Year in review

It has been another exciting year for the ADIA with progress being made across several key areas of digital inclusion in Australia.

Notably, the 2019 Digital Inclusion Index was released in September which showed that:

• Since 2014, Australia’s overall digital inclusion score has risen by 7.9 points, from 54.0 to 61.9 and improvements have been evident across all three dimensions of digital inclusion – Access, Affordability and Digital Ability.
• Scores for every state and territory increased. South Australia recorded the largest improvement (2.7 points).
• The digital inclusion gap between Australians with disability and other Australians is substantial but narrowing.
• Indigenous digital inclusion is low, but improving.
• Rural Australia leads the way in NBN take-up and Access improvements.
• Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) migrants have a relatively high level of digital inclusion.

However, there is still a lot of work to be done. The Index also shows that:

• Although value for money has improved, affordability remains a key challenge.
• While the cost of internet data has gone down, households are now spending more money on internet services to account for more usage.
• People aged 65+ are Australia’s least digitally included age group.

One area the Index identifies for more support is ‘Digital Ability’, or essential digital capabilities. Worryingly, under half of all Australians think computers and technology give them more control over their lives and less than 40% feel they can keep up with a changing technological landscape.

In 2019, we worked towards this goal by meeting with members of the new Government to share the views of our members and the communities they represent. The Collective Voice team developed a Call to Action that was sent to members of both the Government and the Opposition. This Call to Action:

• highlighted the current state of play for digital inclusion
• identified priority segments of the community that are currently underserved, and
• called for specific interventions to address the issues identified.

We also made submissions to two major reviews (the ACCC Digital Platforms Review and the Department of Home Affairs’ 2020 Cyber Security Strategy Review) and are encouraged by the Government’s response to the Digital Platforms Review which proposes action on digital literacy.

Our members met with Professor Julian Thomas, the lead researcher on the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, in a meet-up where Professor Thomas provided great insights into the future work of the Index and on what areas that Index would focus next year.

There will be more opportunities to engage with researchers like Professor Thomas in the New Year, so make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter for details.

As we move into 2020, the ADIA will continue its work to ensure Australia adopts a nationally accepted digital capabilities framework.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to and supported the work of the ADIA in 2019 . The work of the ADIA would not be possible without your support, and we look forward to reducing the digital divide further in 2020.

Dear ADIA community,

We recently completed a review of the backbone functions and priorities for the year ahead based on feedback from ADIA participants and our sponsors. The review has taken into account the excellent work done by the collective voice team in defining a ‘call to action’, the desire to progress a national digital skills capability framework as well as the opportunities presented by the new Parliament.

In response we have identified the need for the ADIA to have a more active role in public policy engagement and I am very pleased to announce that with the support of our sponsors we have been able to add this capability to the backbone.

As of 1 July the ADIA backbone will be led by Ishtar Vij, Carolyn Hough and Ben Rice from Eloquium Group. Ishtar, Carolyn and Ben bring a wealth of experience in strategy, public policy, government affairs, stakeholder engagement and communications having held senior roles across a diverse range of government, corporate and not-for-profit organisations.

One of the first priorities of the backbone will be to support the collective voice team in progressing the ‘call to action’ and engaging with the incoming government.

The backbone will also continue to support the broader work of the ADIA including scheduling regular meetups, coordinating activities and continuing our regular newsletters.

We’ll also be looking to confirm members of the ADIA Governance & Strategy Committee for the year ahead in July, with the next meeting proposed to be held in August 2019. I’ll be reaching out to previous members and if you’re interested in being involved in the committee in the year ahead please let me know.

I would like to thank John Huigen who has led the development of the ADIA as our Alliance Facilitator. John’s passion and energy have built significant momentum for the ADIA with an impressive list of achievements. John will be stepping down from his day to day role in the backbone but will continue to be involved as a facilitator when called upon and as an active participant.

Finally, I would like to thank our sponsors Australia Post, Google, Telstra and Infoxchange who have supported the ADIA both financially and on an in-kind basis from the beginning.Without their support the ADIA would not be possible.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you as always for your support of the ADIA.

– David

From Andrew Whelan, Project Leader, on behalf of the ADIA Collective Voice Team

Hello ADIA-ers,

Over the past 12 months the ADIA Collective Voice team, which has broad industry and sector representation, has developed a Call to Action that:

• highlights the current state of play for digital inclusion
• identifies priority segments of the community that are currently underserved, and
• calls for specific interventions to address the issues identified.

While 2.5 million Australians remain offline and a further 5 million are lacking basic digital skills, the time to act is now.

We have sought and received much great feedback along the way, in line with Collective Voice Guiding Principles for Communication and would like to thank everyone for their hard work and input.

The main issues of the Federal Election are somewhat set. Despite being an important issue, digital inclusion is unlikely to be a major election focus for any of the parties. Given timings and the advice we have taken, the Collective Voice team has decided that the most effective way to make our voice heard is to have a letter ready to pass through to the relevant Ministers, shadows and other targeted people AFTER the new government is sworn in.

In the meantime we will continue to reinforce the efforts of others who are calling for similar things. For example, ACCAN recently ran a well-executed campaign for broadband affordability in line with what the ADIA is calling for, so we were able to endorse their submission, adding weight to their call on affordability.

We have now finalised the consultation/input phase and are calling for individuals and organisations to endorse the letter that contains our arguments and call to action. As indicated, the letter is planned to be sent (and followed up) after the election to a range of key politicians.

Endorsement means supporting:

• the letter
• the overarching call for a national strategy to address digital exclusion that should particularly address:
  • affordability, digital ability and inclusive access
  • with particular consideration of five priority segments/populations
• the specific calls to action, being:
  • a national awareness campaign for the need for digital inclusion
  • the development of a framework to set and measure digital inclusion targets, and
  • a consultation process with lead organisations from each of the priority segments

The letter refers to an attachment that has some further details and proposals that could be included in a national strategy, but these are provided as suggestions at this stage.  Endorsement is endorsement of the letter only, not every suggested proposal in the attachment.

The more logos and names we can gather, the stronger the call will be.

Please let our Alliance Facilitator John Huigen know by May 13th if you/your organisation will formally endorse the Call to Action. 

Again, I would like to thank my hard-working colleagues in the Collective Voice team for their insights and contributions and everyone across the ADIA network who have provided input.

Regards,
Andy

Andrew Whelan

DOWNLOAD THE CALL TO ACTION LETTER

Author: ADIA  |  Size: 230kb  |  PDF  |  Published: April 2019

DOWNLOAD THE ADIA STRATEGY DOCUMENT

Author: ADIA  |  Size: 2MB  |  PPTX file (Powerpoint) |  Published: April 2019

by Natalie Collins, ADIA Inclusive Access Project Leader, Centre for Inclusive Design

Since its creation, the ADIA has made some substantial achievements. The Centre for Inclusive Design has been a keen supporter of the ADIA and has project-led a number of its projects.

The ADIA aims to harness the collective skills, knowledge and capabilities of organisations across Australia to reduce the digital divide through affordability, ability and inclusive access (formally described as “digital accessibility”) to digital technologies.

Thousands of people are currently being left behind because of the inaccessibility of some digital technologies. So in October last year we convened a meeting with representatives from Infoxchange, Intopia, Diversity Council Australia and Capgemini to develop a plan for how we can work together to make big improvements to inclusive access.

What do we mean by “inclusive access”?

Inclusive access focuses on the ability of people to access the technology and meaningfully engage and interact with the content.

It includes:

• devices (e.g. a screen reader) hardware and software
• inclusive design
• structural barriers (discrimination, lack of intentionality)
• diversity and inclusion policies (CSR statement and policies corporate strategies) and intersectionality (awareness of cultural barriers)

It doesn’t include:

• the ability of the user (or prior technical knowledge)
• affordability
• connectivity (waves, wires, data and infrastructure)

As part of our Inclusive Access Project we’ve developed two key activities for the next year:

Activity 1:  Develop a plain language pack for creating and maintaining digital assets

Activity 2:  Collect and publish inclusive access experiences – good and bad stories from people’s interactions with digital assets.

Can you help?

We’re testing our plan in the accessibility sector and welcome support or involvement from ADIA partners. If you would like to be involved please contact Project Leader Natalie Collins.

What a year (and a bit) it’s been in the young life of the ADIA!

We’ve gotten off to a great start and made some terrific achievements thanks to the commitment of ADIA participants to working together to ensure everyone can thrive in the digital world.

As a digital inclusion action accelerator and facilitator, the ADIA has been busy establishing our operating approach, our communications, and guiding principles for collaboration. We’re thrilled to now have 542 participants from over 400 organisations in our network working together to reduce the digital divide.

We’ve hosted a number of big events as well as local meetups across every Australian state to enable local networking and discussion.

We’ve established and trialled a Project Team process to empower ADIA participants to collaborate on digital inclusion projects. Since our launch in 2017, this process has supported 16 different ADIA Project Leaders over 12 different long-running projects across the country to pursue our shared goals.

Project collaboration has resulted in many great achievements, including two funded research projects, co-developed submissions to government, free-to-use digital inclusion resources, the first ever International Digital Inclusion Week with a fantastic international panel.

We are poised to begin campaigning federally – in time for the next election – for a national digital inclusion strategy and more strategic resourcing to ensure everyone can make full use of digital technologies.

We very much appreciate the support, friendly engagement and commitment of the digital inclusion enthusiasts we engage with and who do the real work of the ADIA.

Thank you to our supporters and sponsors Infoxchange, Australia Post, Google and Telstra for enabling us to come together.

Happy Christmas and Holiday Season. Next year will be great!

– The ADIA Backbone Team,
John Huigen (Facilitator) and Charlotte McCombe (Coordinator)

We need your input!

The Collective Voice Team are making great progress on the development of our ADIA strategy, along with our ‘call’ to engage with federal politicians and stakeholders, ahead of the upcoming election. We need to secure firm commitments to help close the gap!

We are proposing that the ADIA call for a national digital inclusion strategy that addresses affordability, digital ability and inclusive access. Why? Because currently millions of people in Australia are being left behind and it’s a social and economic cost that we can’t afford. RMIT researchers who have worked on the Australian Digital Inclusion Index have been a great help defining where we are today and developing some hard targets for where we need to get to. It’s been a great team effort!

The next step is to get wider input into building out the strategy with key recommendations and programs. We have drafted how a national digital inclusion strategy should be framed, what it should achieve and have recommended specific interventions, programs or policies to achieve the improvements that need to happen.

Please have a look at the summary and get back to us ASAP with your suggestions to improve the draft.

You will hear back from us seeking endorsement of the final draft once we integrate the feedback.

It’s been great working with such a great team of passionate people and I want to recognise and thank them all.

Happy Christmas!

Andy Whelan
Collective Voice Project Leader

DOWNLOAD THE DRAFT

Size: 324kb  |  Author: ADIA  |  Published: 2018  |  Status: DRAFT

Who are you and how do you promote digital inclusion in Australia?

The City of Greater Geelong, or ‘The City’ as we call it, is the local government for the Greater Geelong Region, representing approximately 225,000 people.

The Community Inclusion Unit within ‘The City’ has been supporting digital inclusion since 2015 and continues to work on strategies to bridge the digital divide around access, affordability and ability in the broader Geelong community.

Tell us about some of your achievements in the last three years

We’ve been involved in a number of digitally focused community events and larger conferences; from hosting teacher and volunteer ‘Code Club’, an ADIA meetup and community based learning pop-ups, to supporting the launch of the National Year of Digital Inclusion and Digital Innovation Festival.

We’ve led initiatives such as installing free WIFI in disadvantaged areas, providing free digital audits for neighbourhood houses and other community organisations, and linking schools and organisations such as Lions clubs with free refurbished computers.

More recently we supported a ‘Digital Expo’ at one of our Neighbourhood Houses and received a $1.8m grant for Geelong from State Government to expand the City’s free WIFI network to improve digital connectivity and address disparities of access and affordability of internet access to the northern suburbs of Geelong.

Wow, amazing work! Any lessons to share?

We need to keep talking about digital inclusion. It requires a whole of community effort, understanding, planning, engagement and moreover policy infrastructure and financial commitment.

How could your organisation benefit from our network of academic, business government and community organisations?

ADIA provides an opportunity for everyone to share information and come together to talk about where to go next and what we can do as an Alliance. Great to see what people are doing, so keep sharing your information. Visit our website and join our ‘community accessing technology’ Facebook page to stay up to date with our community’s efforts to close the digital divide.

Learn more: www.geelongaustralia.com.au

In a world first event, the Australian Digital Inclusion Alliance (ADIA), the US National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and other participating organisations around the globe co-organised International Digital Inclusion Week.

International Digital Inclusion Week ran from 15 – 21 October and aimed to highlight and celebrate digital inclusion efforts around the world. We were thrilled with the variety of events that took place and conversations that were sparked on the #IDIW2018 hashtag.

Highlights included Good Thing Foundation’s Get Online Week – a week long campaign to improve digital ability in Australia and talk about the benefits of getting online. A11y Camp Conference also took place during IDIW2018, bringing together all kinds of web professionals and enthusiasts to devise strategies for a more accessible world.

Our international online panel was also a hit.

With help from a variety of organisations and individuals from who knows how many timezones, the 75-minute panel was brought together to feature the voices of four digital practitioners from different corners of the globe: Kathleen Smeaton, a librarian, educator and researcher who is currently leading the Digital Literacy project at the University of Queensland; Achilles Kameas, Associate Professor of Pervasive Computing Systems with Hellenic Open University, Greece; Munirih Jester, Connecthome Coordinator for the San Antonio Housing Authority and a lead member of the San Antonio Digital Inclusion Alliance, USA, and; Nicola Wallace Dean, Programme Lead for the Starting Point Community Learning Partnership in Stockport, UK.

Our panel discussed how digital inclusion is addressed by their organisations, whether or not digital natives have an advantage over older generations, the role of government and how we measure success.

More than 120 people watched the panel in Australia alone, with many joining at meetups in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Wangaratta and Geelong to participate in the discussion and network locally with other Alliance participants.

Missed out on attending the panel? Not to worry – we recorded it for you. The panel chat and all resources mentioned by the panellists can be found in the YouTube comments section.

We’re glad to have opened the lines of communication and hope to continue collaborating with our international partners. Thanks to our marvellous meetup hosts, attendees and everyone who helped to bring the week together.

Think Digital is an outreach service that builds the digital skills and confidence of regional, rural and remote Australians through the delivery of digital education, experiences and entertainment.

They have hosted over 2,500 workshops across the nation and offer services ranging anywhere from structured learning to the implementation of digital mentorship programs.

“We’re fighting for people who don’t get the same access as their city counterparts,” explains Tim Gentle, founder of Think Digital and ADIA participant. “We’re out there on the frontlines and we feel like we are making a big difference on our own, but now we want to work with others in the space to make an even bigger difference.”

Think Digital is seeking opportunities to work with local government, adult educators and community groups in regional, remote and rural communities to help roll out digital education in their region.

Website: Think Digital

Get in touch: tim@think.digital

Around three million Australians are not participating online and are being left behind in the digital age.

The Australian Digital Inclusion Alliance (ADIA) believes all Australians should be able to make full use of digital technologies and is working together to reduce the digital divide.

More than 100 organisations have come together to accelerate action on digital inclusion with the launch of the Australian Digital Inclusion Alliance (ADIA).

The alliance was established by not-for-profit Infoxchange with support from Australia Post, Google and Telstra.

Today leaders from across the business, academic and community sectors joined to build momentum in addressing the digital inclusion challenges facing Australia.

The launch was also attended by government representatives including Hon Angus Taylor MP, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.

“The ADIA seeks to harness the collective skills, knowledge and capabilities of organisations across the country to reduce the digital divide and enable greater social and economic participation for all Australians”, says David Spriggs, CEO of Infoxchange and Chair of the ADIA.

At its heart, digital inclusion is about using online and mobile technologies to improve skills, enhance quality of life, educate, and promote wellbeing across the whole of society.

The Australian Digital Inclusion Index shows that while online participation is increasing across Australia, gaps continue to exist between those who are digitally included and excluded – linked closely to social exclusion and disadvantage.

People with low levels of income, education and employment, along with older Australians, people with disability, remote Indigenous communities and people in regional areas are more likely to be digitally excluded.

Dr Lisa O’Brien, CEO of The Smith Family, says thousands of Australian children don’t have access to technology than many of us take for granted.

“There is a real risk the education gap for these children will increase if this “digital divide” is not well understood or systemically addressed,” says Dr O’Brien.

“The gap doesn’t only relate to access to computers, tablets or phones, but also ability to afford broadband and a lack of digital skills support at home.”

While there are numerous digital inclusion initiatives across the country supported by business, government and community organisations, significant gaps remain.

The ADIA believes digital inclusion needs to be better addressed in public policy and innovative approaches need to be shared. Working groups within the alliance are being established to raise awareness and accelerate collective action in critical areas including affordability, digital ability and accessibility.

“Unless we work together with a strategic approach we won’t succeed in achieving an Australia where everyone can participate in the digital world,” says David Spriggs.

Cassandra Goldie, CEO of Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), says there are three million people living in poverty in Australia, and around the same number are digitally excluded from Australian life.

“It would be fairly safe to say there is some cross over here, and that giving a necessary hand up and reducing the number of people living in poverty will assist in increasing the accessibility of people to the digital world,” says Ms Goldie.

Find out more about the challenges the ADIA is working to address and get involved by following #digitalinclusionAU on Twitter.