The race is on to get as many people online as possible by 2012, Martha Lane Fox has told the BBC.

Martha Lane Fox告诉BBC，2012年以前让尽可能多的人上网的活动已经开始。

Martha Lane Fox is best known as co-founder of LastMinute.com

The newly-appointed Digital Champion has been charged by government with finding a way of getting the six million poorest Britons online.

Speaking to the BBC's Business Editor Robert Peston, Ms Lane Fox said she wanted a virtual（虚拟的） race to sit alongside the 2012 Olympics.

"Let's have a race online alongside all the other big races that are going on."

"What I'd like to try and start with is a kind of challenge to the country to hook around the Olympics because that's something that's in our national psyche（灵魂，精神）," she said.

"I quite like the idea of a sort of virtual race alongside all the real races. So, I want to kind of get this idea out there of how we try and create a completely wired and online community of people by the time Britain has the Olympics hosted here," she added.

Plugged in

Some 17 million Britons are currently not online, either out of choice or because they cannot afford internet connectivity.

Ms Lane Fox has indicated that she wants to concentrate on the six million poorest "nonliners" first.

She will be relying on people already online to convince others to join them.

"The only way I think we can do that is if all of us as individuals sit down and think okay, how can I bring someone on this journey with me?"

"So I'd like to kind of raise the challenge to the country about how we could create a team of volunteers that will build a big peer-to-peer network, training and mentoring¹.

"Get kids training grannies, get all of us kind of plugging into our local communities to try and pull the whole country along.

"If we all took it on ourselves to train ten, twenty people, the job is done," she said.

Basic right

She will be drawing on projects already up and running around the UK.

The thing that I found interesting in the month that I've been doing it is that there is a huge number of different things happening, masses of different local projects run by charities, run by government organisations, run by private companies," she said.

"I think what my role should be pulling them together, raising the profile of the ones that are good, thinking about how we can replicate²（折叠，复写） them," she added.

Ms Lane Fox said she was firmly of the belief that the internet was a "basic human right alongside electricity and water".

"I certainly believe that from here on in you are not going to be able to be a good citizen of this country if you don't have technical skills," she said.

It is widely acknowledged that being online can save people money with the average estimate being savings³ of around £276 per year.

Ms Lane Fox has some more statistics.

"If you have internet skills, you will earn up to 10% more than if you don't. If you have internet skills, you will be 25% more confident than if you don't. And if you have internet skills, people's feelings of loneliness when they've come from vulnerable situations have gone down by 80%," she told the BBC.

While most would agree with her enthusiasm to persuade the social excluded（除外，排除） to get online not everyone is convinced by her strategy.

"Before we recruit a team of enthusiasts⁴ to travel the country looking for people who don't use the internet we need to find out why these people are not already online," said Alex Salter, co-founder of broadband measurement firm SamKnows.