Report: The importance of social engagement in putting 5G connectivity infrastructures in place

The purpose of this document is to share social science research insights, generated through work with the Mobile Access North Yorkshire (MANY) project, in order to develop best practice, generate discussion for future collaborative work, and work out our collective next steps that might better achieve our aim: to help very rural communities achieve socio-economic flourishing through improved connectivity. We define ‘flourishing’ as improvements in wellbeing, business innovation and the safety and resilience of connected communities and use this as our overarching aim of our work. More specifically, we define improved wellbeing as reductions in self-perceived levels of harm, loneliness, and improvements in social connections and mental health; improved business innovation as improvements in practice that contribute to the business growth and/or improvements in productivity and/or (public) service offering (i.e. using a reduced resource for the same output); and improved safety and resilience as improvements in the timeliness and quality of information provided at critical decision-making junctures. We are working across three domains of action, the technology innovation domain, the technology-in-use domain, and in the middle, the institutional domain to identify opportunities for intervention. We are working across these domains to help people co-produce connectivity solutions that work in place: in a very rural community.