DB response from NESTA, harnessing the digital in positive ways

'Digital Britain is no longer a marginal issue. It lies at the heart of unlocking economic potential and radically reshaping how we deliver public services. Get this right and people will no longer accept being passive consumers of services, but will become a part of the solution.

The challenge for policymakers is to harness this new power in a positive way. It's time for Britons to get digital'.

Following the publication of Digital Britain, NESTA will take forward a practical set of solutions that will:

Develop a rights framework, along with other organisations, for publicly procured new media content which will allow secondary commercial exploitation and create extra public revenues;

Work with the TSB (Technology Strategy Board) on the development of a Next Generation Digital Testbed where the telecoms industry and digital innovators can experiment with novel product ideas and revenue models, intellectual property frameworks and new models of partnership that will enable UK businesses to become global leaders in the digital markets.

In addition, NESTA will launch 'Reboot Britain' in early July which will use the opportunities offered by digitisation to find practical solutions to some of the intractable social challenges we face, for example, providing public services which are more efficient and shaped by the people who use them.

From the NESTA wesbite.
This has to be right: We've seen the consumer voice in these debates infrequently, and yet consumers are the economic and social drivers of the digital experience and the behaviours that result (which appear to be different from behaviours in the physical/material world). New research into what people do, and how they respond to innovative ideas - technology take ups, for example - must be part of the process of making us digital. Much of the response to DB has been, ok a tax, what else? In fact there are many interesting ideas buried in the (large) document. The detail is not the devil; the devil is in the ongoing consultations that will follow DB: such as those over the licence fee, the Ofcom stance on "file-sharing". And, of course, the dreaded 2Mbs...