Monday, July 28, 2008

Blog Guidelines... A 3 Part Harmony

I have just begun to get to the part that I have been waiting for since I started this job....Developing the blog. I have submitted the project request and it is "in the queue"? I have crafted the "pitch" slide deck, that I am scheduled to present to all of the major stakeholders.

I wrote the first draft of the guidelines document.

Let's stop there. I learned the most about this blog by writing the guidelines document. I started with the assumption that I would be writing one document explaining to people how the could and could not use and comment on this blog. It was shaping up to be a multi page monster that would probably be further beefed by our legal department and never be read by anyone who it was intended for.

So, during my vacation, on the train trip between destination 3 and 4, while waiting for my daughter to finish with my laptop I began with ancient tools... a pencil and paper to write a list of the audiences who would need some guidelines for use of this, and the list of things each audience would need to know.

So finally I began to craft a set of rules for ;

  1. Commenting from the outside world
  2. Commenting from employees
  3. Writing posts for the bloggers that would be participating

The result was a pretty succinct 3 page document that address the needs of most anybody who would use this blog for communications to or from "the institution". It has not passed through legal yet. So there will probably be a part 2 of this post.

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