The solution to this, which works on facebook but not MySpace, is to create groups. In a group you can communicate with users without them seeing your profile and all communication is documented.

It may well be that it still takes some persuading and explaining as to why you can’t add people as “normal” friends, but is agood inbetween. The other idea is to use the facebook privacy` settings to severly restirct young people but, as hidden communication can still take palce, that may not be acceptable.

Very good and clear.

At my work we have a policy about our interactions with young poeple online and managing our (personal) facebook pages in a professional manner. We are struggling with how to say you don’t want to be ‘friends’ a young person you are working with…

I agree absoutely with what you’ve said. Check out my questions around the risk of not on my blog today…in relation to the BBC article which suggests it could be harmful NOT to enage young people with socvial netoworking.

With adults not understanding the benefits of social network sites and assuming they are only negative, they effectively just build walls between adults and young people…. and as you say stop being the approachable guardians they need to be.

….And how can adults offer any guidance and support when they don’t know how these sites work? Lets face it, most of them seem rather banal on their face value ….

1. A clear policy, clear guidance and relevant training to help staff use all parts of the web effectively in their work

or

2. No guidance on using those parts of the web that young people use and staff who (maybe inadvertently) make contact with young people online out of their professional capacity – potentially exposing themselves and their organisation to unnecessarily difficult/awkward situations.

For the young people it makes no difference at all – if you’re Bob the Youth Worker you’re still Bob the Youth Worker with or without policies & guidance. At least with a clear professional online identity it makes it easier to differentiate appropriate online contact & relations.

What I don’t understand is the frankly dumb attitude there seems to be that we’ll wait for problems to occur before working out how to deal with them. How about trying to be proactive and then being able to take advantage of opportunities rather than firefighting & becoming overly concerned with perceived risk? Actually that pretty well sums up what I largely feel about Youth Services – they have a preference for waiting for problems to happen so that they can do yet more ‘issue based’ work