Activities

Digital Arctic

The OECD Territorial Review notes that “ICTs can play an important role in improving the efficiency of public service delivery in sparsely populated and remote areas. The Internet can also promote better business opportunities and help rural firms to penetrate distant markets.”

These observations formed the starting point for our Digital Arctic initiative. Our approach was three-pronged, focusing on society, technology and business: we looked at how IT can affect the way people live; we looked at the technological issues; and we looked at business potential and how IT can boost economic diversification.

In the spirit of its digital theme, we decided to make it a digital conference, divided into three sessions:

IT’S ALL ABOUT HUMANS — society
MAKING IT POSSIBLE — technology
IT CAN BE DONE — business

Oana Spinu, Søren Halling, Olavur Ellefsen, Tara Sweeney, and Kate Sanderson at the Arctic Futures Symposium

Digital Arctic at the Arctic Futures Symposium

As a follow-on to the conference, NORA organised a session about ICT development in the Arctic during the Arctic Futures Symposium in Brussels on 17-18 November 2015. The session, chaired by Kate Sanderson, Head of the Faroese Mission to the EU, emphasised that digitisation is essential for Arctic development.

Oana Spinu, Executive Director of the Nunavut Broadband Development Corporation, described internet access as a human right due to its importance for education. “In the Canadian Arctic, I would argue that the lack of digitisation constitutes a social injustice”, she said.

A more positive outlook was provided by Tara MacLean Sweeney, Executive Vice-President for External Affairs at the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) and then Chair of the Arctic Economic Council. She focused on Alaska’s good results using tele-medicine and progress installing fibre optic cables across the Arctic.

From a business perspective, long distances, small communities and the extreme climate can make access to competent labour complicated. Søren Halling, Senior Software Developer and Partner with E7 said: “Software production is hard. Especially in the Arctic.” Often they struggle to recruit the specialists they need, however, there are also benefits to developing software in a small “laboratory” community such as the Faroe Islands.

Olavur Ellefsen, an ICT entrepreneur in the Faroe Islands since 1996 and currently working for Schlumberger, underlined the importance of local ownership and leadership in the development of ICT solutions for the best results. This requires support from both local and national politicians across the Arctic.