world brought about by new scientific breakthroughs and technological developments, and the impact these changes have on how we behave. 2. It recognises the importance of responding to these changes in ethical and intellectually rigorous ways. 3. It appreciates that we have a long historical tradition from which to draw when addressing these challenges. 4. Digital Civics is an appreciation of the informational nature of reality. Contention of digital civics and virtue ethics In considering the ethical issues that arise from digital age civic issues, numerous scholars have suggested that such ethical initiatives should use virtue ethics as a basis for a shared global information ethics: namely, Charles Ess, Shannon Vallor, and Richard Volkman (2010). In her doctoral work on digital civics pedagogy, Clements suggests that her findings were compatible with a framework of virtue ethics. However, the information philosopher Luciano Floridi asserts that a global information ethics cannot be built upon virtue ethics, because virtue ethics is "intrinsically egopoeitic," and thus does not take into account responsibilities owed to the surrounding community or environment. To date, this matter is still contested. Educational programs In 2010, the first pedagogical program for digital civics was started by the Oscar Wilde Facebook Laboratory. It was a collaboration between the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive and the Dublin Institute of Technology's Estelle Clements. A global team of researchers and educators created a multi-platform (online and offline) learning environment to teach students and the public about digital civics. The project formed the basis of Clements' doctoral work, which formulated a Model for Digital Civics in pedagogy. At the time, Clements was particularly concerned that new digital citizenship initiatives were not considering the necessary underlying philosophical and ethical issues raised by the digital age and sought to provide a robust foundation to solve this problem. In 2014, Newcastle University, launched a program to teach digital civics to postgraduate students at their Open Lab. The program research concentrates on "exploring how digital technologies can empower citizens and communities" and "trains doctoral students in the design, deployment and evaluation of community-driven digital technologies and services." In 2018, The MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) released a digital civics toolkit described as: "a collection of resources for educators to support youth to explore, recognize, and take seriously the civic potentials of digital life." The toolkit draws heavily from digital media literacy, focusing on five