Thoughts from the TUANZ Tech Users Summit 2026

When collecting the evidence for the new Te Rourou One Foundation Connected Rangatahi: Digital Inclusion in the Age of AI report, a young person told the researchers that their local mall “just shuts their things off, their charging ports off, they just turn off after a certain hour.”

I want to be fair to the mall. I’m sure somebody, somewhere, held a meeting about this. Somebody raised a concern about loitering, and somebody else said they could just cut the power to the outlets at certain hours, and everyone nodded because it seemed tidy. Nobody in that meeting thought of themselves as making a digital exclusion policy. But that’s what they were doing. We write lofty strategy documents for digital inclusion. Digital exclusion doesn’t need any. It gets made in a thousand small decisions by people who don’t know they’re making them.*

The Brainbox Institute spent much of the past year bringing together people with experience and expertise in a range of areas, including data scientists, people in and working with the telecommunications sector, and community leaders, to work through what internet resilience actually means for Aotearoa.