If you want to see FirstPlaces in action, go to http://demo.firstplaces.org/
A while ago I had the privilege of being invited by the lovely Tiina Carr and Joanne Mateer of The Workshop to visit Sheffield and their lovely offices for the day and help come up with ideas around Digital Inclusion. It produced some really interesting ideas, some more immediately useful for them and some less so. Of the less so useful ideas is one I decided to pursue at the recent Rewired State Get Online event which was co-produced with UK Online Centres.
The premise behind that idea that formed with much tea and good biscuits at The Workshop and that now sits behind FirstPlaces is this. You remember events such as your first kiss because they are emotive events. You enjoy things which relate to your passions and interests and you want to do more of them. It’s about chemistry in the brain.
So let’s make the journey online for people be about joy and wonder. The internet is huge, so let’s give them a place to start that they’ll enjoy, an experience that is curated by either their friends/family or the special interest groups they’re already a part of. All too often it feels like digital inclusion carries with it the risk that at some point it would be measured in units of “people being able to access government services”. For me that feels like the end goal, and a very far away end goal too. People enjoying all that is for them online and feeling confident and returning regularly feels like the metric. However if we’re going for the transformative effects of being online, personal interests feel like the right sort of gateway drug to doing the hard stuff online like banking, job hunting and engaging with government.
I’ve been playing a bit of late with making short image based presentations to see if an idea feels right before laying down any code or sketching. Here’s the one I made for this, which I’ve now updated with a few screenshots and a killer slide from the presentation that Joel Mitchell put together with Ben Griffiths and I about the related hacks we made.
I’ll put a little video up later about how this all works, but I think it’s fairly clear.
You say who you want to get online, where they are and what they like.
You then pick the nearest or most convenient centre for them. We can add in information about access for people who are disabled and opening hours, given time.
They then get to print out a page with all the information on it which they give to the person they’re helping.
Who go there, hopefully get help to open the nice simple short URL. Part of the project was to build a shortner that was not just for a URL, but for combination of URL and visit.
They get greeted and are on the real internet immediately, seeing things that hopefully relate to their passions. We all get data about inclusion which we can then use to make maps of where people are using the service to get online.
