MEASURES BEING TAKEN TO BRIDGE THE GAP GLOBALLY
- Internationally there is a lot of support to help bridge the digital divide from private foundations to government policies being put in place. Many governments have proposed and support the idea of having a digital peace corps that would provide technologists that are interested in helping with socially responsible technology work in the U.S and abroad to help bridge the gap. There are also other programs such as OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) that is helping to raise money and supply hundred dollar laptops, UNICEF also does a lot of work to help bring technology to different areas, UK charity computer aid international also takes computer donations that can be fixed up and distributed to different areas and other various fundraisers are slowly but surely bridging the digital divide. Different government agencies are also helping by setting up telephones or internet for the public to use in places that it may not be available to the general public. We have also realized that just having the technology alone is not enough to bridge the gap we need to be able to equip the people with the knowledge and confidence to be able to use the technology and get the most out of it otherwise it will be useless.
- The British charity Citizens Online has an ambitious goal - they would like all schoolchildren in the UK to have their own laptop by 2010. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) boffins Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert and Joseph Jacobson also share the mantra "one laptop per child", but they have a much more ambitious plan: to provide 100m to 200m laptops to schoolchildren in the developing world by the end of 2006. And how do they propose to do this? By making them very cheap - $100 (£53) per laptop, or $90 plus $10 for "contingency or profit".
- The government has launched a Digital Inclusion Strategy to reduce the number of UK people who are not online by 25%. The strategy brings together 40 public, private and voluntary sector organisations who have signed a UK Digital Inclusion Charter to get 2.7 million additional people online by 2016, and a further 25% every two years after that.
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