Policies, guidelines and boundaries for interacting online

[Jon Jolly]

Does anyone have any written statements about online conduct for youth workers and volunteers? I'm re-writing our volunteer handbook and would love some thoughts from others about what to include. There's the obvious stuff about safeguarding children, but what about personal/professional boundaries, keeping logs of online comments or Personal Messages, and guidance on 'what not to post'?

[Ricky Rew]

Hmm - not sure that's necessary. Do we same the same before we engage in offline conversation (when we know we're going to record notes)?

[Tim Davies]

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.

[Alex Dowding]

http://formessengers.com/mdetect.htm

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

[matthew seebach]

Thanks for everyone for throwing in your thoughts on logs, I agree with the points about logs and it completely makes sense now that I think about it.

I guess the point is, and it completely missed me, is that there is no reason not to adopt standard detached or streetwork operating and recording procedures while on-line. It goes to show that when you approach a new way situation that you can forget that you already have the skills and knowledge required to deal with that situation.

As an aside, this is something that I have encountered in training workers who are suddenly in a situation in which they are dealing with young people from minority groups. The youth workers will often say that they do not have the skills to engage these young people. However, in Ireland, and I imagine in the UK, youth workers are trained in social analysis, reflective practice, needs analysis, developing interventions, group work, etc. These skills, not accidentally, provide a pretty good basis for engaging minority young people. But when faced with a new situation, workers sometimes lose confidence in their skills and experience and fail to bring it to bear.

It begs the question of how we ensure that we and others engaging in on-line work can be sure to confidently apply skills and prior experience to a new medium and not go completely blank as I did.

On that, I was going to ask how one best identifies oneself in one's on-line profile. But really, one could look to an outreach policy and use whatever is there as a guideline. I have seen outreach policies that are very clear about how to identify oneself as a youth worker when engaging young people. Arguably, the same could be used on-line.

any thoughts?

[Alex Dowding]

The issue of identifying oneself online maybe easier than at first glance. To sign in to any SNS/IM site you need an email account. If let YP know that anyone who is claiming to be a youth worker online should have an email from a bona fide website domain (easier for local authority workers) then this a great way of proving identity. For SNS it may also be possible to post a link from a .gov.uk site.

Anyone see any problems with these?

[Tim Davies]

Verifying via a .gov.uk seems a reasonable solution. The only challenges are:

1) Not everyone with a .gov.uk is necessarily a youth worker, CRB checked or should be working with young people;

2) On some sites you can't see the e-mail address of the person you are interacting with.

But - something along these lines might work. For example, listing all the approved profiles of workers in a service on an official web page so that young people can check them out.

The advantage of having a clear notarisation method, is that, if anyone is attempting to abuse trust be posing as a youth worker (for example) it becomes easier to identify that abuse and to address it with whatever practical (e.g. reporting abuse to the SNS site), or indeed legal, measures that might be necessary.

[mas]

I don't think a .gov.uk is the right avenue for this - it would be much better to adopt something that does indicate the 'online youth worker' does have a CRB check, and that any data collected will be properly stored etc. etc.

I'm thinking along the lines of some sort of badge or common ID that people would sign up to (regardless of if local government employed/third sector etc.) and that would indicate the person can be trusted. Obviously a long way off and would cost a lot to implement + to manage and prevent fraud but I'd have thought at some point something like this would become necessary?

In the meantime I agree with Tim that perhaps something we should all have is a page on our sites that people can be directed to that clearly states who we are, what we do and why + how to contact to verify, this could then be linked to in all 'professional sns profiles' allowing young people and parents to quickly get info.

[mas]

Just saw this on the Channel 4 Site 'Disarming Britain' - they seem to have staff that engage with young people on social networks and they have a page similar to suggested in the previous posts.....

http://disarmingbritain.wordpress.com/about-2/

[Chris Cook]

That is an excellent example of a clear and concise policy. Now if we could just adapt it to our needs ...

[Chris Cook]

With social media sites I've always gone down the line of being completely open about who I am and what I do. My individual profile's have been private but I have also been part of a public group. As young people have added me as a friend I have only accepted those known to me through my work but I have limited my contacts to when they approach me and logged everything.

With MMORPG at one point I used a pseudonym in one game of "J R Hartley" to help me identify the age of the person I was chatting with. If they recognised the name and its context I was generally safe in assuming the person was closer to my age. If they didn't I would consider them to be children or young people and ensure that all my responses were even more guarded and careful.

I'm going to have to read the outreach guidelines as it seems as if they might inform my own practise online which follows much of what has been discussed here.

[Hilary Mason]

This is proving a really useful discussion. I think that some of the issues will be covered through our outreach / detached guidelines and that this does prove a useful strating point...something I can feed into the discussion locally.

I think that I would maintain that the personal / work personas need to be kept as seperate as we do when we youth work off line as I think we need to ensure that young people and colleagues are aware of boundaries and guidlines in this instance.

With regards to your point Alex, I think that the idea of the email address being a gov.uk one would possibly work for local authorities. My question as well as identifying ourselves is that if we are hosting a SNS then how do we ensure that the YP that go online there are indeed yp? (This may be my ignorance of how things work so please do excuse this as I am very much in the learning phase!) I thought that the case study Tim put up about the Womans Group was interesting and seemed to combine online and offline work well. At least there there was some offline familiarity with the individuals concerned. Any thoughts or experiences?

[Tim Davies]

Hey all.

I'm just writing up the final report for the YWSN report. At the moment I've get a section in on what a policy for Youth Work engagement with SNS would need to cover. I'd love any feedback on. I'll paste in what I've got below (hopefully it will work and Ning will cope with the table layout).

Plus - thanks to everyone for this discussion so far - which has really informed this chunk of the research.

---

As part of our action research in Devon we explored the key issues that a policy on youth work engagement in online social networking would need to
address. We consulted with over 60 young people at the 2008 Kongomana
festival to identify their views on such a policy – particularly a
policy for youth workers creating participation opportunities on
sites like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. The views shared by these
young people¹,
along with evidence from the literature review, and discussions in
the UK Youth Online Community²
are expored in the table below. The left-hand column indicates a key
issue that a policy for youth work engagement with SNS should
consider, and the right-hand includes guidance and notes for
considering that requirement of a policy.

Key issue	Draft guidance/notes/issues
(a) What guidance is provided for staff to manage their personal SNS profiles?	Staff should be free to have their own personal SNS profiles. However: (a) They should not accept friend requests from young people against these profiles; (b) They should not post any content on their profiles which it would be professionally inappropriate for young people to know or see or they should use the privacy settings of a site to ensure this content is not accessible to young people; (c) They should lead by example, and abide by all the relevant safety messages and guidance provided to young people.
(b) Who is allowed to use SNS as part of their work? And in what ways are the allowed to use SNS.	There are different uses of SNS (see §XXX) and any guidance or policy should specify who can use SNS and how they can use SNS. For example, a policy may build upon these three distinctions: Individual youth workers may use a work SNS profile to contact the young people with whom they have a direct professional relationship – and only with the permission of that young person; A centre or project manager may use a public SNS profile or group to market a project. They may accept friends list requests from young people who have attended or would be interested in attending the project subject to the notes in (e). A specially trained youth worker (e.g. a 'detached youth worker for the web') may use SNS to interact with young people who may not already be known to the service and to carry out online outreach and issue based work. A workers use of SNS should always be agreed with the relevant line manager.
(c) How should youth workers manage their SNS profiles?	Workers should maintain separate personal and work profiles wherever possible3. Where possible, the ability to browse the friends list on the profile should be switched off. Where a profile is being used to contact young people known to the worker it is important that the message box on the profile is checked regularly. Where a profile or group may receive friend/membership requests from individuals not already known to the worker – the profiles of the individuals making the request should be checked before they are accepted. Groups or profiles should include a clear message stating who the profile owner is, their affiliation, how to confirm their identity, and who to contact in the case of any concerns about their conduct.
(d) What recording of contact should take place?	Contact with young people through SNS should be recorded alongside any other communication and work with young people. A process for recording contact and communication may be based on a detached youth work policy. Services should decide how to record and report 'contact time' with young people that occurs through SNS.
(e) What guidelines should exist for workers and young people about conduct in online SNS spaces?	Our consultation with young people suggested the following (non exhaustive) list of guidelines should be explored: Youth workers should make sure young people are aware that adding them as a friend makes information on the young persons profile accessible to the worker. If a youth worker is concerned about the content of a young persons profile (e.g. unsuitable profile picture) they should send them a polite private message. Workers should actively check any discussions they host, and should make sure these online spaces are kept free of bullying. Services should consider consulting young people on a local code of conduct for particular uses of SNS and posting this on their official websites.
(f) How should workers deal with concerns about young people's safety or conduct?	Youth workers should know how to record and report any concerns about young people's safety to their line managers, or, where relevant, how to escalate any child protection concerns to the relevant authorities. Relevant codes of conduct, negotiated with young people should be used to set the youth worker response to concerns about young peoples conduct in online SNS and community spaces.

1See the consultation report at http://blogs.nya.org.uk/ywsn/2008/08/using-social-network-sites-for...

2See the discussion here: http://tinyurl.com/5wpgqe (Accessed 18/08/2008)

3As of 18/08/2008 having two profiles is officially against the Facebook Terms of Use, as is having an organisational profile. It is,
however, possible to 'segment' a Facebook profile, and to have
different privacy settings for different groups of people. Managing
this properly takes care – and staff and services should be
confident in dealing with the Facebook settings before going down
this route.