Digital Fabric
I was recently involved in a Digital Strategy refresh consultation meeting with a small group of people from agencies in the conservation and environment sector. During the discussions on the vision the term ‘fabric’ came up. It got me thinking about what a ‘digital fabric’ for New Zealand might mean.
The term fabric has been used in computing for a few years now, in the context of ‘storage fabric’ for virtualisation and storage area networks (SANs). That involves weaving together a number of storage resources into a single flexible layer or fabric that many systems can use.
Gartner has listed computing fabric as one or their top 10 trends for 2008 – “computing fabric involves treating memory, processors and I/O cards as a pooled resource instead of a fixed arrangement”. Again, it’s something flexible, dynamic, and shared.
It was the question of social fabric that really got me thinking though. Social fabric is a lot more than just the physical/financial infrastructure in society. It is enabled by that, but it’s more about the web of trust and human relationships that make a society strong. What does that mean in the digital world? Does it mean that the social fabric becomes more digitally mediated? Proponents of txt, Facebook, Bebo seem likely to think so. Does it mean the social fabric becomes less compartmentalized, less class or ethnically based? Does it mean the social fabric becomes more flexible, less rigid? Advocates of the long tail, e-democracy, and Second Life might agree.
What does this mean for the Digital Strategy 2.0? For me it means thinking about the strategy’s impact not just on having digitally skilled people accessing/contributing content over fast broadband, but also on the way that digital technologies will build relationships, will strengthen the social fabric. This applies equally across communities, business and government. E-government, e-commerce, business alliances are all about relationships. When a nation’s social fabric is strong, anything is possible. How might we benefit from a strong digital fabric, and what would it take to create it?