Giving a Voice to the ‘Hard to Hear’ - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 81

• prisoners and first-time offenders;
• travellers;
• people living in rural areas (where social exclusion can arise due to a
lack of transport, employment opportunities and facilities);
• people who do not have access to information and knowledge;
• people from disadvantaged, crime-ridden areas and background;
• geographically isolated communities;
• single parents;
• minority groups (e.g. ethnic minority groups, people of different relig-
ions);
• carers;
• people suffering mental and/or physical illness;
• women.
It is recognized that social exclusion is a multi-dimensional phenome-
non. Janie Percy-Smith (ed) (2000) identifies seven dimensions of social
exclusion: economic, social, political, neighbourhood, individual, spatial
and group, and highlights their interactive nature (see Fig. 5.1). Many indi-
viduals will experience a combination of such factors which could exacer-
bate the difficulties of engagement. On the other hand, individuals with
fewer of these attributes are likely to be easier to engage.
Among the various barriers which exist to prevent increasing Internet
use, language and website content have begun to receive attention. For ex-
ample at the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS) in Geneva in 2003 UN Secretary General Kofi Anan noted that 70
percent of all websites are in English. Peter Armstrong, Director of One-
world.net, a website for development issues, comments: “ if a person comes
up to the terminal and there is nothing there in their language that is rele-
vant to their lives, then why should they bother? ” (Boyd 2003).
There are numerous initiatives which are seeking to redress the imbal-
ance in content and language of the internet. The K-net project (described
in Chapter 4) has developed and provided own-language resources for the
indigenous communities it serves.
Another example is DireqLearn, a South African organisation. DireqLearn
customizes educational tools for hundreds of schools in Namibia, Nigeria
and South Africa. The idea, says DireqLearn's Leonard Tleane, is to give
students the knowledge they want, in a language that they can understand
(Boyd 2003).