We were approached to build the Communities section of the sixpartswater website. sixpartswater is a new charity with an objective to provide the resources you need to become more informed about your health and more involved in your healthcare decisions. In developing its community proposition sixpartswater encountered three challenges:

- How can individuals discuss sensitive health issues in a safe and secure environment?
- How can individuals share their health information selectively and easily?
- How can knowledgeable individuals be encouraged to create support groups?

The big challenge was control of the sharing of information. A lot of the popular social networks are geared towards relatively unrestricted sharing of information, with little emphasis on privacy and control. People are uneasy about sharing their health information with people they don’t know and in an environment which they’re not sure is secure.

So what did we do?
Well, unlike a lot of popular social networks, Communities is about message management. It is secure, private and easy to control... not by using complex privacy settings but by keeping control and privacy central to the site’s structure and strategy. The network allows people to create written, photo or video messages which they then send to the different groups of people in their life (i.e. family and close friends, hospital support groups, work colleagues etc).

And it’s not just individual users who can use the network as a safe forum to share health information. The site also has a section for partners of sixpartswater – these could be local hospitals or other charities. These partners can then create their own groups to provide secure spaces for discussion and support.