Generate an appropriate single-sentence summary for the given text such that it includes the main topic of the text.

By Paul RubensTechnology reporter It's a solution that is not as impractical as it may seem, and it's one that an increasing number of people with few or any programming skills are turning to. For people brought up with video games, smartphones, iPads and PlayStations, the idea of pulling together an application if nothing better is available is completely natural, according to Gartner analyst Ian Finley. "It's a generational thing," he says. "Many of the baby boomers are now retiring, and they are being replaced by younger people who have used computers in school, who have played with web and blogging tools, and who simply don't fear technology." The idea of employees bypassing the IT department and writing the software they need is not altogether new. In 2009 Gartner predicted that, by 2014, 25% of new business applications would be written by staff outside the IT department - or "citizen developers" as it called them. While that prediction may not have come true, Mr Finley believes that citizen developers are definitely on the rise. "End-user application development has been slower to take off than we thought, but we are only two or three years behind where we predicted we would be," he says. What drives today's citizen developers is the knowledge that they could be more productive if they had the right tools, according to Mr Finley. "They don't want to wait for IT departments to get around to writing or procuring software for them, so they decide to do it themselves," he says. Customised apps Thanks to cloud-based application development platforms provided by familiar companies such as Salesforce.com, as well as less familiar ones like TrackVia and Mendix, citizen developers can get to work without the need for expensive development tools. So what kind of applications can citizen developers create? Peter Khanna, chief executive of TrackVia, says that the majority are used by between five and 25 employees, and are built to meet niche needs that many IT departments are unaware of. "Most companies make an investment in the business software they think their staff need, and then individual departments are left to fend for themselves," he says. He adds that TrackVia's customers typically build applications to track people, assets or projects instead of using spreadsheets, or build customised applications for marketing, HR or to meet the unique needs of a particular business or industry when commercial alternatives simply do not exist. As an example, John McGarvey, resource manager at California-based DirecTV, a direct broadcast satellite service provider and broadcaster, used TrackVia's cloud-based development platform to build an application that keeps track of the company's many contractors. He says that although the company had tried off-the-shelf software products, none of them were quite suitable. "These applications tend to be designed to work in a certain way, so either you have to change your internal processes to match the way the application works, or you have to reconfigure the software to match your processes." Cost efficient Faced with a possible two-year wait before the company's IT department could develop something for him in-house, Mr McGarvey decided that the obvious solution was to build an application himself. Before he started, DirecTV's IT department examined TrackVia's cloud platform from a risk and governance perspective, and looked at the security of any data that would be stored in the cloud. "Basically they gave it a typical vendor assessment," Mr McGarvey says. After he was given the go-ahead to use TrackVia, he uploaded data from his spreadsheets to TrackVia's cloud platform and built his application in a matter of hours using a browser-based drag and drop interface. "I don't have any particular coding skills but to build my applications I didn't need any," he says. He then spent about an hour a week fine-tuning the user interface of his application for the next couple of months before it went into service. It is now used by about 20 co-workers in his department. Mr McGarvey concludes that his group is now more productive thanks to his efforts as a citizen developer, and his application also costs far less than the software that he was using previously. 'Embrace' citizen developers For organisations to avoid citizen developers introducing unacceptable security risks or breaching regulatory requirements, Mr Finley believes it is essential that IT departments set up citizen developer programs. These need to offer approved development tools for would-be citizen developers, and they need to provide a way for IT department staff to monitor what citizen developers and their applications are doing, and what data they are accessing and storing. Although setting up a program like this involves some extra work for the IT department, in the longer term it relieves them of the burden of acquiring or developing and supporting software that these citizen developers would otherwise need. "Companies that don't have a program that reaches out and provides rules for citizen developers, or that try to stop them, will just end up with rogue developers who are outside their control, introducing risk," Mr Finley warns. "Companies need to avoid fighting citizen developers and start embracing them."
Don't have the right software to get your job done efficiently? Then why not write your own?

BBC TrendingGoing in-depth on social media "At one point I Googled myself and I got the result 'Anna Scanlon offers sex.' I threw up." For Anna Scanlon, it was a nightmarish twist on what had once been a positive addition to her online life. After moving to Milton Keynes from California in 2012, she found video making not only a way to update friends and family on her new life, but an introduction to a whole new community. "When I moved to the UK I didn't know anyone," she says, "so YouTube became a great outlet to be able to interact with people on a daily basis." Anna, now 34, became immersed in her studies - a PhD in Holocaust History at the University of Leicester - as well as her YouTube channel. At about the same time she decided to turn vegan, motivated both by a desire to lose weight and also for ethical reasons. Her vlogging increasingly covered vegan issues - and soon she became a target for another vegan blogger. YouTube drama Vegan Cheetah, whose real name is Charles Marlowe-Cremedas, is a popular vegan vlogger. He lives in California and he built his channel, which has 37,000 subscribers on YouTube, by engaging in debates about veganism. Like in other subcultures, arguments in the vegan world are often fractious and - for those outside the subculture - often tediously detailed. Vegans argue back and forth about questions like whether it's OK to date non-vegans, or keep pets, and a host of other issues. You may also be interested in: The Vegan Cheetah channel included "drama" videos - a particular and hugely popular YouTube genre which catalogues gossip and rumours, often about other YouTubers or celebrities. Anna watched his videos. Initially she saw the appeal. "He was saying something that a lot of people in the community resonated with," she says. But soon, she claims, Vegan Cheetah ran out of original ideas and his channel "just became bashing individual vegans." Anna posted criticism of Charles in a private Facebook group, but somehow the drama vlogger got wind of it and began making drama videos - about Anna. He claimed that Anna called him on Skype, exposed herself to him, and started performing sexual acts on camera - all things which Anna says "never happened." It culminated in a four-hour broadcast on another video site, YouNow. Charles repeated the allegations and encouraged people to join in a live-streaming conversation. More on this story "I did confront him asking him to retract his statement, but as it went on I think he really enjoyed the attention that he got from saying these things," Anna says. "His audience loved it and joined in." "It was very shocking to me because it had no basis in reality," she says of the claims. "I felt disgusted, at that point I thought about taking legal action." In April 2017 she did just that, and filed a defamation suit in California. Charles Marlowe-Cremedas declined to comment for this story, but in court filings he has denied Anna's allegations. Until recently, he continued to make a series of reaction videos insulting Anna and saying that the lawsuit "doesn't scare me." Anna says that initially YouTube and YouNow took no action, even though she reported Vegan Cheetah's videos. "I sent YouNow several emails," she says "they didn't even respond." "Social media companies could do a lot better especially when it comes to protecting the safety of people online," she says. "If they have somebody who is constantly reporting incidents then maybe it might be better to actually look into it and talk to people and actually take reporting seriously instead of just glossing over it." Visit BBC Trending on Facebook In a statement, YouTube told BBC Trending: "We have clear rules and policies against bullying and hateful speech and we enforce these policies. Our broadcasts are monitored 24/7, and any user who is reported is quickly disciplined." YouNow said in a statement: "We have strict policies against inappropriate behaviour, harassment and illegal activities. 24/7 live moderators respond to any issue flagged by the community or detected by our automated systems." After Anna filed her lawsuit, Marlowe-Cremedas was suspended from YouNow. His YouTube channel is still online, however recently most of his old videos were taken down. Court case After initially refusing to respond to the legal action, Charles filed a response to Anna's lawsuit in May, 13 months after the lawsuit was originally filed. A trial is now pending. "I think one of the positives is that people have seen that they can speak up for themselves," Anna says. "I hope this gives people some hope that the internet will be a bit of a safer place." If you've been affected by this story, there are resources and links available from BBC Action Line Do you have a story for us? Email BBC Trending. You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.
Anna Scanlon became immersed in the online world of veganism. But when she was critical of another vlogger, he started posting videos about her - and after getting little relief from social media websites, Anna sued for defamation.

Over the same period Scotland housed 249 Syrian refugees and Northern Ireland 104, Home Office figures show. Nine of Wales' 22 councils had taken part in the Syrian refugee settlement programme up to the end of June, four more than three months earlier. Oxfam Cymru welcomed the increase but said the resettlement process remained "painfully slow" in Wales. UK ministers have pledged to settle 20,000 Syrians in the UK by 2020 under a scheme launched in October 2015. Between April and June Rhondda Cynon Taf resettled 18 refugees whilst Blaenau Gwent, Carmarthenshire and the Vale of Glamorgan took five each, as the four councils took part in the Home Office-funded scheme for the first time. The five authorities already involved were Neath Port Talbot, which has now taken 27 refugees, Swansea (24), Ceredigion (11), Torfaen (10) and Caerphilly (seven). Other local authorities, including Wrexham and Anglesey, also have plans to accommodate refugees fleeing war-torn Syria. Matthew Hemsley from Oxfam Cymru said: "We welcome the fact that more families have been brought to safety here and we know that more refugees from Syria have arrived over the summer. "Yet we cannot ignore how painfully slow the resettlement process still is in Wales. "While there is some improvement in terms of numbers resettled here, there is no doubt that Wales still could and should do more to help families who have seen their lives torn apart by this war." Mr Hemsley urged the Welsh Government and councils to work closely together to speed up the system.

A further 34 Syrian refugees were resettled in Wales in the three months to June, bringing the total to 112.

