As you complete your holiday shopping lists and 2025 resolutions, the Seward County Chamber and Development Partnership wants to know what’s on your technological wish list.
Workshops on protecting yourself from computer viruses and online scams? Using the internet to connect to healthcare or other services? Learning to use your new cell phone or laptop to the max? Training to do your own phone and laptop maintenance and repairs? Ways to better utilize your online connection for work or family?
SCCDP is conducting a survey until Jan. 1 to determine what kinds of workshops or programs it can offer in 2025 in Seward County and the surrounding region. People can access the survey on the SCCDP website – cultivatesewardcounty.com – as well as picking up paper copies at the Seward Memorial Library, senior centers around the county and the SCCDP office in the west side of the Seward Civic Center.
While the chamber’s work is focused primarily on Seward County, SCCDP President and CEO Jonathan Jank said they have received letters of support from Saline, York and Butler counties for a grant the group is seeking to extend its work in the area of digital connectivity, empowerment and literacy further.
Jank said this outreach to new and current technology users through this digital literacy training needs assessment survey is a logical next step from the efforts to extend broadband internet access throughout the county and region, and respondents should be able to complete the form in about five minutes.
The SCCDP will use results of the survey to determine what topics are of most interest to area residents to start offering workshops as soon as February.
“We don’t know what we don’t know in this digital equity space,” Jank said. “We really do need people’s insights.”
The assessment survey also ties into a “soft launch” of a physical center for digital learning or empowerment in space provided without charge by Next Link Internet, 510 Bradford St., Suite C, in January. SCCDP has worked with Microsoft to provide support for programs in such a center.
The center will eventually provide a place, tech experts and learning opportunities for area residents.
Ongoing feedback from the initial workshops will help to determine other workshop or technology help programs needed the rest of the year.
Jacob Jennings, SCCDP director of community affairs, said the workshops will help bridge the “digital divide” the broadband efforts have been trying to close in the past few years. SCCDP has been working with the Community Tech Network, which offers survey samples to get them started.
The survey will also help identify what kinds of equipment people want to learn more about.
Andrew Hanus, owner and founder of Hanus Tech Solutions in Seward, said his work has focused on the repair and fixing of technology equipment and applications to date, but he is interested in helping people learn how to prevent problems like viruses and hackers. He will play a key role in the workshops.
Hanus said the concept of the digital literacy and empowerment center presents the opportunity to help people when they need it, and perhaps prevent technology-related problems rather than addressing them after the fact.
“It’s tough to see people’s trust get betrayed,” he said.
He hopes the center’s cybersecurity educational role will help prevent that betrayal, as well as the threat of financial theft via phishing and scams.
