In an earlier post I mentioned a survey we were running which allowed participants to test a number of widely used social media services (Youtube, Deliicious, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Facebook etc).  The respondents were presented with a link to each site in turn and asked to report whether they were allowed to connect or blocked or what message appeared.

Some 225 people responded: 67% were from local authorities, and 20% from voluntary organisations. The remainder were from central government, higher education, non departmental public bodies, inspectorates etc.  The results suggest that a substantial proportion of respondents are unable to use social media. While it’s encouraging that more than 50% could access video on Vimeo (a channel that IRISS uses to distribute video) the converse is that around 44% of respondents cannot access these videos. Soundcloud is a cheap and effective way of sharing audio files, yet 49% of our respondents were denied access. Security and/or bandwidth are often cited as reasons for blocking access, yet services such as Soundcloud are unlikely to pose a threat on either ground. Flickr was accessible to more than half the respondents, but the other 43% will have to do without.

Some data visualisations from the survey are available on Flickr, a cost effective way of sharing graphic material and raw, anonymised data is available to download on Google docs.

Respondents were also invited to comment on access to social media in their workplace. These responses provide an interesting insight into the technical and cultural barriers that inhibit access to and use of content delivered via social media.  For example

the firewall creates significant buffering issues, and very few if any NCs [Network Computers] are enabled for sound. So, you may be able to see a video on a website, but you will not hear anything and to all intents and purposes it will be unwatchable

There was also suggestion that using the internet at might not be regarded as ‘work’:

The length of time spent online is monitored which makes some staff nervous accessing the internet. This creates a hidden barrier and perhaps sends a tacit message that internet usage is not acceptable

While many organisations say that access will be unblocked on request, in practice the process can be cumbersome, if not daunting:

… as the process says I phoned the helpline to get access to this [Vimeo, a streaming video service used by IRISS]. I had to give the web address and confirm that this was for work usage – no problem there. However, I now have to get my line manager or above to email IT to confirm that my request for access is approved. If I want this access to be for more than myself I have to give a list of names – hence to have everyone in social work able to access video clips on IRISS I would have to list all 2,000 staff names..

We cannot emphasise enough that services such as Vimeo and Flickr are extremely cost effective ways of sharing video and still images respectively. The annual subscriptions (£60 and £20 respectively) are affordable, but more that that, they save us considerable sums in administrative and technical overhead costs.

Read a fuller account on our website.

In this blog I’ll be talking about how we at IRISS use social media as well as the barriers our colleagues in social services face in using simple, but highly effective, tools such as Delicious social bookmarking or even Doodle meeting scheduler.

The great thing about social media is that its really easy to use. As Euan Semple so succinctly put it

It’s just the web, growing into our lives, becoming part of our work lives … It’s about people writing some text in a square box and ticking “save” – it doesn’t get more complicated than that

http://www.euansemple.com/theobvious/2012/2/20/the-thingification-of-social-media.html

We’re not alone is advocating greater use of social media: organisations adding their voice to the arguments for embracing social media include:

• SOCITIM http://www.socitm.net/downloads/download/255/social_media-why_ict_management_should_lead_their_organisations_to_embrace_it
• NESTA http://www.socialbysocial.com
• LGiU https://member.lgiu.org.uk/whatwedo/Publications/Pages/3006092.aspx
• Carnegie Trust (http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/getattachment/ee2be1a3-8a94-4d8b-963f-94e29c8a9781/Making-the-Connection–The-Use-of-Social-Technolog.aspx

Yet, despite encouragement from these reputable organisations, practitioners are routinely blocked from using social media and are therefore largely enable to assess its potential. And the potential for supporting knowledge management and workplace learning and development is enormous.

We would like to see a culture in which staff are positively helped and encouraged to be more productive by developing confidence and competence in the use of the computers that sit, greatly underused, on their desks. As one employee development manager told us ‘we should be on Twitter and Facebook as a means of communication with our partner agencies’ http://vimeo.com/21390033

So, let’s start with the following questions:

• Why block access to Vimeo, the video sharing site? Vimeo make video distribution economically viable: £60 per year against the cost of duplicating DVDs.
• Why prevent people installing a Delicious bookmarklet on their browser so that they can use this great tool to create lists of web resources to share with colleagues?
• Why prevent access to Google Docs for collaboration? It’s so much easier than the version management chaos that inevitably follows from “please comment on the attached Word document”

Where data managers have concerns about security it would be great to have a discussion in order to understand the problems and look for solutions, so that people can, well,  just do it!