Social Media for the socially excluded

I had a meting today with an organisation – HeartsnSoul – who want to create a community web site to bring people with learning difficulties together with potential employers. They want to encourage use of personal blogs for their users and have a virtual meeting place (e.g. forum) where their users can ‘meet’ potential employers.

I am looking into the issues and dependencies for providing all this through our existing CoP platform , but I think the interface design requirements may exceed the available budget and there may be implications for the future management and maintenance for what would have to be a separate bespoke development.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with designing, developing or using similar sites (i.e. with heavy emphasis on accessibility and usability), blending social media applications with a simple and intuitive front end design? Or perhaps anyone with experience in this whole area of bridging the digital divide for socially excluded groups. If so, I should be very grateful if you would contact me.

2 Comments

  1. David Wilcox said:

    Hi Steve – might be worth popping something in to charitywebforum http://snurl.com/25qjr on accessibility and also exploring blog-based solutions with our friends at Networksonline. http://snurl.com/24jee
    It looks as if the great strength of HeartsnSoul is their arts content … so needs to be public and as you say using a range of social media. Glad to discuss further … how about a social media game workshop to do some collaborative design?

    April 25, 2008
    Reply
  2. Steve Dale said:

    Hi David,

    thanks for the suggestions – follow up.

    Steve

    April 27, 2008
    Reply

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