Rural Connectivity

Reading DEFRA's Rural Statement 2012 (produced in September), I was interested to learn that the government has made a commitment to ensuring that the UK has the most efficient superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015 and that DEFRA will work to make sure that this will include rural areas. To this end they have introduced three investment programmes

• The Rural Broadband Programme - £530m dedicated to delivering 2Mbp broadband to all rural premises and superfast broadband in 90% of cases.
• The Rural Community Broadband Fund - A £20m fund to help 'hard to reach' communities receive the same services. This fund works by financing 50% of the cost of local initiatives to develop broadband in an area.
• The Mobile Infrastructure Project - £150m in capital expenditure to improve mobile phone coverage (welcome news - we have to hang out of a window or climb up the back garden to hold a mobile conversation!)

There is also support for Local Enterprise Partnerships in the form of research and 
information to help them in their development of local intiatives to get more businesses connected to superfast broadband. There is an organisation called Go On UK working to improve digital skills across the rural population.

All this got me thinking about churches. We still have three churches that do not have electricity in this archdeaconry and several that do not have water. We all know how difficult that makes it to use and maintain the building, romantic candle-lit carol services apart. We are the generation that needs to make sure that our churches don't end up with the same scenario as reagrds broadband. In twenty years time (probably a lot sooner) public buildings which are not connected to broadband will become limited in their potential usefulness and attractiveness as places to gather for community and arts events, worship, education, even for meetings.

The Go ON UK website has information about getting involved and making a difference locally - click on 'Act Now' and go to Organisations. It also tells you how to become a 'Digital Champion' in order to use your skills to help others. I've lifted the UK Digital Skills Charter from their site.

'In 2012, an estimated 16 million adults still do not have the Basic Online Skills to fully benefit from the internet - including 4.6 million people in the workforce. At Go ON UK, we believe that:

• Everyone in the UK should have the Basic Online Skills to enjoy the full benefits of the web
• Everyone deserves world-class digital services that meet their needs and are useable by all
• Communities that don't have the skills to fully enjoy the benefits of the internet should not be left behind
• Every organisation - in the private, public and voluntary sector - has a role to play in building our nation's digital capability.'

This is something that, with our track record of educational opportunity for all and, most importantly, our understanding of God as a God who communicates through word and interpretation, the churches can and should be engaging in. I'd like to see churches encouraging members to become involved in projects to bring broadband and digital skills to the homes and businesses of their area, in using social media themselves as a primary means of communication (among others), and in working to make sure church buildings are included in the communty's plans for broadband.

For more information go to http://www.go-on.co.uk or http://rdpenetwork.defra.gov.uk/funding-sources/rural-community  and click on 'site map' then ' Rural Community Broadband Funding.'

Ripon & the Dales Social Media Surgery

Graham Richards, our archdeaconry children's worker, alerted me to this:

The first Social Media Surgery for local voluntary organisations will take place in Ripon this Monday 10th Sept at Ripon CVS' offices, Community House in Allhallowsgate from 6-8pm.

People need to book a place via email: reception@riponcvs.co.uk

This is a free service to all voluntary organisations needing help to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Pinterest, etc for their work.

Graham is a real wizz at all these things and also good on how and why we should use them. It's really important to choose the media that you feel comfortable with and that will work well for you, so do book into this session (or subsequent ones) if you would like help either for your church or another group.

'And the Word became flesh' - Jesus came among us to show what God is like in a form that puts words and communication using words very much at the heart of God's relationship with us. I think that, had He been around today,  Jesus would certainly have used social media and IT to help Him communicate. On Friday morning we had the 'old wineskins and new patches' reading from the Gospels. Our very wise priest said that the old can have much that is of value and the new can have much to teach us - we need to discern the appropriate use of each. That is relevent to this - we need to participate in the ways people are communicating now and this does not alter the fact older methods of communicvation still have great power. I will be ever grateful to my father who, in 1987, gave me some money and said, 'go out and buy a computer and teach youself to use it - that is where the future lies.' I bought an Amstraad (you remember the ones with white on black type and a daisy wheel printer - even before the green on black screens?) I'm of the generation who have always had to teach ourselves to use computers and new media - we didn't have them at school or university - and so we are a bit nervous! If you feel like this about facebook, twitter, blogs, websites then this is probably the surgery for you! It's not difficult to get started, honest!     

Orwellian Worries

Apparently, the Information Commissioners Office investigated Google in 2012 and received assurances that the company was not intentionally collecting personal information about people in the UK. However, during the course of the investigation, it did become clear that the company has the capacity to intercept and store information from the content of e mails, chatrooms and other social media sites and photographs. Now, the USA Federal Communications Commission has published a report (about a month ago) that suggests that the street view software, gstumbler, used by Google to collect information such as that needed for maps, was in fact, designed to gather information of a personal nature and has the capability to give rise to data bases which could support future Google products. Google's stated strategy has long been to tailor the information it gives its users ever more personally. Just what does Google know about our buying habits, travel patterns, financial transactions, friendships and illneses? In particular, networks that are not secured by passwords are vulnerable. Of course, we're not talking about knowing in the sense of indiviual people knowing things about other individual people - we're talking, perhaps more worryingly - about the power of vast amounts of knowledge to shape behaviour. 

Frankly, in a digital age this kind of thing is unavoidable. The garnering of personal information needs new types of policing and we need draconian penalties for those who misuse rather than simply collect data. The most worrying areas are finance and medicine. Although I cheerfully use digital communication for most things, I am a Ludite when it comes to banking. Not for me the trust that hopes that online (or worse mobile phone) arrangements will hold: give me a passbook in my hand and a personal conversation over the counter any day! In the medical field, I  have a friend who went to the doctor for a routine blood check and was refused on the grounds she'd already had it done. Investigation showed that someone, somewhere had fed someone else's blood results into her records. Mental note - if your doctor tells you something a little strange, check, check and check again!

However, the main point of what I want to say is that in a digital age where we all enjoy so many of the benefits of instant access to information, we each have to accept some responsibility. In fact, we retain much of the power to decide what we reveal, say and do online and what information we are willing to give about ourselves. Saying 'no, I won't give you that information,' may mean we can't have something but is that necessarily a problem?  Ingenuity can usually find a way round it. Or perhaps we don't need something as much as we think we do! We don't have to shop or bank online and we don't have to take the slightest bit of notice of adverts (I don't even read them). Above all, we have the power to control what we say: to ensure it's courteous and doesn't name others or drag them into digital places they don't want to be in and have no control over. Time is a crucial factor in retaining the power to regulate ourselves in digital space. As everything speeds up (banks say that people now expect immediate responses to requests for mortgages and loans, for example) we need to cultivate in ourselves and our children the resilience to resist the immediate. Take a space to think. Cool off overnight. Withdraw from a site. Restrain yourself from responding if you don't really need to. And keep challenging - asking qustions, 'Why do you need to know that about me?' 'Where did you get that information from?' 'Why is that linked to this?'

Power to Shape the Future?



Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, Jeffrey M. O'Brien
IBM Press Pearson plc, New Jersey



http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ibmpress  

IBM celebrates its centenary this year. In 1911 Charles Flint merged three small companies making tabulating machines, time recording punch card machines and computing scales. CTR (the Computing, Tabulating, Recording Company) became International Business Machines in 1924 and the company we know today was born. In a book published to mark 100 years of shaping the corporate world and influencing the way we communicate and do business, Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm and Jeffrey M. O'Brien examine the six pillars of Information Technology which support the computing environment

• Sensing - mechanisms for obtaining information and getting it into computers
• Memory - methods of storing and accessing information
• Processing - the core speed and capabilities of computers
• Logic - the languages and software which computers use to do their work
• Connectivity - the methods by which computers talk to each other and to people
• Architecture - the evolving ways we think about information and the nature of computing .

They also look at how the modern corporation and thinking about corporate life are changing in a global environment and affecting economic systems, influencing how they impact the different regions of the world. The final section of the book examines
methods by which we master complex systems to achieve and deliver those things which we believe will improve our world - seeing, mapping, understanding, believing and acting to bring about change for the better. IT literally changes the way we think and our concept of what is possible - and it does this more than we realise. 

The Book is called Making the World Better; the Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company and is a really fascinating read, full of memorable stories that make you rethink something you thought you understood - one of IBM's watch words, introduced by one of its founders, Thomas Watson Sr., has always been think. Another concept that has shaped IBM is belief. This, of course interests a theologian but, in fact, this is a different kind of belief - the belief of the scientist or technologist who lights on an idea and then sees it painstakingly through the long, protracted stages of research, staying with is until it is realised, often in the face of opposition, incredulity or mockery.  The authors tell the story of Julio Palmaz who created the world's first coronary stent and who persevered with his innovation in the face of what he called 'rational negativism'.
 'Such perseverance is the result of truly believing. There are many forms of belief, of course, including imagination, curiosity, hypotheses and intuition and each has an important role in life....In the hard work of making the world work better, believing is about establishing and standing on evidence because that's what is takes to support and pursue an idea until it's fully realised. This uniquely human capability is common among history's heroes - people who possess singular vision, drive and charisma. But it can be fostered.'
 This is the belief of the innovator not the belief that is synonymous with faith. It is the same quality but focused on evidence-based knowledge as opposed to those things which cannot be directly evidenced such as quality of moral or personal relationship, divine revelation, ontological meaning. It is a belief that speculates within the boundaries of what might be or become provable. But, of course, the two kinds of belief are linked and IBM has been a company which makes some of these connections; just one of many examples given by the book's authors,
'By learning how to halt the spread of H1N1 we gain insight into more than just pandemic behaviour. Discouraging disease transmission may reveal the keys to encouraging the spread of ideas of tolerance.'
The potential to treat disease, made possible by Information Technology, throws up questions about attitudes to disease and perceptions around the cause of disease which belong much more in the realm of the ethicist, philospher or theologian. This relationship between IT and the human condition is replicated over and over in every area of life and the book makes the reader aware of how this very complex dialogue is played out locally and globally.    

Making the World Better caused me ponder two things in particular.  People of faith tend to see the community of faith and their own scriptures and creeds as the locus of the root of morality. Yet there is much that is going on beyond us that is throwing up both moral perspective and practical ways of tackling moral issues that may challenge us but may also help us to discharge our moral responsibilities and indeed become more nearly the people of God, living in ways that are true to God's purposes for the world. Candidly, sometimes the world beyond the religious community is setting an example. And secondly, the book is very much the story of community - corporate, organisational, national, global - the future is being shaped by forms of IT which are evolving through processes of participation and democratisation previously unthought of. The IT revolution is not primarily about individualism but about community - community is its oxygen - and the revolution is shaping our future in ways we find it hard to imagine.