You might have seen news items recently celebrating the achievements of Digital Dorset after benefiting from not one, but two major government announcements in a week.
‘Digital Dorset’ reflects the activity in the county to help improve people’s lives by using new and emerging technologies that are designed around their needs. It is about how we use data and insight to design good customer experiences and how we use technology to support different ways of working and enable new and innovative service delivery.
It describes the projects led by teams in the Digital and Change service and also our partnership work with other organisations. But Digital Dorset is much more than just that – it belongs to us all.
We’ve had a great start to the year, and we’d like to share some of the highlights with you.
Many of us know what it is like to struggle with poor broadband in such a rural county. We were thrilled to be one of only six areas in the UK to benefit from the first tranche of the government’s £5bn Project Gigabit . This will bring ultra-fast broadband to the most rural and hard to reach parts of the county and will really put Dorset on the digital map.
Our ground-breaking 5G RuralDorset project continues to receive recognition, with the government announcing a new partnership between 5G RuralDorset and Qualcomm – the largest manufacturer of chips in the world. This partnership will help revolutionise the agriculture sector, including developing a 5G chip to power the first ever 5G-ready, crop-growing robots.
Digital Dorset has enjoyed other great achievements that are getting our county noticed. National recognition helps cement Dorset Council as an organisation we are proud to be part of and people aspire to work for.
One way of doing this is entering (and hopefully winning!) awards. Last year we won the Connected Britain Digital Skills Award and we have recently entered the following in two awards, The Impact Awards and The Granicus Awards:
- The consultation work on the Local Plan – how the council used new ways of getting people’s interest to undertake a wide-reaching consultation with a better than normal response rate.
- The Flood Online Reporting Tool (FORT) which is an online platform that lets people to report flooding and brings the reports together in one place for access by the different agencies who can take action according to their internal processes.
- Promotion campaign for Festival of the Future online event – this virtual festival attracted over 10,000 registrations.
- The Digital Hotline uniquely helps people overcome all the major barriers to digital inclusion: too few skills, inadequate connectivity and a lack of device. In its first year we have taken almost 1,000 calls.
Keep your fingers crossed for some wins.
We’ve been out and about in the virtual world and have spoken at various events to tell people all about the work we are doing including the Local Government Association Digital Inclusion Network and the Public Sector Innovation Conference.
The 5G RuralDorset team gave a presentation as part of Services Week on Discovering Dorset’s 5G future.
We also spoke at a virtual careers events to let young people know about the openings available to them in digital careers at Dorset Council.
Connectivity is a huge part of the Digital Dorset work and improving broadband speeds is one of the council’s main priorities.
As well as the major projects we have lined up to bring better broadband to Dorset, we also advise people on the help available to them now – from rural gigabit voucher funding to subsidies for people on very low speeds.
In the last three months alone, we have dealt with more than 40 enquiries. Sometimes, unfortunately, we are unable to help (and that is why government investment in Dorset is so important) but for many people there are solutions. You can read some of the suggestions or email us connectingdorset@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk (please give your postcode and first line of your address) if you would like us to check whether you can get better broadband.
And it’s exciting times ahead.
The Digital Vision provides a single place to view the breadth of the work taking place and the priorities for the next 18 months. It will be going to the Cabinet meeting on 6th April so we hope to be able to share it with everyone after that.
We know that there are still lots of people in Dorset who are not embracing the digital world – and we don’t want them to be left behind in this ever-changing world.
Recent figures have revealed that around 35,000 in our area are completely offline – that’s 11% of the county who are missing out on opportunities because they are not digitally connected.
To help people get digitally connected; we are recruiting new members to our team to work on a Dorset-wide ‘embedded digital champions’ programme. The new team will work with other organisations to establish an army of in-house volunteers who can help their customers access digital services.
We are also looking for other roles to join us in the digital and change service to support our transformation work. If you are interested in joining us, read more about #DigitalDorset on our blog posts and check out the vacancies from 6 April.
Finally, we have some exciting events coming up.
In June we will attend Digital Leaders week and share our work with people across the UK and beyond.
And planning for this year’s Festival of the Future, which will take place in October, is underway. Last year’s event was a huge success, and we want to make this one even better.
Why not sign up to our newsletter and keep up to date with all things #DigitalDorset?
And if you’d like to know more about any of the work we’ve been doing, get in touch connectingdorset@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk or follow #DigitalDorset on Twitter and Facebook.
We are keen for everyone in Dorset Council and across the county to use #DigitalDorset to describe their digital work on social media and more widely to show the great things taking place in Dorset.
