 per cent Digital Leeds team have created a Community-based model to increase digital inclusion. The model takes other councils through the Stages required to foster collaboration between key partners in a place. Each stage includes steps to be followed to build partnerships and bridges between services and organisations that serve a particular community.
Barking & Dagenham council commissioned Citizen Online through the Switch Project to carry out analysis of digital inclusion issues within the borough. 9 per cent of adults in Barking and Dagenham are not online (around 15,000 people) and they estimate 25 per cent of adults don’t have all of the ‘Essential Digital Skills’ for life. The report suggests that Barking and Dagenham council should aim to recruit around 150 Digital Champions (DCs) across the borough so 1 Digital Champion to every 100 digitally excluded people.
Their solution is to recruit volunteers and provide them with the training and tools they need to support residents to improve their digital skills either in community hubs or remotely. With this funding, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham are proposing to build a training portal for digital champions/friends/assistants which can be used as a shared resource with other public sectors.
The London Borough of Havering have identified that frontline, voluntary and charity sector staff have limited information on where to signpost residents who need additional digital inclusion support. The authority understand that they aren’t utilising all the services and support that are available around digital inclusion.
LB Havering believe that a shared triage and signposting system/tool would help the most at-risk residents to get the support they need and enable a more joined up approach between the council and organisations providing this support.
LB Havering anticipate this tool being used by residents, their family members, volunteers or frontline staff (e.g. staff working in social care, libraries or foodbanks) to identify the type of exclusion and triage them to appropriate services or schemes that can help with this issue.
Long term, it is envisaged that this tool will function like the NHS diagnostic tool.
During the discovery, LB Havering aim to:
Create user journeys and types based on specific needs Identify the touchpoints within the council, health and voluntary sector who could use the triage tool to identify Havering residents that are digitally excluded Create a questionnaire to identify the type of digital exclusion (or potential issue) e.g. no device, connectivity or lack of skill/confidence. Identify how the council store, manage and maintain the details of services offered e.g. a directory If there is a viable product that could be built in alpha Constraints.
Triaging support for digitally excluded residents — Discovery and approach to Alpha
Digital Inclusion Triage — Alpha
London Borough of Redbridge’s current challenge is around assurance of their estate and working to assure that there are no exposures or compromises.
Through their work to secure systems and networks, London Borough of Redbridge are creating a toolkit which can be used for both assurance and in the event of an incident.
This toolkit would include:
- a firewall review
- a password audit
- an artefact and forensic detection and report
- an analysis of network traffic
- a cloud system compliance review.
Norwich City Council think that there are devices which are no longer needed by the business community, and they know there are people who are in need of technology but can’t afford to buy it themselves. The Pathfinders project will start with a research piece through speaking to local stakeholders and learning from past initiatives, and will recommend the best social value model of getting devices to people who need them. Norwich City Council will then work with partners to pilot a recommended community model for safe refurbishment and distribution of devices, complimenting the other great digital inclusion initiatives in the city. Norwich City Council will make this report, process and evaluation available to other councils, sharing learning along the way.
Project update