Digital Nomads and Digital Divide

 Here is the Parliament   f i n a l l y    addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic, with a fairly comprehensive review of the facts they gathered.

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Digital exclusion is a key item our Community Interest Company, Cottenham Open, proposed to address. Among an entire series dedicated to our offering, here is a mock press release starting with:

"Digital nomads returning to villages from city centres as work forces get decentralised, transform Silicon Fen Edge Villages into producer-consumer co-operatives. Did you know that Cambridgeshire included no less than 270 villages? While "wifi not spots" and "high street store closures" make the headlines, little is said about rural isolation from the closure of post offices, bank branches, libraries, bus lines etc..."

Then our manifesto went on to update environmental and education issues in the current environment:

"The previous post tallied three series - community engagement, and geo-info and pandemic maps & stats - since starting cottenham.info almost 18 mo. ago. Not only will Anthropocene East Anglia give a geo-historical framework for it all, it also highlights the opportunities and challenges in the future, which we proposes to address. Let's detail our proposed road map issued from all this as well as discussions with local councils, ecologists, and neighbouring village revival planners:..."

Finally we put it in the context of reaching out and addressing immediate concerns in local villages, flood preparedness in the immediate winter and the impact of social deprivation in the long run:

"Following on local flood preparedness in Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, an East of England Flood Response Group asked for situational awareness maps to complement sustainable development goals for Cambridge. The group's aim is to be able to zero in on areas at risk, look up their corresponding emergency response list, and to contact the relevant parties as quickly as possible with as much information at hand as possible, in order to dispatch help in the most efficient manner..."

An effective strategy is also not to do this in isolation, but to leverage the same info in outreach efforts toward local Parish Councils via my other activities in Extinction Rebellion and Cambridge Quakers. It is therefore heartening to see the dialogue extending to Parliament, with the abundance of information they put at our disposal. Will this extra context not be useful to frame the issue in relevant terms?

Last but not least, we have advocated open data across the board, not only to acquire COVID data from coronavirus.data.gov.uk, but also to share our comprehensive climate review as relates to this topic, as well as current pandemic effects throughout this blog. We're working with Open Data Institute, Sports England and other agencies concerned with our well-being to help address today's issues.

The detailed listings of this series are updated below, a handy reference as this year draws to a close: