Blogging in organisations. Reminder - remember people.

Jonathan Briggs raises interesting questions about sharing knowledge in organisations through blogging. These cover issues of single or multiple authors, moderation, security, structure, style and other matters potentially crucial to success. One issue that I think deserves more attention is the differing skills, motivation, confidence and personalities of those who may be expected to blog. If we move towards more distributed knowledge management systems, then how people are prepared to share becomes important (again). Hoarders, connectors, catalysts, enthusers, facilitators are endless categorised and re-named in various theories of organisational development and team building - but I don't know of much work translating those wisdoms into the online world. (Link please from any kind readers). As I've written before, I think that these personal factors can be underestimated in enthusiasms for the role of social software.
Which brings me to my motivation for writing this, and a little self-reflection prompted by Will Davies' Friday afternoon provocation . Will muses on whether the blogosphere is fair, the power of 'alpha bloggers', and the balance of individualism and collectivism in the medium (I think).
Blogging Jonathan's item gives me the chance to raise the issue of people-centred design without too much effort. But does the fact that I'll be meeting him on Friday with Common Purpose staff influence me? Am I using this blog item to give a friendly wave after my rather tetchy piece about his speednetworking event? Certainly.

What happens - surprise - is that we end up blogging our friends, those we want to influence, those we want to get to know, those we want to take a shot at. It reminds me of a my days, rather a long time ago, as a journalist on the Evening Standard. Londoners Diary was the best place to indulge this anonymously, but it was always a temptation in both news and features. In addition, the test of a good story, I found, was not so much whether it broke new ground, but whether other news media followed it up. One could easily end up writing for one's contacts and other journalists - as now happens most obviously in the Westminster village. This then provides the content for many more columns, baffling to most people outside the circuits.
All that matters quite a lot when media, politicians and think tanks get locked into self-regarding loops paying too little attention to enlightening wider publics. Blogs could be a way to break into this... citizens' self-publishing and all that. But not if the ethos becomes just as self regarding, with bloggers mainly writing about other bloggers. It is a bit scary, I suspect, for most people to start blogging, and so they look around to take comfort from others doing the same thing. If you want links and mentions - easiest from other blogs - you can easily fall into following the prevailing ethos.
This leads me back to organisational blogging because presumably the same thing will/does happen there. What works or what doesn't in knowledge sharing distributed systems will depend on people and the prevailing culture of the organisation or network as much as (more than?) the tech systems.
And another thing. It's much more fun - for some of us anyway - to blog than get on with some 'real work'. If your manager isn't a blogger, watch out.

Comments

[Jonathan Briggs]

Should I really be commenting? Or as David says are we simply talking to each other?

I totally agree about the social and motivation aspects of organisational blogging. And this changes as people become confident commentors and confident posters.

A friend of mine told me that although he read Reengage he felt intimidated that my ideas had been turned into words on screen rather than his that were still in his head. He said he lacked confidence in adding his thoughts because they were less well formed. He urged shorter postings and questions that would encourage more contributions. I wonder if it would?

See you Friday David!

[Kevin Harris]

Of course blogging doesn't have to be ego-based. I have an information worker's instinct for ways of organising material and I see my blog as proving pretty useful, in coming years, in helping me pick over ideas, issues and even paragraphs that I'll maybe want to re-use. I'm flattered frankly that others look-in from time to time and hope they find it useful. And why would I have a sweat about sharing stuff? David once shared with me a quote from Seneca, (which i think I have right) - "The best ideas are common property."
Blogs are also a neat staging-post between informal mention and formal material elsewhere on (or off) the net.

[Jack Dalton]

Both previous commentators make interesting points about in-organisation blogging. There's an interesting example of precisely this going on here.
Both previous commentators make interesting points about in-organisation blogging. But I wonder if the wider wired world is ready for this level of open source / creative commons yet? There's an interesting example of an organisation engaging with this precise notion here. It's a London based think-tank with a fairly strong political agenda. And to an outsider the jury still seems very much out...

[Dave Lee]

Isn't it true that for the first number of years of it's existence, the Internet itself was merely the personal communication device of a small, closed, close-knit community of researchers and scientist who probably spent more time with each other on the phone and in person then they did on the grandfather of the Web?

That's the nature of innovation, at least according to rogers' diffusion of innovations curve. It has to start with a few ego-centric whackos. God bless the Whackos!

Keep talking amongst yourselves, some of us are listening and following you. And there's more behind us!