1.1: Online Peer Support
Public servants should take part in online peer support forums. Other Information:
Public servants taking part in online peer support forums - ‘A small group of mums can reach an audience of hundreds of thousands.
They do not need a large organisation with an expensive IT support system or technological expertise. If 30,000 parents were
meeting in a park or football stadium to share information and tips about parenting, government would take notice. Citizens
are helping each other in online communities, and working towards the same goals as government on a range of issues, from
parenting to health and financial management.’ Hilary Armstrong MP, Government response to Power of Information Review Online
peer support forums are going from strength to strength. Millions more people are engaging in online peer support forums than
at the time of the original Power of Information Report in 2007. One major support network, The Student Room, now has 1.4m
unique visitors a month, run by a small business and its own user community with 60 volunteer moderators. Netmums, represented
on the Taskforce is growing by up to 20,000 new members a month. In the offline world we cannot think of any UK membership
organisations growing this fast. The Taskforce has encountered a remarkable range of mutual support forums of all sizes for
all audiences. These range from: Money Saving Expert (reporting 6.4 million visitors in December alone with 3 million people
receiving a weekly email) to the Army Rumour Service (reporting over 340 million page views since 2004 and over 42,000 registered
users) the targetted The Poultry Keeper (which has over 70,000 posts), to the specialist Noise Abatement Society forum helping
people with noise problems (over 3,000 posts), the Sheffield Forum (over 2 million posts about a City with a poulation of
0.5m) The Taskforce has assembled a list of sites for reference here This is simply a representative list compiled from our
experience. We believe that a comprehensive search for relevant sites by different government departments and agencies would
discover many more examples of potentially useful forums and so should be undertaken as a matter of urgency. In the USA Pew
Research reports that: ‘The internet…has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international
news….For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers ‘
There is now a compelling case for government to follow their citizen customers to give advice in the places citizens seek
it. Peer support forums have now entered the mainstream and should be treated as an important place in which to help citizens.
COI identified a lack of guidance for civil servants as an important barrier to participation in social media. The Taskforce
worked with Ministers and officials to produce guidance for civil servants to take part in social media published at this
link. This has been supplemented with a manual by the Cabinet Office Government Communications Group here. However, an interview
with an Online Community Manager, whose job it was to help officials take part in online policy discussions suggested that
there are many cultural barriers to be overcome at a personal level for civil servants. Steinberg and Mayo recommended that
‘To improve service delivery and communication with the public, the Central Office of Information (COI), in partnership with
the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), should coordinate the development of experimental partnerships between major
departments and user-generated sites in key policy areas, including parenting advice (Department for Education and Skills),
services for young people, and healthcare (Department of Health).’ In pursuit of this recommendation, COI did some useful
strategy work to advise public sector managers on how to take decisions about engaging in social media. This is published
for the first time here COI strategy report. COI did not find it easy to engage Departments in such experimental partnerships
but unearthed some examples in the report. Steinberg and Mayo also recommended that ‘To reduce unnecessary duplication of
pre-existing user-generated sites, COI should update the guidelines for minimum website standards by December 2007; departments
should be strongly advised to consult the operators and users of pre-existing user-generated sites before they build their
own versions.’ This analysis still stands - that in general government should not set up its own support forums, but rather
it should go to where the customers are seeking help and provide it there if customers would welcome it in the context of
that forum. There are a wide range of interventions that could be made. TheStudentRoom.co.uk observed that the nature of intervention
needed to be carefully thought through. In the student room case, people go to peer forums to seek advice initially from their
peers, rather than from govenrment. But government advisors from say NHS Direct could add real value if a person requiring
specific help was referred to them by a forum moderator. Another site owner felt that in the case of health advice, a specific
clinic might work best for their property, and another site owner that call centre advisor experts should simply take part
in the discussion online where people were asking for help on technical aspects of benefits. However, some sites clearly would
not welcome such intervention. There is therefore no simple one-size-fits-all model for what would constitute effective intervention
in online forums. Rather, it should be for each public service organisation to draw up their own strategy in consultation
with the administrators of fora which they have identified as significant for them. We do also recognise that the landscape
of online activity changes rapidly requiring such strategies to be regularly-updated living documents rather than being set
in stone at infrequent intervals. The Taskforce judges that the moment is right for a firmer push for public to engage in
peer support forums, with public measurement and reporting and so makes the following recommendation. Recommendation: Public
servants should take part in online peer support forums as a matter of course. Public bodies should investigate and publish
lists of the major forums in their areas of responsibility and engage with these following a published plan. A cross-governmental
list and set of Departmental plans should be published Cabinet Office by Q3 2009 with a follow up report on progress in Q1
2010. This builds on the enabling work advised by the Taskforce on the publication of social media guidance for civil servants.
Indicator(s):
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