I am Nici, a new SAGovt employee, who is in her late 30’s and the mother of 6 children between the ages of 11 and 15. As a family we struggle internally with the usual round of ‘why can’t we use MSN whenever we want?…why can’t I have a laptop of my OWN in my room? and why do we need to ask you before going on the internet?’, which are issues each family has to deal with. We try to make use of the information at hand in order to formulate our own family community ‘policies’ about such things. Everyone makes their own choices and it’s great we all don’t have the same view. My comment here regarding discussions which should be happening at home, is around educating parents (who may or may not be net savvy) to the joys and potential pitfalls of the internet and the scale of decisions which need to be made about the internet at home. What it means to have a facebook page, what you can and can’t change about your FB profile to make elements public or private (as one example), that there are fantastic opportunities to connect, re-connect and learn from social media and following ‘tweets’. Parents need tools and real life examples and how to’s in order to form opinions about their own internal ‘policies’ about social media and it’s use. On the work front….I have just attended a forum in Adelaide set up by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (SAGovt)in regards opening up our ideas and work practices to embrace social networking tools…..my impressions from the forum are, that as a collective, the participants were all in violent agreement that Government and it’s agencies need to and should embrace (web2.0) technology and begin to form a view about how we could utilise and benefit from the social media space. Education about what it is to make ’smart’ decisions about personal facebook pages and tweets is vital and appropriate and perhaps (dare I say) in favour of making a ‘policy’ for something which moves and morphs at the speed of sound. I await with interest the ensuing chapters of this debate.