CommunityInternet.org.uk

Making the Internet accessible to all - an initiative by members of the Oyster Project

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    Our brief: to encourage and develop practical social use of the internet in safe and useful ways which enhance disabled people's lives. Volunteer members from the Oyster Project do this by bringing together a number of social enterprise and charitable projects plus the input of people with appropriate skill sets, knowledge and contacts. We have developed a model social development project we call Community Internet that can be taken up in communities large or small. Community Internet is an initiative by Oyster Project members, an innovative, pro-active group of people with disabilities.

  • Community Internet is best described as a social enterprise 'vehicle' which promotes and delivers internet access plus support and training where it is most socially needed and deploys the
    Meraki
    professional wireless network solution offered by Meraki. We have experience of working with one of the first groups of disabled IT people in the UK to deploy Merakis on a large scale. Lewes Community Internet now delivers real social value each day and assists, supports and trains disabled people in Lewes, East Sussex UK and provides a public wifi broadband access service in the town.

  • The internet makes information and services available to all, however despite this wonderful promise the practical result is to make services and information available only to those who have the ability/equipment to have that access. This inevitably excludes disabled people on low, fixed incomes etc.

  • Our volunteer members from the Oyster Project specialise in assisting disadvantaged disabled people. We encourage participants to become volunteers themselves and to pass on the skills they have learnt.

  • Community Internet also encourages initiatives that seek to address the wider issues of social exclusion and skill acquisition and actively delivers solutions where they are needed.

  • We are supported by IT specialist volunteer members of the Oyster Project who are active in DiTs (Disability IT Services). DiTs provides the installation, support and equipment for Community Internet projects.

  • Community Internet will also be supporting www.lewestv.net in conjunction with the Oyster Project and the video, photography, social, craft and arts groups the Oyster Project creates and supports.