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Re-empowering social workers through the online community: The experience of SWForum in Hong Kong

This paper focuses on the new form of social participation created by information and communication technologies (ICTs), as experienced by an online professional community, SWForum, in Hong Kong. The group has expressed resistance and contributed to social welfare policy development since 1997, when frontline social workers were disempowered and lost their previously influential status. From this experience, we argue that the online community has created an arena for alternative discourse on social policy and it shows that the technology can be harnessed to create a more equitable participation in policy making in a society.