Getting the hang of Almedalen: A perfect digital storm

Sometimes people are guilty of overestimating the area they are working on and thinking that everything else is peripheral. Most people in Almedalen have their own agendas that they do everything they can to push through, and they don't want to know that there are other, larger perspectives.

However, those of us who are working in various ways to promote digitization can credibly say that this issue is at the top of this year's Almedal. The news site Dagens Media trumpets "Digitally hottest this year" and states that 125 seminars in various ways are about digitization.

On Monday, IT&Telekomföretagen, in collaboration with Computer Sweden, held the usual IT Day, and the theme for this year was "Get the hang of it!". The theme was, of course, digitization and its power to transform society, which permeated the four seminars that were held. In the final seminar, on how Sweden should meet the future challenges of digitization, economist Anna Felländer described the combination of digitization, globalization and urbanization as the "perfect storm", where politics and society must fundamentally change to not only be caught up, but preferably also take advantage of all its opportunities. Tips on how to take advantage of these opportunities can be found in the anthology "About Sweden in the future", which the chairman of the Digitalization Commission Jan "Gulan" Gulliksen presented at the same seminar.

Facing the new digital reality without becoming anxious and passive requires leadership, and as part of our usually well-attended IT mingle, we had set up a rollup with the text "Get it!", where visitors could write in the names of people or organizations that should embrace digitization and take action. Our mingle visitors are polite and well-behaved, so most refrained from singling out individuals, but some who still had to put up with ending up in this unhonorable collection were the "Minister of the Future", the "Prime Minister" and the "Government".