Ms. Molly Lesher, OECD Senior Digital Economist, opened the workshop and gave scene-setting remarks. She suggested that understanding the impacts of digital technologies on people’s overall well-being is one of the most important issues of our time and, while difficult to assess, something that the multi-stakeholder community needs to get right so that nobody is left behind as digital transformation progresses. She highlighted the purpose of the workshop – that is, to brainstorm on the key priority issues the international statistical community should focus on with respect to bridging digital divides of all kinds so that our economies and societies become more inclusive.

In this context, she invited all participants to contribute in the zoom chat their views on what – from a digital perspective – is the single most important issue we face today in terms of making our economies and societies more inclusive. The following issues were identified: Disinformation, the digital gender divide, access to affordable broadband, measurement frameworks, media competence and sovereignty in using digital technologies, digital divides, measurement of artificial intelligence (AI), and digital skills.

Ms. Lesher introduced the OECD Going Digital Toolkit, which includes a core set of indicators to help country’s assess their state of digital development and is structured along the lines of the OECD Going Digital Integrated Policy Framework. The Framework) includes seven dimensions:

• Access to data, communications infrastructure and services,
• Effective Use of digital technologies and data by people, firms and governments,
• Innovation, which pushes out the frontier of what is possible in the digital age, driving job creation, productivity and sustainable growth,
• Jobs, which highlights that as labour markets evolve, we must ensure that digital transformation leads to more and better jobs and to facilitate just transitions from one job to the next.
• Society, which reflects the fact that digital technologies affect society in complex and interrelated ways, and all stakeholders must work together to balance benefits and risks.
• Trust in digital environments, because without trust nobody will use digital technologies.
• Market Openness, which creates an enabling environment for digital transformation to flourish.

Mr. Dominik Rozkrut, President of Statistics Poland, then gave keynote remarks on Poland’s efforts to measure the “inclusive” aspects of digital transformation. Mr. Rozkrut underscored the importance of ICT use surveys in producing cross-country comparable statistics. He also highlighted complementary domestic approaches, including a recent social cohesion survey in Poland that addressed some aspects of trust and subjective well-being from a digital perspective. He suggested that linking different surveys could yield important insights. He also noted that Poland implemented a census during the pandemic which interestingly also yielded insights about the Polish population’s use of digital technologies and their impacts. He further highlighted the need to work together to facilitate access to new data sources, particularly with respect to privately held data and the need for “data stewardship” at the European level. He responded to a question about how international co-operation can push forward the digital measurement agenda (e.g. through the development of model surveys and related tools).

The workshop then moved into the panel discussion, which was kicked off by Ms. Nagwa El Shenawy, Undersecretary for Information and Decision Support in the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Egypt. Ms. El Shenawy informed the participants about work in Egypt to measure digital gender gaps and develop policies to support the inclusion of women and girls in the technology sector. In particular, she highlighted Egypt’s “ICT for Women and Girls” programme that offers education and training resources as well as hackathons to encourage female entrepreneurship. Ms. El Shenawy also highlighted three priority sectors for Egypt: 1) agriculture, 2) manufacturing and 3) the ICT sector, with artificial intelligence being a particular technology of interest. She also underscored the importance of connectivity in rural areas, which is a challenge Egypt is making strides to address. She responded to a participant question about the digital maturity of small and medium enterprises by highlighting the efforts Egypt is making to prepare tertiary graduates with AI-related skills, which will help entrepreneurs in the ICT sector.

Mr. Mark Uhrbach, Chief – Digital Economy Metrics, Statistics Canada, informed participants about Canada’s efforts to measure well-being, both domestically and internationally. He highlighted the recent results from Canada’s Internet use survey, which attempts to measure victimisation online as well as other subjective measures of well-being in the digital age. He noted that Canada used the results from the survey to conduct correlational analysis, and that a new app-based survey tool has been deployed to try to measure disinformation. He underscored that data collection approaches need to evolve beyond traditional survey techniques, and that he hopes the app-based tool will be useful in this regard. Mr. Uhrbach responded to a question about the policy impact of subjective well-being measures in Canada (e.g. by describing how the measurement results feed into policy analysis and development).

Mr. Alexandre Barbosa, Head of the Regional Centre of Studies on Information and Communication Technologies (Cetic.br), provided the last intervention of the panel. He discussed Brazil’s efforts to measure the societal impacts of digital transformation. He noted that Cetic.br has been producing regular ICT statistics since 2005, covering a wide range of areas such as households, enterprises, government, education, health, culture, among others. He underscored that Brazil is facing an increasing demand for high quality, timely and disaggregated data to support policymaking, but that data gaps may hamper evidence-based policies, particularly for new and emerging technologies, such as AI, or on new issues such as trust on the online environment, privacy and data protection. He responded to a question about innovative data collection approaches (i.e. the use of electronic questionnaires).

Ms. Lesher noted that the OECD is undertaking work to understand better misinformation, disinformation and other forms of untruths that circulate online, and that this work includes a new typology of untruths online, in part with a view to try to measure this phenomenon. This issue was of great interest to the panellists and audience, who all intervened to mention efforts underway to measure this (Canada) and important issue to consider (Poland, Brazil, Egypt and online participants). The discussion was active and robust, and the workshop had to close for lack of time.