Social Services in computer :

Social services are a range of public services provided by any national or regional government organization for its residents, including such things as health care, public housing, social care and social security.

Not all public services are social services.

Some companies use social service as a means of marketing or to save taxes.

International Social Service

International Social Service or ISS is an international charitable, non-governmental organisation. It provides assistance in cases of family breakdowns with an international aspect, for example ascertaining a child's best interest where divorced parents live in different countries. It was founded in 1924, and was originally called International Migration Service, changing to its present name in 1946. According to its website, International Social Service (ISS) helps individuals, children and families confronted with social problems involving two, or more, countries as a consequence of international migration or displacement. As an international not-for-profit organisation, it is active in around 140 countries through a network of national branches, affiliated bureaus and correspondents. Each year, it provides services to more than 50,000 people throughout the world. It deals with issues related to voluntary or forced movement across borders, international family conflicts, family separation prevention, issues concerning child protection in family separation (Custody / visiting rights and maintenance payments, etc.), child abduction, alternative care, foster care, national and intercountry adoption, search of origin, voluntary or forced migrations and protection and care of unaccompanied or separated minors in the countries of origin and receiving countries. It provides intercountry social and legal casework, counselling for individuals and professionals, research and analysis, pr00200020

oject management, information diffusion and advocacy.

INFORMATION - WHAT IS IT?

There is a debate in information science as to whether information is a 'stuff' or a process. In ordinary usage we refer to different media of communication in terms of the 'information' they carry or contain. We speak, for example, of the 'accuracy' of the information in newspaper reports or of the 'objectivity' of the information conveyed by television reports. We also speak of 'information technology' where information is some 'thing' which can be processed or communicated by the technology. In other words, we have an everyday perception of information as something which, if not exactly concrete, can be grasped. When we look more closely at the nature of information, however, that everyday certainty about its character disappears. For example, we find that we are not always 'informed' by what others call information. In use 'information' has connotations of novelty, or surprise. One definition of information is that it is 'that which fills in forms' (de Mey[1]) - social workers and their managers will readily recognise one meaning of that definition but there is the second meaning that information fills in mental forms.

If this is the case then the nature of the everyday life of the individual, in work and in social interaction generally, will be of importance in determining what information is needed by the mental form - just as the nature of design of the client record sheet determines what information is needed for its completion. We need, therefore, to look at the nature of work in social services departments to discover what clues there may be to the kind of information needed for the performance of work and to enable the social workers, managers, and others to become competent and to remain competent.

THE NATURE OF SOCIAL SERVICES WORK

The first thing to say about social services departments, or social work departments, is that they are not unitary organisations. They are complex organisations, covering wide geographic areas and usually subdivided for management purposes on that basis, and responsible (often under statute) for performing a wide range of functions, from the care of children at risk, to elderly persons, and people suffering from mental illness. These functions are performed in the community at large and in residential establishments or functional units such as day-training centres and special schools. The functions are performed in a political context under the financial constraints set by local and central government.

To speak of the 'information needs of social services departments' therefore, would be to oversimplify the situation considerably. The information needs of departments are the needs of individuals performing jobs and to imagine that the needs are identical when the jobs differ widely would be to obscure characteristics which are important for the design of information systems and services.

In addition to the needs associated with basic social work, residential work, and other direct client-serving functions, there are the needs of departmental managers (at all levels), and the needs associated with specialised functions in departments such as those performed by advisers, training sections, and research and development or planning sections.

This complex structure of roles, specialisations, and relationships with clients and other users of the department's services must guide any analysis of information needs. Furthermore, the task of specifying information requirements should be undertaken before decisions are made about 'human systems' for information service or about hardware and software for computer systems because these elements can only be specified properly on the basis of how they are to be used.

  A  vast array of social work Web sites have sprung up. The first systematic social work invasion of Web service was in educational institutions. Michael McMurray (Colorado State University) was the

first, most notable effort. A long lived and well managed example is the University o South Carolina’s SWAN (Social Work Access Network). At the time of this writing well over 25% of all accredited social work academic programs have Web sites. Clearly, Web pages that are owned and operated by large institutions are the most reliable.

INCREASING TRAFFIC, REGULATION

AND ONLINE SOCIAL INTERA

CTION

By the early 80s the network traffic increased to the point of becoming sluggish. As a result, in

1983 ARPANET was split. MILNET was used for military sites and ARPANET was used for non-military traffic. How even ,it did not take long for growth to go beyond control a second time.

 A key innovation occurred with Paul Mockapetris’s (University of  Southern California) November 1983 memo entitled ‘‘Domain Name System  To compensate for the unexpected increase of addresses, he proposed an international system which includes seven “top level domains” the unceasing growth, standardized protocols were required by the Secretary of Defense.

com (commercial)

edu (educational)

gov (government)

mil (military)

net (networking organizations)

org(non commercial organizations)

int (international organizations, like the United Nations

Three letter county codes were added later. This was a complex political task, not an engineering problem.

The above discussion illustrates that the history of the Internet is a hi story of rapid technological improvements wed

To an environment of human cooperation. The technological advances and social inkages occurred in three general categories that are not necessarily mutually exclusive.. They include

Communication  E-Mail

InterNIC

Listserv

Chat

•Information Acquisition

Archie

Bulletin Board

Gopher

Hytelnet

UseNet NewsGroups

Veronica

WAIS

World Wide Web

•Other

File Transfer Protocol

Telne

THE ROLE OF THE COMPUTER:

Most contributions to this collection are about the role of the computer in the organisation of departmental information resources. It seems reasonable to ask, therefore, what we mean by 'computer' in this context. Clearly, the word has a number of connotations and for many people the computer is the BBC Model B at home or the Sinclair Spectrum, or whatever. In the context of organisations, however, various options are available for defining 'computer resources':

    a) The use of stand alone microcomputers running software packages for a variety of office applications. The usual packages include word processing, spreadsheets, and database systems. According to a recent report[8], when businesses buy microcomputers they tend to be used for little more than the first of these functions - word processing.

    b) The next stage is to network microcomputers and to provide communication links to the outside world, thereby giving access to public electronic mail (such as Telecom Gold) and to online databases. In addition, the same set of packages as in a) above may be used. However, problems exist in the networking of multi-access systems such as databases, and guidance is needed.

    c) The next level is that of the large minicomputer-based systems such as those offered by DEC (All-in-I), Data General (CEO) and Wang (Wang Office). The basic filing and retrieval systems offered by such firms are relatively crude, so far as their use in handling files which contain large amounts of text, rather than large amounts of data, is concerned, being based on analogues of traditional office filing cabinets, with files, folders and documents. Retrieval is generally on predetermined fields and keywords (usually uncontrolled other than by the individual users).

The optimistic expectation 20 years ago that computer technology would also come to play an important part in clinical decisions has not been realised, and there are few if any situations in which computers are being routinely used to assist in either medical diagnosis or the choice of therapy' .