From: Jonathan Sharp, Sales & marketing director, Britannic Technologies
Sir – Britannic recently got together with Family Mosaic’s staff and tenants to transform a dilapidated and overgrown yard into a community garden in true ‘Ground Force’ style!
This set me thinking; while we were happy to contribute funds and resources to make this small contribution to the lives of tenants, how could we expand this to benefit a wider community?
As part of new initiatives such as the Social Value Act 2012 and Digital by Default, there is so much more that can be achieved across the housing sector. How about if we could combine facets of CSR, digital inclusion and the Social Value Act to create a true ‘social network’ using the advances in technology and the economies of scale possible across the housing sector and the wider community?
We have been working with housing providers for many years to deliver cost savings and efficiencies while improving frontline services and access to enabling technologies. For example, we recently extended IP telephony across Family Mosaic’s 210+ locations to provide free ‘on-net’ calls.
With suitable planning and control with HAs, this social network could be expanded further across housing providers, tenants and tenant businesses to offer affordable shared internet access and low cost ‘on-net’ services such as telephony, video, CCTV across the community.
By scaling this concept throughout the housing sector, not only could we deliver increased value to housing providers and their tenants, we could also extend the shared services model to support tenant enterprises with access to centralised IT and telecoms. Working together on a local level with the big picture in mind, we could really accelerate digital inclusion and social value initiatives.
