A reader pointed out a column in the Toronto Star by Joe Fiorito, writing about the recent closure of an employment resource room in a local community centre.
the computer room developed to the point where it was serving somewhere near 35 people a day, roughly 13,000 a year; people who live in the neighbourhood and who either cannot afford their own computers, or who do not have an Internet connection in their home.
This closure appears to be a demonstration of the lack of digital vision at our various levels of government.
As I wrote last week, the United States has launched a program to leverage its 2800 jobs centres to help with digital literacy training. Canada’s governments, operating without a national digital strategy, are unable to set objectives and then operate with a view to hit those targets. Instead, we have seen a stream of announcements throwing a little money here and there, all with a suffix saying that the spending is part of our digital strategy.
I wrote last fall about tactics in the absence of a strategy.
Neighbourhood resource centres need to be associated with an interdepartmental, perhaps multi-level government strategy.
Simply shutting down a location in the absence of an overall strategy is heading the wrong way.
One doesn’t need to have a national digital stategy to understand that there are still a lot of people who do not have internet access at home and require some community facility to do very basic stuff many of us take for granted.
And you don’t close such resources until you have established a replacement.
If such replacements are to be defined in that mythical digital strategy, then the government needs to wait until this strategy is made public before closing those centres.
Being the reader that Mark referenced in his posting, all I can say is:
AMEN, JEAN-FRANCOIS! Your message is bang on.
Our local library in Mount Albert has computers available with high speed access in both the childrens and adult section. They are generally always being used when we go there to pick up DVD rentals (they have a great old movie collection that we are working our way through). Many folks have asked me and my team at FOX GROUP why they don’t have wifi also available so that the parents could use their smart phones, tablets or laptops to work while they are they with their children at reading groups? Another part of possible grass roots Digital Strategy for Canada? I encourage those of us in the tech industry to speak up and talk to our local/regional governments. Maybe it has to come from grass roots upwards, since the feds don’t seem to get it?