The recognition that a digitally enabled and effective economy is founded on a digitally enabled and effective society seems somewhere to have been lost. Lost as well seem to be the recognition that the greatest skill in a digital economy as in any other economy or in society overall is the capacity to learn and that learning how to learn, a function of a broader and more humanistic education rather than a “skills oriented” one, is probably a more important and useful preparation for a digital future overall. Equally lost is an understanding that economic innovation is a subset of broader social innovation which in turn comes from a critical yet practical immersion in prevailing cultures and practices.
The response then from a Community Informatics perspective to the questions posed by the Digital Economy Consultation would be as follows
Regulators, policy makers, access suppliers in Developed Countries have a considerable pre-occupation with how to bridge “the last mile” i.e. the gap between the common carrier and the end user’s premises. Here in Hong Kong, where I have been for the last few days at a conference, the concern on the part of regulators, policy […]
I'm currently at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum Meeting in Hong Kong where I presented this afternoon on a panel on "Access and the Digital Divide", which I'm presuming was meant to mirror in some fashion the discussion within the Internet Governance Forum concerning issues around Internet Governance and Development and more broadly the overall discussion of "Digital Divide/Access/"Development" issues in the context of the IGF.
I think that there is a second issue to be addressed which is going beyond "open access" to that of "open use/usability". Giving LDC researchers access to the range of publications and research which are currently denied to them is a good thing to be supported but regrettably I don't see a lot of evidence that doing this would in fact, mean that the uses to which they as researchers would put the information would be very different from what those who currently have access do with the information. Hopefully it would be different, but regrettably and from both observation and experience researchers and academics in LDCs appear to be no more likely to be concerned with making “their” information useful to the potential lay end user audience than their counterparts in Developed Countries.
Gurstein's Community Informatics 
June 28, 2010
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