Addressing digital exclusion through sharing best practices.

For many years, digitalisation has steadily increased across government, businesses and society. This is a process with clear winners and losers: those who are socially excluded are often digitally excluded too. The coronavirus lockdown has greatly exacerbated the situation and risks generating a social catastrophe of lost education and isolation for the poorest and most disadvantaged across the EU.

The Medici website has launched during this time of fragmentation to offer professionals and policymakers an opportunity to help heal the digital divide. The Medici project has been funded by the European Parliament to identify, collect and map good practices in the field of Digital Inclusion in Europe. The Medici Community is gathering stakeholders (practitioners, policy and decision-makers, researchers, industry and civil society representatives) engaged and interested in the promotion and implementation of Digital Inclusion initiatives and gathering best practices and learning resources to strengthen the sector.

The website has now been launched with over 200 best practices for digital inclusion including:

• Hastings Creative Summer: a five-week long festival with activities to support young people aged 11 to 18 who lacked access to digital media. The festival included a Virtual Reality storytelling event, a two day documentary digital photography workshop, two one-day music tech and games sound design workshops and two digital textile design and screen printing events. The intervention addresses a long term issue of economic stagnation in Hastings as well as increasing attendees’ employability and civic participation, and could be transferred elsewhere to places with creative industries.
• Konexio: a hybrid non-profit and social start-up that provides tech skills training to disadvantaged populations, notably refugees and migrants. The inclusion and integration of disadvantaged groups require support in the social, professional and educational areas as well as core digital skills. Once trainees complete the 100h course, they earn an EU-recognized certificate in digital literacy. Konexio adapts their training method to their audiences for an individualised and personalised approach. Konexio try to take a system approach and so their activities also target the trainers who are in primary contact with these vulnerable groups.

Watch an introductory video about the MEDICI project:

To find out more about projects like this, visit the website at https://digitalinclusion.eu/ Please check regularly as new content will be uploaded through the coming year, including webinars on digital inclusion, an online surgery for practitioners of digital inclusion, new videos on evaluation, replication and standards of evidence, a digital inclusion podcast and evidence digests which summarise the catalogue.

You can read more about the Tavistock Institute’s involvement in the Medici project here.