  With the emergence and rapid growth of Social Media, a number of government
departments in several countries have embraced Social Media as a privilege
channel to interact with their constituency. We are exploring, in collaboration
with the Australian Department of Human Services, the possibility to exploit
the potential of social networks to support specific groups of citizens. To
this end, we have developed Next Step, an online community to help people
currently receiving welfare payments find a job and become financially
self-sufficient. In this paper, we explore some ethical issues that arise when
governments engage directly with citizens, in particular with communities in
difficult situations, and when researchers are involved. We describe some of
the challenges we faced and how we addressed them. Our work highlights the
complexity of the problem, when an online community involves a government
department and a welfare recipient group with a dependency relationship with
that department. It becomes a balancing act, with the need to ensure privacy of
the community members whilst still fulfilling the government's legal
responsibilities. While difficult, these issues must be addressed if
governments are to engage with their citizens using Social Media.
