Policies, guidelines and boundaries for interacting online

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tim Davies on June 17, 2008 at 11:11pm

Hey Jon

Not that I know of - so please do let me know if you find anything!

I was working with Devon County Council today - and they were talking about writing some though - based upon their guidelines for detached workers... so if you having anything like that it might provide a starting point.

I've been exploring some possible guidelines over the last few week - so I'll try and summarise them into a starter for 10 when I get a chance later this week...

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Permalink Reply by Alex Dowding on June 18, 2008 at 12:35pm

Hey Jon, I msgd mas yesterday about it and was about to start a thread on the issue today when I spotted yours! The local authority I work for has begun to explore the idea, but haven't really got to grips with the issues yet. It's just a group of youth workers trying to develop the work their work. Our starting point was our child protection policy as we felt/new that would be our biggest hurdle. Some issues raised so far (but not solved) are:
-Keeping Logs online.
-Personal SNS and professional SNS contact-When, where, for what reason
-Informing yp of appropriate/inappropriate contact-To protect yp and yw but also to keep the relationship professional.

A few others, but hopefully this can help start the discussion going?

Alex

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Permalink Reply by matthew seebach on June 18, 2008 at 4:01pm

hiya, good to see other people interested in this, as I'm in the national office of a large youth work organisation in Ireland, I only occasionally see the young people I work with face to face. So those young people involved in working groups to develop policies, or other pieces of work are best contacted through social networking sites. I've tried google groups or other meeting software, but the fact is that young people know and use bebo, etc, and that is were they are.

Anyways, I've lots of stuff I want to explore in relation to this, but immediately I need a policy or safety statement. I am wondering if it is best practice to have closed and moderated groups vs open and unmoderated groups.

Also, alex mentions a few issues raised in his local authority, they seem to make sense, but I am wondering what you mean by "keeping logs online"?

It would be good to hear back from people on this stuff.

cheers,

m

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Permalink Reply by Tim Davies on June 19, 2008 at 7:22am

From what I understand - detached workers will usually be charged with keeping notes of their conversations / contact with young people.

They are, of course, not tape-recording or verbatim logging those contacts - but they are keeping a record.

Perhaps a similar procedure could work with interaction in SNS spaces / MSN where, whilst it's theoretically possible to log everything, it might be better just to keep brief notes (with the option of saving a web-page / MSN chat / screen shot if the worker feel that is useful evidence / neccessary).

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Permalink Reply by Alex Dowding on June 19, 2008 at 1:20pm

I think one of the main problems we are trying to cope with is the assumption that online contact is 'anonymous' and therefore suspicious. The people that need to ratify any policy may need to be educated around certain idea's as well. I think they would see the logging of 'online' conversations as a way of protecting young people and themselves, and we may see it as a bureaucratic annoyance that may prevent young people from talking about what they really want to. Having said that, the protection argument is quite persuasive and if data handling procedures are followed, is there an issue?

In Bournemouth we record our work on an online databsae, and it can be easily used/adapted to record this type of work accurately. I think alot of the problems are actually training issues when it comes to staff. There is a team leader in Bournemouth (who will remain nameless) who wanted to call out IT as his computer wouldn't turn on. It was explained that he was actually turning his monitor on and off and the 'box' on the floor is actually the computer. This is the level of 'skill' we may be dealing with and although he would not be likely to use SNS, he may be line managing someone who would. If this is the case, would he be capable of checking the contact made was appropriate/youth work/worth while?

Quite an holistic approach is needed to this then with lots of factors to think about. Line management is a key to our child protection policy so in turn will be a part of any SNS policy. Is this a Bournemouth issue or does this situation resonate with others?

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Permalink Reply by Jon Jolly on June 19, 2008 at 1:25pm

Thanks for your comments Matt. It seems people have different ways of keeping relevant logs. I myself make sure all my messages are public or recorded by my IM software (Adium for mac is great as I sign into GTalk, MSN, and AIM from the same programme)!

But what about the issue of personal/professional boundaries? As a church-based worker, I have permission to share my 'personal/public' profile with young people online and simply make sure I am accountable with what I post and write.

However for many other workers I realise this would not be appropriate. Do people have work logins and profiles online? What about MSN or Facebook. Is it sensible to manage both a personal and work account?

What are other people doing?

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Permalink Reply by Hilary Mason on June 19, 2008 at 2:09pm

Hi Jon

At the moment I have work and personal profiles as in a have a personal flickr account and then have developed a work one for professional use. I have a personal facebook account and if we go down the line of developing a work account then I would keep both areas seperate. That's just me. I know Mas wrote somewhere about having both on one site. I think that would be difficult to manage and not to blur the lines.

In developing our policies as a local authority I would probably be suggesting keeping the 2 areas seperate, not sure what others think?

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Permalink Reply by Jon Jolly on June 19, 2008 at 2:34pm

Thanks Hilary,

I thought that would be the most sensible way for agencies to manage profiles. It may be that as a church, we go a similar direction in future.

As for practically using separate profiles, how do you decide or define 'ownership' of online media? For example, you take a beautiful scenic picture while on a residential and post it to your personal Flickr account. But then the agency wants to use it for promotional material as you took it while 'on duty'!

I know it's an unlikely scenario, but certainly possible. In a similar vein there have been reports of people hired or fired over things posted on their personal online profiles.

This is where we really need some guidelines for workers to follow.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Cook on June 20, 2008 at 8:26pm

With all this logging perhaps we should have something at the top of our social media sites along the lines of "conversations may be recorded".

As someone who has always worked all hours - and have often had chats with young people at all sorts of times - this is proving to be a very fruitful discussion. And yes, I would be very frustrated to fill in a form after every chat online - particularly as most are innocuous and can be responses to simple enquiries like "what are we doing tuesday?"

From a personal perspective - if the stuff that was being logged needed to be recorded to another file then I would probably look to try and code something. Then limit my activities to those tools that I can capture the logs into another format. For instance with MSN I know how to locate those log files and it wouldn't take much to code something to capture data at the end of a session. There's probably something in an sdk kit. If it is deemed essential then perhaps we should see who can write things like this and share the code.

Or maybe just write a little executable to capture keystrokes - almost like a virus - whenever you're interfacing online. Hmmm...

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Permalink Reply by Jon Jolly on June 20, 2008 at 10:59pm

Interesting thought Chris. I like the idea of automatic logging (when signed in through a work profile) but you raise a good point about declaring our recordings. Should all youth worker/agency profiles, logins etc. have a disclaimer and would this prohibit young people engaging with the service?

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Permalink Reply by Tim Davies on June 21, 2008 at 9:36am

You might be right about the need for some code here (it's some of this sort of stuff I hope a digital innovation centre for youth work may be able to explore) - but I would have thought the code would be more about a virtual version of the quick record form, rather than verbatim logging.

So that it makes it easy to hit a button to save a record that you were in touch with a particular young person at a particular time, and asks you to provide a one line summary of that contact. It could provide space for pasting in a full log of the conversation - but doing that would be discretionary and only encouraged when there was a particular concern/reason for having a verbatim record.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Dowding on June 24, 2008 at 12:00pm

http://formessengers.com/mdetect.htm

Possible software solution for logging? May need multiple licenses though as I think most people use multiple pc's

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