Relational Digital Inclusion: The Politics of Care and Connection

Our third annual INCLUDE+ event spotlights the 2024–2025 cohort of funded projects that tackle the complex realities of digital inclusion. These projects speak to the contradictions of digital inclusion today: being connected but excluded, visible in systems but unheard in decisions. At a time of limited resources and growing need, they offer grounded, local responses that question assumptions and expand what digital inclusion can mean in practice.

Recent developments such as the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan and the publication of Digital Minimum Standards suggest there is still space and momentum for change. Combined with what we’ve learned from the INCLUDE+ project communities, and drawing on the IN+ Principles, these developments give us new tools and perspectives: They remind us that even in an unpredictable and uneven landscape, there is potential to build more grounded, inclusive, and sustainable futures if we do it together.

Our third INCLUDE+ event will spotlight the 2024–2025 cohort of projects supported by the network. These projects speak to the contradictions of digital inclusion today: being connected but excluded, visible in systems but unheard in decisions. At a time of limited resources and growing need, they offer grounded, local responses that question assumptions and expand what digital inclusion can mean in practice.

We bring together people working across youth work, health, education, migration, disability justice, and community organising in order to share methods, reflect on common challenges, and explore how digital inclusion is being defined and delivered from the ground up. Through interactive sessions and project-led activities, we’ll explore the strategies, questions, and relationships that underpin this work. We’ll end the day with collective reflection—asking what is needed now to ensure digital inclusion is not only a goal, but a shared, sustained and community-led practice.

We ask:

• What does it mean to be digitally included?
• Who gets to shape digital tools, and whose voices are left out of policy decisions?
• How can we move beyond access to build digital systems rooted in care, fairness, and lived experience?

Our event will include:

• Project presentations

• Panel discussion

• Workshops
• IN+ ART Iterations

• Exploration of our network's core principles

INCLUDE+ is a network exploring how social and digital environments can be built, shaped and sustained to enable all people to thrive. The five-year programme of activities (2022-2027) will build a knowledge community around in/equalities in digital society that will comprise industry, academia, the public and third sectors in response to the UKRI Equitable Digital Society theme.