• Should social media accounts be personal, professional or corporate?  Should they be a mixture of all three?  If they are a mix, can this distort the message?
• If people use personal accounts, is there a danger of contacts leaving with the staff or people misrepresenting the company?
• Who, in a public sector organisation, engages with twitter on an official basis?  The comms team?  The managers?  The frontline workers?
• For Twitter or facebook engagement to truly take place the conversation is important.  Can this conversation take place with a comms team, rather than a subject specialist?

Maybe that’s why, despite columnists, broadcasters and union leaders ranting on about it, the cut word hasn’t really crept into the public sector and voluntary sector blogospheres as much as I thought it might. Nobody wants to talk about it. Partly because they don’t want to enter into political territory. Partly because they are worried that, if they stick their head above the parapet, their neck is vulnerable to the public sector guillotine heading towards us in October.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a lot of events where some or most of the delegates were from the private sectors. I’ve found a lot of people completely unaware of October’s comprehensive spending review and the unimaginably massive impact this could have on the public and voluntary sector if the worse of the rumours are true. More to the point, a lot of people are staggered to find that public sector morale is at rock bottom. We always say that though don’t we, us whining, unionised, cushy-jobbed public servants? The fact is, this time it is true. I’ve not met anyone in the public or voluntary sector in the past two months who isn’t in in fear of their job, their service area and, frequently, the difficulties their service users might experience if it all comes crashing down.  However, despite this morale crash, people aren’t aware. They are not aware because no one will talk about it.

Then, yesterday, I saw a post from Katie Brown, a friend and co-innovation enthusiast at Leeds MIND, the mental health charity. Katie’s blog is the first I’ve seen that really spells out how low morale is – but it also makes another point, one that is actually very important.  These points together persuaded me that I really do need to write this post.

Her second point was about the vision she had presented for taking forward MIND’s Information for Mental Health. It involved savings. It involved rationalising. It involved, in part, the use of technology and social media to achieve this. But it didn’t involve cuts. No jobs were going to go.

There are very few people reading this who will be under the illusion that the public sector doesn’t need to save. We’re in tough times and, while some may have it considerably tougher than others, the sound bite that we are all in this together is true insomuch as we are all part of the same economy. It’s also true that, in some areas of the public sector there are more ways to save than others. One way of saving money is to rationalise, making use of free, or open source, technology, using social media as a form of communication and embracing mobile working not only as a environmental and productivity raising tool, but also as one that can save organisations huge amounts of money.

So, in a time of cuts, is the public sector embracing this? Well, let’s narrow this down. Is local government embracing this? No, in a word. Recently, I helped organise an event around public sector innovation. Every local authority Chief Executive was aware of this event. Yet, Chief Execs, Directors or even Heads of Service were only really notable by the absence. The promising things that are produced from time to time from organisations representing ICT in the public sector appear to come to nothing. Councils, as a generalisation, still require employees to come to the office every day, still block useful professional networking tools like Twitter, and still see social networking as a novelty that someone in the comms team does. That person in the comms team isn’t usually even a comms officer.

At a time when the private sector are talking about crowd sourcing, social marketing, corporate blogging and putting live chat rooms in their websites to allow people to get on-the-spot customer service, councils are creating a Facebook page but barring discussions in case anyone says something they don’t like. They are implementing text message systems to keep customers informed, but not allowing them to text back. It’s not that they don’t see the use in technology. It’s that they don’t see the vision.

Social media is all about communication and the transmission and organisation of information. It’s no coincidence that this is what much of life as a whole is about and, while it could be argued that money is at the root of all evil, I think it’s fairer to say that communication is often a factor in the issues of a community. People who are unable to communicate effectively, people who struggle to receive and process communications are often the people who councils are supporting.  But, it’s not the comms department doing the supporting.  Communication is at the heart of almost every council frontline service and essential internally to keep the organisation working.  But social media is seen as a way of marketing, and limited to a cupboard in the comms team office. Bosses see it as something to replace news releases, a way of people interacting without the need for people.  This, in turn, sparks a technophobic, and often union backed, backlash of people worried that the computer will replace them. Community development workers have been using the telephone for years, saving a lot of time and money, but people don’t want to press 1 to receive support. They want to speak to someone, the support coming along the way. Social media doesn’t need to cost jobs…and can still save money.

I’ll take you back now, to Katie’s post, her vision that didn’t include job cuts. There’s a bigger picture here, a future that’s much brighter than the confusion we have tonight. But that bright future depends on people listening, people responding and people changing. Right now, we’ve got some room to breathe in the eye of the storm. We’re spending the time battering down the hatches and clinging on to the safest tree.  Not only that, but we’re so busy clambering for higher ground that we’re not looking at new ways to stay afloat.  Let’s look beyond that and start that innovation right this instant.

I suggest a simple action plan.  Let’s think about how we communicate.  Internally.  Externally.  With people.  Not just in term of formal, public relations.  How do we support colleagues, how do we support customers, how do we support each other?  There are new, easier, more effective, cheaper ways of doing this.  Let’s change.  Let’s move forward.

This blog is a-political. But that’s not important because, let’s be honest, if the public sector can’t respond and change now, it will destroy itself. It won’t be a case of blaming the Government.

Today I was talking to several friends who have been, or are, involved in BSF (Building Schools for the Future) programme.  For anyone who’s missed the news the last few days, this was the former Labour Government’s plan to re-build every secondary school in the country, which has been put on hold and looks to be scrapped by the incoming Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.  This isn’t the first building programme cut either – we recently saw funding for a wellbeing centre in Leeds being axed and, during the Labour administration, we saw various college new build programmes cancelled.

This isn’t a political blog, so I don’t intend to comment on the politics of it all.  However, one thing is clear.  Whether your politics is that we need to save money and the cuts are justified or that this is a ideological attack on public education, you have to accept that we’re in a new place where throwing money at problems will not be tolerated and, for the foreseeable future, expensive building programmes are a thing of the past.

When BSF started is was kind of linked in with the whole extended school thing, a project for getting schools to be part of the community.  Indeed, the first rebuild I ever saw was designed to be not just a school, but a community hub.  So, with wellbeing centres, libraries and now schools facing the chop, where does this leave the community?

Well, in a move that will upset critics of the government and friends in the construction industry, I think it leaves it in a place where it can try something new.  Something that’s not been done before.  Something that doesn’t involve the buildings.

There are two stories I need to add in here.  One is one I often reference from a former colleague in community development who told me: “Why am I trying to build a community centre for a geographic community, when that community doesn’t exist any more?”  The second is more recent.  Social media marketing legend Chris Brogan told a recent conference I helped organise: “The difference between a community and an audience is which way the chairs are facing.”

These two adages are linked.  Firstly, because the idea of having community hubs, schools and community centres are very geographically based – they serve a community that is made up of where they happen to live rather than based on their needs, interests or what they have in common.  Secondly, because all of these geographically placed buildings assume a top down approach – a committee, a council or a management team running the building for an audience.  What if the chairs are turned, and the community take control?  What is the old school buildings don’t need to be replaced, because the classroom of the future isn’t a building?

I’ve long argued a concept I call “us, the classroom”.  I base this on the fact that learning takes place all the time amongst young people, chiefly through their collecting, editing, selecting, publishing and evaluating information through social networking.  I argue that, if young people are naturally using this method of learning, why do we ban that method from the classroom?  The real classroom, I’ve declared, is wherever and whenever the learner is.  It isn’t about giving the learner “ownership” because the learner, and the learner alone, owns that space already  So, let’s take this a step further.  Let’s look at this not in terms of the pedagogy but instead in the terms of the learning space.  Is the greatest space the personal space the learner occupies, rather than the building around them?  Open this wider.  Move away from traditional schools and look at extended schools.  Community Space.  Why are we consulting people on one, two or even three options?  Why are we insisting we need to build and construct space?  Some of the greatest spaces are online.  They are shaped, designed, maintained and developed by the users themselves.  Can we learn from this virtual idea and take it back into the real world?

I’m not a community designer, so I probably can’t answer that question.  But I was cheered recently to hear of a graduate whose landscape architecture project went along these lines.  It looked at concepts like gorilla gardening to get the community designing their own space.   Maybe, if we can take those ideas from the landscape designers, take the classroom theories from online learning and the community concept from Chris Brogan we can find some really innovative ways to move education forward – and really build ourselves some schools for the future.

It’s taken a long time for a lot of the smaller charities and community groups to cotton on to these ideas, and a few still haven’t. However, it’s at this point that social media comes into play.

Social Media is a branding exercise. Brand has stopped being something that is the domain of the multi national. It’s stopped being the tools of large organisations. It’s even stopped being a sidethought by grassroots campaigners. Brand is now truely in the domain of the individual.  Even the most open facebook user needs to recognise that they are not really sharing everything about themselves – they are sharing select information with the intention of influencing people and affecting how they are perceived.  Like the great multi-nationals, logos, reputation and crisis management are needed.  The logo is the facebook profile picture, the reputation is the groups you join, the photos you comment on or the wall posts you make and crisis management is what you do when someone posts a negative comment on your photos.

I’ve experienced personal brand myself.  At various meetings of the past six months, I’ve found people don’t know me or who I am, but do follow and know about “kevupnorth” (my twitter name).  So, kevupnorth is a user that is known beyond Kevin Campbell-Wright, someone who has his own reputation and on whom people have made their own judgements.  I can’t help but wonder, if I put particular effort into it, whether I could build up a totally inaccurate portrait of kevupnorth, or manipulate his reputation without effecting my own.

The problem is that brand management has been a skill used for decades (or possibly centuries) by incredibly clever operators who we now call “spin doctors”.  It has been honed by exchanges of practice and education.  Yet now, everyone needs to have these skills to make good use of their social networking presence.

To bring this back round to the point of this blog, how is this relevant for communities?  One of the questions in the discussion today was whether I felt every brand would one day be represented via social media.  While I said that they would, I also emphasised that brands would change.  In a world where we are all brands ourselves, it will stand to reason that every community group, every community activist and even every community problem and challenge will be a brand, which will require its own ideas around reputation management, key messages, logos and PR.   If we’re going to tackle digital literacy seriously and support communities in acheiving what they want to, we need to do more than just teach them how and why to use the net and tools for safe usage.  We have to allow them to develop their brand – and give them the skills to manage it.

There were lots of sessions on lots of topics and I can’t even begin to cover every thought and idea that passed my way.  The best thing to do it read the Twitter stream and see all the hundreds of comments.  There were lots of people to meet too, some people who I knew from Twitter and some new faces too.  I won’t list them all, partly because I can’t remember them all and partly because I want to get to the core of this blog post.

My running theme for this GovCamp was, unintentionally, the three Cs:  Community, Crisis and Communications.

Alastair Smith ran a really productive session around social media and the response to the recent snow.  The conversation strayed off into emergency planning as a whole and the role of local and national government alongside the role of media and volunteers.  There were some great stories of how local government had responded using social media, how local government had rallied volunteers and how the media had used council social sites like Twitter to gather information.  Despite a general feeling in the hierarchy of many local government bodies that social media is something for the kids, the snow showed huge hit counts of web media.  One posting even reported 21,000 hits.

However, these great stories were also diluted with the inevitable ones around social media failing during the snow.  There were calls for a greater consistency in the way councils used things like twitter – for example using a #schoolclosure hashtag nationally, so that media organisations could follow everything (which SkyNews did).

In terms of planning for future emergencies,  there was a definite consensus that web officers, ICT professionals, comms officers and emergency planning officers need to work together more to plan for these eventualities.  Somehow a 24/7 approach needs to be agreed.  Other questions raised were:

• What is an emergency – what defines a time when it’s ok to get the boss out of bed to get a tweet?
• How do press staff respond – are press releases the way forward, or is a twitterfeed more useful?
• How does the organisation respond – some schools give their closures to the BBC, not the council PR team
• How does the comms team work with the emergency services, roadwatch and other external agencies around this?
• How is web content updated?  Can key staff access the CMS from home to make web updates?  How do they plan for Twitter or Facebook crashing under increased demand of a major emergency?
• Most importantly, how do they respond to customers?  Obviously emergency queries could be answered online, but is it over the top to assume a 24/7 conversation can take place?  What if someone replies to a school closure with “well that school would close, it’s rubbish”.  How do comms staff avoid engaging in debate?  Should they avoid engaging in debate?

Following on from this nicely, I went to Eve Shuttleworth’s session around how journalism is changing and, more to the point, how comms should relate to the media via social media.  There was strong feeling that video and youtube type content submitted with press releases needed to be in keeping with the spirit of the medium.  There was little point making corporate videos for YouTube.  A lot of doubt was raised that content like this would be used at all, especially as many media bodies won’t use content developed by a council because it’s weighted.  Jim Hawkin’s, from BBC Radio Shropshire, joined in the debate via twitter, suggesting that media releases should remain as text and that actually linking to other content was largely irrelevant – it was a quick, accurate and simple product that journalists wanted.  Despite this, one local newspaper had already agreed that they would take YouTube content for their website.

The final session, run by Robin Grant, looked at how we use the data we can get for consultation.  There were lots of methods suggested and ways of analysing the results were also debated.  My favourite, though, was the feeling that consultation could be crowd sourced, ie that, as part of a formal conversation, we should be tapping into where peopel are talking about the issue already.

I’ll finish this post on a note that really summarised the day.  The first session I attended was a “Local Authority Group Hug”, just a session to catch up where local government was in terms of technology.  There was a real mix form the very innovative to those with complete lockdowns.  The session was facilitated by someone I won’t name, who had come unofficially.  Social media wasn’t recognised in their organisation.  Innovation wasn’t  encouraged.  But that didn’t matter, because staff came from all over the country to see how they could make the change in their organisation.  How they could innovate past the barriers.  It’s that passion for the future that really makes UK Gov Camp.  I’ll certainly be booking my ticket for next year.

I thought I’d be in for a  strange kind of day, possibly filled with seasoned barcamp geeks.  I was pleasantly surprised when about half the room had never been to a barcamp before and even more delighted to find myself being able to advise and contribute, as well facilitating a discussion around community development and technology.

So, it’s that subject that I want to the blog to focus on.

We started by asking whether geographic community still mattered, in a time when so many people in one geographic area belonged not to one but many different communities.  It soon emerged that geographic communities really did matter – especially to young people, many of whom define themselves on the school, college and postcode.  In fact, in Bradford, it emerged that groups of like minded music artists are forming groups and networks based on their postcode.  This, several people felt, was down to the fact that services are delivered to key postcode areas.  If you’re in a deprived postcode, you have neighbourhood services in common with other people there.  So, by defining neighbourhoods, are we actually defining people into communities ourselves?

However, what was also apparent was that people didn’t often define themselves based on the standard neighbourhood definition.  Wards and parishes seemed unimportant, and it was also clear that community facilities now moved to where people wanted them;  pubs, clubs, swimming pools and educational institutions.  However, it was acknowledged that there were also online communities forming, separate from geographic areas.

The SAVE THE ODEON campaign at Bradford was mentioned- a self organised group, almost entirely working through the internet.  A group of community activists that had gone, from almost no message to a loud message in a very short space of time, thanks, almost entirely, to a facebook group.

Another issue raised was the lack of connectivity in communities.  Both in rural areas and inner city areas, connectivity (and the apparent randomness of it that could mean one street could having speeds varying by several MBS from house to house) was a real issue.  Connectivity does exist in community venues, but many times this was either in community centres or libraries.  Both of these present differing barriers to communities trying to get online and the the lockdown and lack of public wi-fi in many of these institutions can also impede people getting online.  There were no online community development workers that anyone had heard of and very little monitoring by community organisations and local government of the social meida spectrum.

I mentioned social media surgeries at this point.  Nick Booth, of podnosh fame, started the concept in Birmingham, giving advice to local voluntary sector organisations around social media.  Recently, John Popham started  a similar trned in Yorkshire and I’ve been down to the Leeds and, later today, the Huddersfield social media surgeries.  I’m organising one for Bradford as well, so I’d better plug that here too.  These surgeries are clearly plugging an important gap, but they are not hitting the individual who doesn’t see why their organisation, or indeed they, should be online.  So how can we achieve more online takeup?

Mike Chitty raised an interesting point with me recently about why we try tos how communities the “benefits” of ICT, rather than simply helping them to achieve whatever they want to do.  This issue was raised at the discussion to, with a really useful suggestion: Why not just get ICT in communities, in pubs, in shops etc.  Then, if peopel can benefit from it, they’ll simply find it.

I agree with this, but don’t think its enough – I think we need to see local government, public sector practitioners and third sector organisations / other community groups engaging sensibly with those already using social media.  That way, people will soon see the benefits, like the Save the Odeon campaign already has.

I’d be interested to know anyone else’s comments on this…

I’ve only had a short play with it so far, so it might be remiss of me to say this, but it seems like a lot of hype for a worthwhile business tool that integrates everything we were doing already into a nice, neat business application.  Maybe I’ll see greater value in the future, but this is how it looks at the moment.  That’s not a bad thing, by the way.  After all, it should eventually make collaboration easier.

While playing with Wave, the following Tweet came in: “LinkedIn is the new Facebook; FB is the new MySpace; MySpace is the new GeoCities; @ GeoCities is dead”.

It got me thinking.   LinkedIn, the business social networking platform,  is indeed the new tool of business. But the communities around our country are not moving that way. They like facebook for the social features, the informal networking and, on occasion, the way it blurs the two.  Additionally, these same communities are using facebook and twitter to communicate and, occasionally, organise.  But, if they do organise, they are still taking their notes using pen and paper and have little use for Google Apps, let alone Google Wave.  When they talk, they don’t use visual aids, so SlideShare does little for them.  They don’t produce podcasts for other people, so I doubt thei’ll be using AudioBoo anytime soon.

“Ah, but you’ve missed the point”, one of you shouts, “Google Wave is a business tool”. Right you are. So are so many of these new social media applications.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting that social media tools for business are a bad thing. The opposite in fact. But I come from the informal education sector, a sector which, I have often argued, is tearing at the seams as it is driven towards a learning for work agenda.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Getting people skilled and into work is and will remain a major community development agenda. It should be on the radar of any informal learning tutor or community worker.   But, at the same time, there is far more to informal adult learning.  Indeed, if communities are empowered to make their own choices, to strengthen themselves, to skill themselves, many of them will find work anyhow, without needing a separate agenda.

The point was made during a debate on my facebook pages, around the subject of whether Bookcrossing would be a good tool for communities (I’ve reproduced that debate at the bottom of this post).  Bookcrossing is an activity in which books that have been read are left in public locations and logged on the net.  People can then pick up these books, log into the net and log that they have them, read them and then pass them on in the same way.

There’s no regulation to this.  Sometimes, people don’t pass them on.  Sometimes, people don’t log them on the net.  But that doesn’t matter.  On the whole it works well.  A community that chose to engage with this (there’s a fair bit in the debate about whether they choose to engage or not) could benefit as individuals if they got more access to a wider range of books as a result.  In learning how to bookcross, they could build up their digital and general literacy skills, learn a bit about geography and participate as a community.  There would be no need for them to use these skills for work.  They would have learned these skills for them, for a community purpose.

However, back to the world of learning and such is the back to work drive that the fun, social and developmental courses of informal learning have been, arguably, stifled.

I’m wondering if the same is true of social technology. So busy is the agenda over how money can be made, how workplace efficiencies can be developed that we’ve lost sight of the fact that social networks offer far more than a bit of help to business. They can network communities.

Here again is a sticking point.  I’m all for communities organising and I’m in little doubt that social networking is a catalyst for this.  However, a community can simply network and be empowered, they don’t need to be engaged with services to function.

As a result, if I can get some contributions as comments or emails, I’m going to a follow up blog post on ten social media tools normal people can use in their normal lives. I suspect GoogleApps and Slideshare won’t be on the list.

FACEBOOK debate:

Kevin Campbell-Wright Very sad: 1 in 20 homes has fewer than 10 books, & those with boys have fewer than those with girls” http://ping.fm/raRso

AR: I’m surprised it’s that good, actually – I would have thought 19/20 having >10 is quite positive?

I’ll let you do the reading, but, in a nutshell, it’s the report of a study that suggests young people could be damaged, emotionally, by using Twitter.  The reason being that we can process negative stories much faster than positive ones, leaving us with an overall negative impression.

The National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition looked at how volunteers responded to real-life stories chosen “to stimulate admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain.”  Volunteers we’re brain scanned and the findings suggest the volunteers could process and respond very quickly to signs of physical pain in people, but took somewhat longer to show admiration of compassion. The argument goes that the streams of news are just a bit too fast for us to process.

Another argument the report makes is that this slow processing of admiration could lead to a lack of inspiration – I’d very much argue this, as there is much inspiration to be had from “top bloggers” and “celebrity tweeters”.  However, whether people are able to identify with a tweeter who talks about the positives in their life, rather than one who cries for sympathy , remains to be seen.

As an educationalist, I cite the wikipedia argument – That Twitter as THE source could be destructive, but as A source is constructive.

However, as a community developer I think this report also has a major impact for community technology, aside from the obvious implications of having a world with a broken moral compass.  Will community relations crumble if fast moving news fails to highlight the positives?

On Easter day a lot of questions were being asked on facebook about an apparent fatal stabbing in the area I used to live in.  It turned out that no one had been stabbed, no one had died and the police had only cordoned off an area of the town after a serious assault.  The rumour mill, fuelled by a lack of news on Easter Day, had gone into overdrive and this had spread into facebook groups and statuses.  Currently, facebook groups and statuses don’t seem to have the viral impact Tweets have – but as facebook changes itself Twitterward it remains to be seen if this stays the same.

Either way, the internet became a rife ground for rumours and by the end of Easter Sunday questions were being asked on a local radio facebook group and various statuses were buzzing with comments about the dangers of living in the area.  This could be looked at as a media issue, as they were slow with an online response.  However, I see it more as a community one.  After all, any damage that was done to community safety or cohesion by the false rumours would be felt in the community.

Many will argue that when the real news came through, it would just quell those rumours.  However, this report suggests otherwise.  It also suggests that a community organisation having a tokenistic twitter feed or reassurance officers posting positive tweets won’t counter the negativity and stigma that rumours and negative tweets could cause.  However, from a PR point of view, someone to react quickly to counter the viral spread via twitter might go some way to controlling the message.  Highlighting the positives may take longer, but in the fast news culture,  shouldn’t that mean we get started now?

They’ll be many who will use these comments, and the report, to point to a Web2.0 Fuelled break in society, one that needs real people, in the real world, to fix.  The fact is that speed has become the essence and, while we may all benefit from slowing down a touch, there is little chance of that happening very soon.  There can be no doubt that there is an element of truth in their arguments for a real world fix – but there is also truth in that I found out about this report through seeing it on @jangle’s twitter feed.  How did you find this?

On Sunday night, Twitter tag #uksnow started the snow-ball rolling.  Soon people were posting ratings and postcodes alongside the tag, the result being this wonderful animation on where the snow feel and how strong.

As I write this on Friday, UKSNOW has dominated the tags on Twitter, facebook, flickr, delicious and just about everything else.  We’ve used Web 2.0 to report the snow like never before.

However, while there has been so much media buzz about the reporting of the snow and the chaos it has caused, no one seems to have put the two together.

Last year, Dave Fleet blogged around using twitter as a “Hyper Local Emergency Tool” and since then I’ve blogged aroundother hyper-local ideas for web 2.0.

In a time when we clearly need to look at prioritising resources and sharing information and where community engagement and empowerment are so important, Local Authorities could be looking at contingency plans which involve volunteer groups, community activists and council officers, all linked together through web 2.0  Additionally, web 2.0 plans could support the many peopel who couldn’t get into work.  Certainly, I used Twitter, Facebook, ftp, email and Skype alongside the more traditional mobile phone to ensure that I was really as much in the office as ever.

It is clear that when the flakes come down, we all head for our computers and connected devices.  Maybe we could harness this action into something that would mean that next time we have #uksnow or indeed any #ukemergency we are ready and working together, not just to report it, but to overcome it too.  Who says Web2.0 is about handing over control?

Any thoughts on whther local authorities are already doing this or, if not, how we can get the ball rolling, let me know.  Maybe this would be a good one for a Wiki?

Sadly, neither of the stories looked at facebook and innovation from the point of view of adults.  It’s generally accepted that young people should be contacted through social networking (65% of councils agree, according to the MJ article) but I wonder how that would change if it was looked at from an older persons perspective?

Steve Dale looked at this during an IDeA presentation recently (I wasn’t there, I just read the blogs and slides), citing Ofcom statistics that even in the ‘over 65′ catagory, 3% of people have a social network profile.  In America, facebook recently released statistics showing that, while 52% of facebook users are in the 18-25 catagory, only 15% are under 18.

My own facebook network backs this up.  Using the wonderful socialistics application, I can see that, while unrepresentative of society as a whole, of my 261 friends, only 9% are 18 or under and 18% are over 40.  As websites like Forces Reunited become more social, maybe we can expect these figures to rise.  Certainly, as the 50+ year olds become the 60+ year olds, the next decade will see social network statistics soar amoung older people.

That’s why I was drpessed to see that only 33% of councils have actually tried contacting young people using social networks.  Indeed, my local authority colleagues report that facebook is dismissed at best and blocked at worse.  If  we’re missing out on this obvious community, we’re certainly missing the failed to reach groups.