Whose Friends are Whose?

I’ve presented at conferences on the topic of the importance of social networking and social media for human services providers, and I have posted on this blog many times about our efforts at Keystone Human Services.  Now, many human services providers are on Twitter and Facebook, and it has me thinking about social networking and the people we support.  (For an example of the growing number of service providers on Twitter, see my list http://twitter.com/#/list/jbuford/intellectual-disability.)

People supported by human services providers are all vulnerable in one way or another—some only temporarily, others more systemically—and one of our important tasks is to shore up their areas of vulnerability.  Those efforts can sometimes lead to a blurring of the lines from a professional relationship to one that looks more like friendship.  The ethics of that are clearer in fields such as social work, psychology, and psychiatry (i.e. the principles of confidentiality and dual relationships)  than they are for the people who directly support people with intellectual disabilities, mental illness, autism, or other challenges in the community.  In this setting the guide posts are far murkier .

True to form, I have no answers to these myriad ethical dilemmas.  In fact, I don’t even have the questions.  I have a strong sense, though, that those of us who think we have an obligation to make sure our communities are welcoming to all people, need to think through the hazards, and the benefits, of “friending” people we support.    Already the digital divide disproportionately excludes many people from the community we all enjoy in the social media.

In my organization I’m putting together a diverse panel of people to begin to define questions and an ethical framework, but I’d like to have the conversation here in the social media as well.  Do you or your organization struggle to find the right answer to how to help someone with an intellectual disability navigate Facebook safely, without paternalism or odd blurring of lines?  Have you already answered questions about how to respond when someone you support “friends” you?  Please let me know how you are framing the questions, and maybe we can work together to craft answers.

Thanks!

 

Hats, both new and old

Daniel Henninger, the author of the Wonder Land column in the WSJ, wrote today (10-29-2009) about “Obama and the Old Hat People.”  Today’s column is about the current health care reform proposals making their way through the US Congress, and the current emphasis on dramatically expanding Medicaid alongside the much-debated “public option.”  Henninger places the thinking behind these proposals squarely in the “old hat” category, calling them “pre-iphone” proposals.

Leaving aside the politics or the persuasiveness of his argument, his use of “old hat” thinking and “pre-iphone” proposals got me thinking about old hat, pre-iphone proposals in human services.  In this field we are all too familiar with the Medicaid model and its myriad rules, regulations, complexities, compliance pitfalls, and frustrations.  15 minute billing increments, arcane rounding rules, encounter forms, eligibility change management, concurrent auditing, and much much more are part of the daily lives of human services delivery systems and the people we support.  They are also a part of the infrastructure –human and technological–that human services organizations must have to survive.  We all have software designed to manage the minutia of the rules.

It just doesn’t get much more old hat than that.  

Most human services organizations are moving to service models based fundamentally on the individual being served.  We call it person-centered-planning, self-determination, or any number of other names, but we are often stymied by old hat bureaucratic thinking.  In this time of technological innovation and social movements based on an increasing ability for individuals to belong to disparate de-centralized groups (social media being a very important example) AND an industry movement toward personal choice, we still haven’t been able to be very new hat, have we?

New hat would be a service delivery and funding model based on individually developed service plans.  New hat would be an iphone app that removes the bloat and just delivers the information relevant to that person in that moment.  I’m circling back, I think, to an earlier post about the need for innovation in human services.

 I want us to be post-iphone.  

We need to be new hat.

 

Shame on you, Yahoo

As most readers already know, Yahoo recently apologized via Twitter for employing scantily clad woman as dancers, including lap dancers, at Hack Day in Taiwan.  If you missed this dust-up, both sides of the issue are covered (can there really be two sides to this conversation?) in the Reuters blog post “let there be lap dances” and Simon Willison’s blog post “this shouldn’t be the image of hack day.”  There are many others—just google Yahoo and lap dancing, and you’ll find them.  In my view, Yahoo’s behavior here was nothing short of shameful, and its apology was both late and banal.

What does this have to do with human services and technology?  A lot, actually.   Much of what we do in human services is predicated on the belief that all people have the right to participate fully in the community.  I spend a significant amount of time reminding people that “community” includes the online world, and I spend an equal amount of time reminding technology companies that the people we support deserve good online tools, have something to offer the technology community, and are an important customer base as well as source for future employees.

When technology companies as ubiquitous as Yahoo demonstrate that they don’t value women as customers or as employees, they are presenting a stultifying  view of who cares about technology and who is welcome in the technology community.  Yahoo’s apology said that this incident was not reflective of their values, and that it won’t happen again, but this is not the first time it has been part of their corporate “entertainment.”   Women are an important customer base for Yahoo, yet Yahoo marginalizes them.  How much harder is for us then, to get their attention regarding the needs of people on the wrong side of the digital divide?

Those of us working in the intersection of technology and human services need to have a stronger voice in reminding technology companies to be inclusive in all their activities.  Please take the time to hold companies accountable to a higher standard, and tell Yahoo what you think about the importance of sensitivity and diversity in technology.

thanks

 

Uncool once more . . .

Twitter seems well on its way to becoming the social media tool that non-users love to hate.  A victim of its own good press and popularity, it’s now cool to be anti-Twitter.  This morning on NPR a proudly non-tweeting commentator exhorted us to keep our personal information to ourselves, to be more private, and to stop thinking that we’re cool.   And oh yeah, he threw in a cheesy gratuitous IT-geek insult at the end for punctuation.  Geez.  Uncool yet again.   Didn’t I pay my dues in middle school? in high school?  In college?  In graduate school?  Yikes!

Oh well.  Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether NPR’s Morning Edition Blogger John Ridley is the arbiter of coolness (he may well be; I would admittedly be among the last to know) I can tell you that I am an unabashed fan of  Twitter.   I can and do follow local events, thought leaders, interesting new friends, colleagues, and other non-profits.  In a very short amount of time it has found its way into a natural part of my work day, and I am delighted.  I was happy to see the responses to the Philanthropy.com blog post about non-profits and Twitter.  All the replies are positive and and reinforce my own experiences.  This is a great tool for community building and for conversing about relevant topics.

And if anyone wants to invite me and the rest of the IT team I work with to “two-for-one margaritas”  (read the aforementioned blog post)  I’ll be happy to go, but you’ll have to invite me the old fashioned way.  Email me.