Innovation Versus Plagiarism...and other reflections from a Award

Photo by WiredforLego / CC BY

I was very pleased to be asked to be a panel judge on a national digital inclusion award earlier this year and it was really interesting reading the entries and meeting the short-listed candidates - I hope I will get the experience again. I thought I'd take some time to share a couple of my reflections from it.

1. Digital Inclusion is an often misunderstood (or alternatively, a broad) term. I think there are lessons to learned from this - I think we need to be able to start to articulate more clearly some of the admittedly-related fields often lumped together. The areas that seem currently most often to get thrown in with what I would call "pure" digital inclusion include assistive technology, accessibility, digital transformation and infrastructure development.

These are all valuable and important areas, and often intersect with each other and digital inclusion, but what I would like to humbly suggest actually constitutes digital inclusion, are two important areas: firstly, empowering as many people as humanly possible to exploit the benefits of digital technology, in particular being online (or "universal digital inclusion"), and secondly supporting people to access and benefit from the digital skills economy. I won't go into detail about these two areas today, but both demand attention to ensure we have a fair society and an economically sound society in the future. 

2. Plagiarism is underrated! One of the entrants to the award took a line that they had a limited budget so they looked at what worked and copied that. I felt conflicted in some ways, although I was clear that I couldn't see how it represented "An outstanding approach to..." by very definition.

It is clearly important to identify and recognise trailblazers - and I am grateful I was able to do so on this award, both so that people are inspired to try new things and that the attention of the wider digital inclusion sector is drawn to new ideas that work. Equally, I feel a real sympathy to the overlooked "everyday" -  because taking trailblazers, and successfully emulating and scaling them up, is actually where much of the hard work and where the real victories may lie.

In my experience in the field of digital inclusion, I've had a foot in both camps at different times and both are undoubtedly needed. Perhaps a new category for "best plagiarist"* should be introduced in awards like these? I'd like to see ways (and importantly, funding) in which both the trailblazers, and the equally honourable and often unsung "plodders", can be recognised and nurtured.


(*Clearly needs re-titling! Perhaps "Best Roll-out" or "Best Scaling Up of a Pilot" have a better ring?)