Small rural municipalities face major challenges in social services. One challenge concern social workers’ opportunity for support and knowledge exchange. Social services in small rural municipalities often have limited resources and few employees who are expected to work with a wide range of social problems. Therefore, it can be difficult to stay up to date on the state of knowledge in all areas. One possibility for support and knowledge exchange is collegial collaboration, but because of few colleagues in one’s own municipality and long distances to other municipalities, alternative forms are needed. This article reports on an project with the ambition to develop a digital collaboration solution for collegial support and knowledge exchange through written communication between social workers in a rural area in northern Sweden. The purpose of the study was to investigate the possibilities and limitations of a digital collaboration solution to mediate support and knowledge exchange between social workers in a rural area, but also how contextual conditions had significance for the knowledge exchange.
The data collection took place through group interviews with social workers and documentation at a workshop. The results show that the digital solution was considered valuable for finding solutions that needed to be adapted to the rural context. The main obstacle was written communication, which could make it difficult to communicate regarding cases with complex problems. It was also considered to contribute to social workers not answering questions that were asked as there could be uncertainty about how the answers were received due to the lack of immediate response. The results also show that the context, in the form of the framing of the interaction, was important in both defining what the knowledge exchange was about and in creating meaning in the knowledge exchange.