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One of the barriers that people often see as holding back good use of IT and the web by government, is that many of the people involved (New Zealand’s public servants) do not (yet) have the knowledge or skills needed.

This came up at the Bar Camp, with people expressing a concern that there is a lack of skills in both fairly simple technical things (e.g. using Microsoft Word properly to structure documents) and in the non-technical aspects of participating in web 2.0 - ethical, understanding of how to act in a web culture etc etc.

I don’t think it should be acceptable that people can’t or shouldn’t have to learn, no matter if they’re in high school, are a web content administrator, or a CEO. We do have high expectations for school students - why not for adults as well?

These articles from Idealog come to mind, a few months old now but worth a look, all about New Zealand potential and what we’re doing & failing to do with that.

• On the road to nowhere (May - June 2007)
• Road to recovery (July - August 2007)

And check out the Tech Angels at Wellington Girls College, who run a programme where tech-savvy students help not-so-techy teachers - www.techangels.org.nz/mstaff.htm Pretty cool.