1. Access to Web 2.0 sites is blocked or filtered;
Please add more details about this hurdle to effective social media adoption and use here
If staff cannot access Web 2.0 and social media sites they cannot engage with citizens who are using these spaces.
Partner organisations, public bodies and service providers who an organisation may wish to engage with are increasingly using third-party social media platforms to deliver aspects of their online content (for example, delivering key content in Slideshows hosted through SlideShare, or national government communicating policy messages through YouTube). If access to these social media sites is blocked staff will miss out on key content that they need in doing their jobs.
Often the way blocking takes place staff may not even be aware that certain content has been blocked - so not only is there information they don't know. There is a lot that they don't know that they don't know.
Email is often only accessible from within the network, and not for example at a remote location or at home. Often email inbox limits are set laughably low - 50Mb is not uncommon.
Why is this a problem? Please provide details and links to resources which help make the case for the importance of overcoming this hurdle
Example: (Stu: We Share Stuff) Working on a project with young offenders using facebook, myspace, youtube as engagement tools. Out of the blue, all access to these sites has been blocked without any prior warning or discussion. A number of young people have commented that they will go to the library to access these sites instead of coming to the project.
Employees can be powerful advocates for what we do, and are likely to speak highly of us within their social networks (both on and offline). However, the potential for our employees to advocate for us online is currently limited due to the restrictions placed on access to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
By limiting the extent to which highly informed and engaged employees can advocate on their behalf, public sector organisations are failing to get the full value from their internal communications.
Restrictions on email in effect clog up both internal and external communications, leading to great inefficiencies and many misunderstandings.
How can we overcome this hurdle? Ideas, links, resources & shared learning about your experiences of this particular hurdle are encouraged and welcome.
Virtually all workplaces will have some procedure for asking for sites to be unblocked. Make sure you know the procedure in your workplace & use it.
Sometimes you will need to request that not only the main address of the site you are accessing, but a range of other web addresses which are used to provide resources to the site in question, are unblocked also. See this blog post for a discussion of getting Facebook unblocked.
BECTA accredit Internet Service Providers for schools, in part because of their filtering arrangements. Could there be a quality mark for filtering which, instead of focussing solely on the success of filters at blocking content, or avoiding false positives, also addresses it's ease of use for:
etc.
Overcoming this barrier may take a while. Are there any ways staff can work-around this barrier effectively until more permanant solutions are in place?
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