Manchester Digital Development Agency

Man­ches­ter Dig­i­tal Devel­op­ment Agency, Man­ches­ter — United Kingdom

The Man­ches­ter Dig­i­tal Devel­op­ment Agency – MDDA – is based in Man­ches­ter, UK. We work with a wide range of local, national and inter­na­tional part­ners from the gov­ern­ment, aca­d­e­mic, busi­ness and com­mu­nity sec­tors. Our role is to sup­port the regen­er­a­tion of the city-region through the strate­gic and prac­ti­cal work of our technology-focused projects.

We are part of Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil located within the Regen­er­a­tion Divi­sion of the Chief Executive’s Depart­ment, and work with part­ners from the whole of Greater Man­ches­ter met­ro­pol­i­tan area. Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil acts as the lead author­ity for this work on behalf of all ten of the Greater Man­ches­ter dis­tricts, which are mem­bers of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Greater Man­ches­ter Author­i­ties (AGMA).

It is our respon­si­bil­ity to develop and imple­ment the Dig­i­tal Strat­egy for the Man­ches­ter city-region. The Strat­egy aims to cre­ate a ‘dig­i­tal mas­ter­plan’ for the city. This plan will be used to guide future invest­ment and bring together indus­try, research bod­ies and com­mu­nity rep­re­sen­ta­tives to develop new ideas for ser­vices that will ben­e­fit res­i­dents, local busi­ness and the wider community.

One of the key aims for the Strat­egy is to put in place super-fast broad­band across Man­ches­ter. We aim to do this by cre­at­ing a new ‘open access’ net­work, putting in place fibre to the premises con­nec­tions, advanced wire­less and a new inter­net ‘Hub’ exchange.

By cre­at­ing this next gen­er­a­tion con­nec­tiv­ity, we aim to link key employ­ment sites across the Man­ches­ter city region to accel­er­ate job growth, enhance the dig­i­tal skill base and pro­vide new oppor­tu­ni­ties for home access, flex­i­ble work­ing and tele­care services.

Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil estab­lished the Man­ches­ter Dig­i­tal Devel­op­ment Agency (MDDA) in 2003 to coor­di­nate infor­ma­tion soci­ety ini­tia­tives across the city-region includ­ing community-based broad­band ini­tia­tives and the ONE-Manchester Dig­i­tal Chal­lenge ini­tia­tive. MDDA focuses on how dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies can sup­port eco­nomic regen­er­a­tion and social inclusion.

The MDDA’s mis­sion is:

“To make Man­ches­ter a lead­ing world class dig­i­tal city, hav­ing one of the most com­pet­i­tive broad­band infra­struc­tures in Europe, attract­ing and sus­tain­ing invest­ment in ICT and e-commerce across all sec­tors of the econ­omy, gen­er­at­ing new busi­nesses, devel­op­ing new learn­ing cul­tures, pro­mot­ing social inclu­sion and pro­vid­ing all res­i­dents with the skills and aspi­ra­tions to play a full role in the infor­ma­tion society”.

In look­ing to expand this strate­gic approach across the whole of the city-region Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil and its part­ners within the Local Strate­gic Part­ner­ship (LSP) have linked up with three neigh­bour­ing munic­i­pal­i­ties, Tame­side, Sal­ford and Old­ham, to cre­ate “ONE-Manchester” (Open Net­work E-Manchester). ONE-Manchester is a new part­ner­ship which brings together the pub­lic sec­tor, pri­vate sec­tor and voluntary/community sec­tor around the idea of “turn­ing the dig­i­tal divide into a dig­i­tal div­i­dend”. This is look­ing at the longer term sus­tain­abil­ity of dig­i­tal inclu­sion poli­cies and prac­tices by devel­op­ing a new col­lab­o­ra­tive deliv­ery mech­a­nism for dig­i­tally enabled ser­vices and social net­work­ing. It also aims to pro­vide a sus­tain­able dig­i­tal devel­op­ment model, includ­ing dig­i­tal coop­er­a­tives, which can be used to cre­ate social cap­i­tal and com­mu­nity cohesion

Con­tact infor­ma­tion
Con­tact per­son: Dave Carter — Head MDDA
Web­site: http://www.manchesterdda.com