Martha Lane Fox, the UK’s first Champion for Digital Inclusion and occasional Boing Boing contributor, has given a spectacular speech in which she calls on the UK government to create a public-service Internet institution called Dot Everyone, to make the UK the most digital nation on the planet, in a way that promotes “the civic, public and non-commercial.”
Lane Fox cites Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore” and calls upon the government to create an institution that promotes diversity and the inclusion of women in the net’s technical infrastructure, and to work on the ethics and morals of the new conundra of the digital age. There’s a petition for you to sign onto to support her vision. I did!
Firstly DOT EVERYONE has to help educate all of us, from all walks of life, about the internet. The internet is the organising principle of our age, touching all our lives, every day. As the late activist Aaron Swartz put it, “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore”.
Secondly, DOT EVERYONE must put women at the heart of the technology sector. Currently there are fewer women in the digital sector than there are in Parliament.
Finally, we should aim for a much more ambitious global roles in unpicking the complex moral and ethical issues that the internet presents. For example, what are the implications of an internet embedded in your home appliances? Do children need online rights? What is an acceptable use of drones?
Britain invented the BBC, the NHS – let’s not have a poverty of ambition – we can and should be inventing the definitive public institution for our digital age.
Dot Everyone – a public institution for the digital age [Change.org]