Time to evaluate :)

Writing this blog has been part of my studies of Master´s Degree in Social Sciences. The idea of the course ”Social Media as a tool in Work Communities” has been to give me and other students understanding how different social media tools and environments can be used safely in every day life.

To be honest I could have done more during this course. I consider myself to be quite familiar with social media and I did have basic knowledge of rules and regulations concerning social media tools. The foundation I work for have given us very good training on GDPR and our communication unit works closely with us giving us support how to use social media and other media channels effectively and safely. Anyway I think that the main thing is to understand that social media tools and environments change all the time so you need to keep your eyes and mind open all the time. Only keeping yourself up to date can secure safe use of social media. And to be even more safe, think twice before posting anything online.

Anyhow writing this blog has been actually quite fun 🙂 I have even started to think that I could write a blog in real life. Writing this course blog has been very beneficial for my work as well, for example writing the implementation plan helped me to think the next steps of the influencing work we need to do in the project I work for. I already used the ideas I got from writing the implementation plan blog in our project meeting where we discussed the future of influencing work done in our project. Because I had thought through for example the importance of using Twitter, I was able to convince the others as well.

I wanted to write this blog in a free way and use easy to understand language as well. I didn´t want to be too serious either but I think I have mainly covered the subjects that were supposed to be covered and I have thought them from various point of views. Writing the blog made me think the ethical questions as well, from example how to get the voice of women experiencing homelessness heard without seeing them as victims or hopeless.

During this course I have also realised that social media tools and environments can be used efficiently at work and they can make your work more fun as well, when used correctly. It is important that all the workers have the understanding of basic rules and regulations of the use of social media. This is why companies do need to put effort on training their workers to use social media safely and effectively. The social media is here to stay so better to make most of it at work as well, right!

Last but not least, the evaluation of two other blogs written by my fellow students in this course ”Social Media as a Tool in Work Communities”. First one to look at is Minan blogi – Kesä 2019, https://minanblogi.jimdofree.com/. It can be easily noticed that the blog writer has a good knowledge of writing a blog. The blog is beautiful and different course assignments are easy to find. She has answered very precisely to all questions in learning assignments. Her blog makes me think that I still have lot to learn. The only thing I´m missing in her blog is the fun of writing a blog.

The other student fellow, Jennie, has different kind of blog https://jenniekoo.blogspot.com/ compared to Mina´s one but for me it appears to be more like a blog than Mina´s own. Jennie has use photos to make the blog more alive. She hasn´t written so much and the writings are not as easy to find as in Mina´s blog though. She does say that she is not so fluent in English and this shows in her writing but she has done her best indeed and answered all the learning assignments anyway. I can say that putting these two blogs, Mina´s and Jennie´s, together would create a very good and informative blog, something I hope to be able to do one day!

So this course comes to an end now. I say thank you and bye bye for now. You might find me one day again as a blog writer. Before that I do need to learn few more things how to write a good and interesting blog. And of course find the subject I can write about!

Take care everybody 🙂 and smile even there are clouds in front of the sun.

Let´s end women´s homelessness together!

Back to business after summer holidays. By this I mean that I have gone back to work and it´s also time to get back to studies. Somewhere in back of my head I had the thought that this assignment, to write an implementation plan, is due 5th of August…

Let´s give it a try! I have been working in a project which main goal is to end women´s homelessness, now almost 1,5 year and I have learnt so much, from my colleagues and especially from the women who have experienced homelessness themselves. I respect their knowledge and endless will to make people more aware of what is happening in this country by telling their own true life stories over and over again.

Finland is the only EU country where homelessness has reduced year by year. Many thanks to a national program of reducing and preventing homelessness since year 2008. We can´t forget the wide implementing of Housing First principle either as it has helped homeless people to access normal housing with support, in other words given them human rights and brought them back to society. Although the long-term homelessness has reduced over the past years and general public is more aware of the phenomena, homeless women stay hidden. Just think what comes to your mind first when you think how a homeless person can look like? Is it more likely to be a approximately 50 year old man looking bit scruff or a young woman in her early 30s?

Ok, maybe you are starting to get an idea what my implementation plan will include or at least what I´m passionate about and want to make a change using the help of social media. I can make it still bit more clear. The aim of my implementation plan is to increase the knowledge regarding women´s homelessness by using different social media tools. So simple! I want everyone, including the politicians, to understand the multidisciplinary of homelessness and especially I want that the women who have experienced homelessness are heard. ”Everything is possible, it might just take more time!”, says my colleague.

In the project I work for we have started this influencing job already with small steps. We have a communication and influencing plan in the project and using social media plays a big role in it. We have our own Facebook page and some of us use Twitter and we are planning to make a video that can be put in Youtube. With the work we have done so far, we have reached many people who are already working in homelessness sector.

This is good, I´m not complaining but we do need to find ways to get the voice of women experiencing homelessness to be heard. These brave women should tell their stories so people would understand that we are all human beings, no matter of our life experiences. My concern is that these women are seeing as powerless victims instead of heroes of their own lives and avoiding this to happen, women stop talking and they will remain hidden. We in the project want these women to tell their stories so that they will be empowered by that. To make this possible we need to ensure that women´s privacy is not being violated in any way and that they have all the needed information regarding the commitment they are doing when telling their story in our Facebook page. We also need to remember that our Facebook page is open to everyone and there are still people who think that talking only about issues concerning women´s homelessness discriminates men.

What about the politicians, the decision makers, how do we open their eyes and ears? We have been told that politicians use Twitter. So we use Twitter too, although only half of us working in the project uses it, the rest find it too difficult. I think they just need encouragement and bit more time to start using it. The fact is that Twitter can be a good social media tool to influence especially on politicians. In Twitter you need to carefully think what to write because of limited space. So it´s straight to the point! And that is what the politicians and decision makers have time for. When they find your tweets accurate and easy to understand they will start to follow you and pay more attention to the message you want to bring out. I would say Twitter is quite safe to use for anyone as long as you remember the basic rules of what is allowed and what is not allowed to post.

If we decide to make a video and upload it to Youtube we need to consider many things. We need to make sure that the video changes the attitudes of people about women´s homelessness and that at the same time the video, and making the video, empowers the women who takes part of it. We need to be 100% sure that women understand that after uploading the video to Youtube their faces can be seen by everyone and the video will stay in internet forever. Obviously we in the project don´t have any knowledge of making videos so we need to work closely with the company who does the work for us to make sure that the privacy of women taking part of the video will be respected and secured.

What needs to be done that the understanding of women´s homelessness will be increased widely? How this work will continue after the project I work for finishes? During the project we working for the project have to continue to do influencing through different social media channels on regular basis and keep our implementation plan of communication and influencing up to date. The workers who work with women experiencing homelessness need to get more women involved so their voices can be heard. And all the project workers have to start using Twitter, slowly but surely. Only that way we can reach those decision makers from many different fields of social and health care. And I hope that by the end of 2020, when the project ends, women´s homelessness is so widely recognised that there is no need for special influencing channels anymore.

Remember, that you can also be part of ending women´s homelessness!

Can we have privacy and confidentially?

I hope I am not letting you know too much about myself in this blog today. Or maybe you have googled me and you know everything about me already 😊. I did google myself and didn´t find much, but enough to know where I work and what I do in my job. Is that bad, I hope not as I like to think that my job is important and if someone is really interested in knowing what I do, I am more than happy to share that information. The information found in Google about me gives only one side of me but I think that´s enough. I like to keep some things private even though I don´t have anything to hide 😉 But when the project is over I do want that information gone from the internet.

       The information found in Google about me is provided by the organisation I work for. Have I given them permission to share my information? No, but do I have any other option? If I refused to give my contact details to public, how would anyone interested in the project I work for, contact me? Or what kind of idea it would give to people about the whole project if I was anonymous and nowhere to find when the project´s main idea is to connect and co-create something new together. But like I said before I want that my organisation removes all the data about me when the project is finished. And that is my right.

       The organisation I work for want to have good image to the public, so they have thought it very carefully through what to publish, where to publish and when to publish. All the publications regarding the project I work for has gone through our organisation´s communication team so I feel I´m in good hands. There is no photo or videos or music used in our website or Facebook page that violates copyrights. And we have gone through GDPR, actually we had a week last spring that we had to watch videos regarding GDPR and then answer questions about it. I got everything right then, but I think I should watch the videos again. But I know that what ever regarding publications in internet in our website or social media, I can trust that I have people around me who I can trust in these cases. And it´s their job to make sure that everything is done based on existing laws and regulations. This is why I know that they also want to keep the information on organisation´s website accurate and remove my data from there.

       In my previous job we had discussions should we or should we not tell clients our last names or where we live. I guess it´s quite common talk in social work. Some workers say they don´t want clients to find out where they live. But at the same time their social media accounts are wide open to everyone, showing photos of their children and pets and were they drunk last weekend or their location of a holiday destination saying that they will spend there another two weeks. I think employers should talk more with employees of how to use internet safely and how to use social media and internet generally as a work tool. I believe that would benefit eventually everyone and give employers positive image in internet as well. But not forgetting people´s rights for privacy and control.

       I will finish this blog text today by saying that I decided to use my right to control what I put in internet. I didn´t want to accept cookies or leave fingerprints so I decided not to write any comments to any chat forums regarding privacy issues. I checked some websites, but they needed registration and I decided not to do it because it doesn´t give me any benefit. Actually, I think that I already did too much and soon I will be receiving advertisements regarding privacy issues, digital identity, GPDR or Article 13. I guess next time I will use VPN also in my private laptop as we need to use at work. Or other possibility is that I will learn more about privacy and confidentiality every time I open my phone apps or browser as I´m sharing the internet from it to my laptop while doing this assignment.

On my way to LA

Right now, I´m sitting on a plane on my way to Los Angeles and struggling a bit because I´m not connected to internet for the next ten hours. So, no chance to check the news feed on Facebook or see if anyone has liked my latest photo in Instagram. But now I have time to write this blog and watch my daughter working as a cabin crew member on this same flight that I´m on. And I know that when we land in Los Angeles I can get connected again and post a status in Facebook and letting my friends know that I have safely arrived and will most likely have fabulous few days in LA with my daughter (and her friends 😉).  

Ten years ago, I was still very new in Facebook and used it very rarely, I was a bit scared I think. So, I did have a profile but I didn´t post, liked or commented anything. Slowly but surely, I started to post things of my every day life, photos mainly with short comment, first flowers in my garden or a photo of muffins my daughter had made for Mother´s Day. Now a days I see those old photos whenever Facebook reminds me of them and all I can think of is how bad photographer I am. Anyway, those photos were liked by my friends in Facebook and I remember getting bit excited about it and wanted to be more active there and have more friends as well. Now I have over 300 hundred friends in Facebook! I have decided that I accept only people I know at least in some level, to be my friends. So, my friend list includes friends from schools and work places I have been to, trips that I have done and of course lovely relatives of mine.

After few years of posting mostly every day something in Facebook I got tired and deleted my profile, completely I thought. I was thinking there was no need of being constantly connected or let other people know what I was doing or thinking. But six months later I was back on and to my surprise so was all the content I had had in Facebook before deleting it, all the photos, comments, friends. Then I realised that all that info I have put in internet will never go away and it can be found very easily if wanted.

Since then I have posted rarely anything personal but instead I use Facebook more to share information and learn new things, mainly work related though. I work in a project that aims to end women´s homelessness in Finland. The project has it´s own Facebook page and I´m one of the main users. This project page has made me try totally new ways of using Facebook as I want to let the people know of the important work that we do in our project. With our project page we can share information to the professionals working in the same field and even more important is that we can get in touch with the women who are or who have been experiencing homelessness and need help to find solutions for their troubled situations.

In our project we have decided to use Twitter as well. We have been told that all the decision makers use Twitter now a days so it´s a must to have if you want to be heard on a higher level also. Actually, our organization´s communication officer told me that everyone in our work has Twitter. So, one morning while sitting in a train on my way to work I made a Twitter profile. I have had that profile for a year now and so far, I have managed to tweet once. But I have liked and retweeted other people´s tweets a lot and I`m constantly looking for more people to follow in Twitter. And I know that one day I will be as good writing tweets as my colleague. And maybe then our president will follow me in Twitter as well as he has started to follow my colleague.

I admire how my, this same, colleague can use the words in her tweets and updates in Facebook. I feel she writes with her heart giving respect to the women experiencing homelessness. She has promised to give us others working in the project a quick course in how to use Twitter effectively one day. Then in every nine organisations that are working in our project will tweet to make a difference and make the decisions makers see that there is a very marginalised group, homeless women, who need special attention to be able to have better quality of life and place in our society they deserve. Together we will make the phenomena of women´s homelessness known and understood. We will also start to use our project´s Facebook page more effectively. We will post links and videos and our project workers will share those in their organisation´s Facebook page and then they will share those posts further. And so, our message will go far and people who have not even thought of homelessness, regardless women´s homelessness, will become familiar with the subject. And slowly but surely people will change their attitudes towards homeless people.  And that is exactly what we want.

We are flying above North Canada now and I was offered a free Internet connection on this flight. I have sent messages and photos of Greenland to my husband and let my mum know in our family group chat in WhatsApp that everything is just fine.

Let´s keep in touch!