Designing for offline and online social work: Technology-mediated collaborative practices in and between municipalities

Abstract

This paper explores possibilities and challenges of introducing the collaborative web-based, wiki-inspired tool Pycipedia in Swedish municipalities. Pycipedia is designed to support social workers that work with assisting parents with cognitive impairments. Pycipedia is co-designed with social workers and digitalize some of their workflows, enabling new ways of working and allow professional collaboration across municipalities. Pycipedia has now been used ‘live’ for two and a half years with users in six municipalities. This paper present and discuss observations and reflections coming from running such a long-term ‘live’ evaluation of a tool that digitalize parts of an existing practice. Our findings deal with the effects of moving social care practices online, the inherent fragility of commitment over time, and the social worker as knowledge creators and sharers. An important perspective is the long-term implementation of our tool in the social workers’ everyday practice.