Digital Social Work: 10 characteristics

Since the beginning of industrialization, social work has never faced a challenge as great as the challenge of globalization. Global social work faces a highly complex set of problems, which require new ways of governance, the ability to develop hybrid models or collaborations with other organizations, and greater reflection on the process.
Here, we are going to formulate the Decalogue of digital social work:
1) Complexity. Digital Social Work is informational: it is about knowledge. Its raw material is information and its main tool is discernment. The inner space of everyone and the inner room of the institutions are the environment for informational analysis and creation. Digital Social Work creates a new alternative telling for hidden and excluded realities.
2) Personalization. Digitalism appears sometimes as a cold, abstract and anonymous process. But digitalization enables an intense personalization. It works for empowerment, responsibility, singularization, and complex identities without borders. Digital Social Work is community empowerment and social responsibility.
3) Mobility. Digitalization gives you a couple of wings but you also need roots. Roots & Wings is a good slogan for digital mobility. Effectively, the digital competences demand dynamism, entrepreneurship, pro-active attitudes and a building approach. Digital Social Work looks for integral mobility for development.
4) Conversation. Digitalization is a huge global and trans-lingual conversation. Storytelling is crucial as we need to express, translate, and communicate. Social Art is also one of the most powerful forms of Digital Social Work.
5) Networking. Digital Social Work is a multi-scaling work: at the same time individual, P2P, group, community and massive cooperation. It works with local groups and global communities. Essentially, digitalization is about universalism: it is deeply modern. DSW has an ecosystem vision of the very diverse actors you need (with different competences and status). It overcomes the differences between public and private; integrates entertainment and the most serious advocacy. It is transversal and fluid: Digital Society is the Fourth Sector (1^st sector is Public Administration, 2^nd Sector is Commerce and 3^rd Sector has to do with NGOs).
6) Alternatives. Digital Social Work is always looking for a shorter and alternative way to fulfill its goal and mission. It promotes the imagination, essays, experiments, creativity, and innovation. And Digital Social Work is not possible without hope.
7) Co-culturalism. Digital Social Work demands great diversity, pluralism, coexistence, inclusive approaches and free expression of ideas, beliefs and ways of life. But it is not relativism: digital social work is not possible without strong values of respect to human dignity and peaceful democracy. Digital Social Work is not so much about multiculturalism or inter-culturalism as co-culturalism: you mix and co-create new cultural commons, bridges between different religions, ideologies, traditions, identities, etc.
8) Business model approach. Digital Social Work is not worried about forms or rules: it works for its mission. Business Model is a method initiated in the last decade of the 20th Century to enhance the adaptation of corporations to our changing world. Business Model looks for a balanced system or value production for the mission. Everything is ordered for the mission or it disappears. Digital Social Work is mission oriented and it creates its own rules.
9) Replicability. Digital Social Work only works with open codes, access and transparency. It is looking for realized experiences and best practices. Digital Social Work does not look for power but radical experienced models. It has a problem-solving approach based on evidence. Global replicability is the key of Digital Social Work.
10) Wiki-governance. Digital Social Work needs a complex architecture of deliberation. That kind of deliberation looks for engagement, participation, individual acceptance, democratic legitimacy and a constant work to achieve consent in every decision. If you have not created that individual consent, people abandon your project. The Wikinomic paradigm of digital production is the framework for the politics of digitalization: participatory governance, changing teams, variable geometries for decision-making, self-management, etc. Wikigovernance is not abstract or virtual: it demands presence and the retaking of public spaces.
 
This post is an excerpt from an article written by Fernando Vidal entitled “Are International Volunteers Digital Swallows? The impact of Digital Social work on International Volunteerism”.  
Photo: Flickr via Creative Commons (CC-BY- 2.0)