The world of resources at your fingertips

In our connected lives we get bombarded with information.  Reports, articles, blogs, tweets, snippets, charts, listicles, graphs, infographics (do I need to go on?)  Here in team digital we sit in a really interesting place between collecting, generating and sharing said stuff.  We have our resource page where we publish and re-share. Sadly, what we’ve recently been finding though is in our everyday busy lives (all of us) we either don’t update this as regularly as we ought (sorry) or you forget it’s there (insert your own apology). So, we’ve had a little ‘in team’ chat and hatched a plan to help us all out. From our end, every two weeks I’ll be writing and publishing a little blog and @digibecca will be updating the website.  Some links will be back to our resources library, so there will be a reminder of what we’ve already curated.  Other links will be out to new websites – so new resources to be explored.  Double Whammy? What do we want you to do in return? Well, pop the kettle on, make a cup of your favourite beverage, kick back and spend ten minutes (choose your own amount of time really) catching up on key information about digital participation (and a bit beyond). The other thing we’d like you to do is flag anything up that you’ve found really interesting – we’d love to help you share it with the world. So, what’s on the bookshelf today? Research

• First up from Citizens Advice Scotland – Bridging the Digital Divide.  In this new research we are informed that ‘a third of CAB clients find themselves digitally excluded’.
• From the other end of the UK  Plymouth University research: The Digital Neighbourhoods project investigates the role of superfast broadband access on rural neighbourhoods
• Ofcom has just published their ’smartphone by default’ research - this will be crucial in shaping our government work programme for this year - as they want to trial 3G / mobile approaches to tackling digital exclusion

Reports: Two from Price Waterhouse Coopers -

• Beyond control: local government in the age of participation explores how the challenge of austerity and opportunities of devolution and digital are transforming local government.
• The (Local) State We’re In focuses on the challenges faced by Local Government in channel shift, making savings, cyber security etc.

Tools, Guides and How To’s There’s masses of stuff out there – before you develop anything new, check these out. This week’s line up brings us digital guides from Media Trust. For something a bit more advanced why not have a browse through Futurelearn – which has a range of free courses including Digital Leadership, Creating Value through technology, Cyber Security, Childhood in the Digital Age (and maybe my personal favourite) Bioprinting: 3D Printing Body Parts.