Dark Blogs: Operation Blogosphere, part 2

This is a moved post.  I'm including the comments from the old site at the bottom.

First, like Heather Green at Business Week's Blog on Blogging (Blogspotting.net), I, too, am a sucker for tech words that have "dark" in front of them. When I first learned about the "dark wire" network in Toronto's downtown core, I was giddy for days -- visions of me spelunking in The Path, surviving on Mmmmuffins. Mmmm .. muffins.

Heather writes about a project that Suw Charman is researching about blogs behind the firewall. Charman has coined the term "dark blogs" to describe these initiatives. She has just released her first case study on a European pharmaceutical corporation that uses dark blogs for sharing competitive intelligence.

What a great project! We've been running Operation Blogosphere here at PC for 6 months now. My workgroup started in January; Phase 2 -- a national, multi-location workgroup has only been going for a month. The roll-out has taken some time (*is* taking some time), but it would have been helpful at the outset to have a few examples of folks who had done this successfully. I relied on powerpoint slides from Lucent [local PDF only] to and another presentation by corporate and freelance bloggers at Google and UC Berkeley (among others).

Some of the issues we've run into:

• IT can be your best friend or your worst nightmare, especially when you're trying to get a non-standard piece of software installed (we use MT which is definitely not a corporate standard). I've been very lucky to have great local IT support who have navigated the waters for me.
• Not surprisingly, content is (still) king. We've tried to impress upon the larger workgoup that they need an editorial schedule, a backup library of content and bloggers who understand writing for the screen. They're taking a while to get it.
• Actually, that's something that would have helped .. examples of different publishing models within an organization. Who gets to publish? And how fast can you more an organization from multi-levels of hierarchy to a flat everyone-can-publish model.

That's been one of the most interesting things about this project -- watching an organization change and adapt. The cultural aspect of any change management/knowledge management program is fascinating to me (which is why I started life as a ritual anthropologist .. but that's a different blog entry).

If it gets to be really interesting, I'll keep posting about how the org has changed. My boss has high hopes .. he thinks we'll be fundamentally different in a year. I wonder ...

COMMENTS FROM ORIGINAL POST

Heya Kate,

Love the word Dark Wire. Must write it down. So is operation blogosphere a dark blog, like the project Suw Charman wrote about? And what kinds of things do you blog about on it?

Thanks

Posted by Heather Green at June 21, 2005 02:54 PM

Hey, Heather ..

Yup -- Operation Blogosphere (my "code name" for rolling blogs across my employer) is a dark blog. We started off with one for just our workgroup (ebusiness) and have been running it for about 6 months. Originally intended to manage projects, capture requirements and share knowledge, it has definitely moved firmly into the last one. We haven't been able to manage projects with it (though we are now using BaseCamp which has a blog component) more successully for that.

The second, more interesting part, of Operation Blogosphere is a roll out of BLOG (everyone in the organization, when referring to blogs capitalizes it .. makes me chuckle) across a national project team. There is an "enabler" team (a group of 10 senior execs) and then about a dozen functional teams across Canada. So there is an "uber" blog (for the enablers) and then one for each functional group. They share categories so that we can do searching and feeds on particular categories for the larger audience.

One of the big changes I've noticed is moving a paper-based publishing organization ("newsletters come out once a month or once a quarter") to an electronic-based publishing organization .. where the goal might be a brief post or two a week rather than a 12 page newsletter.

Posted by Kate at June 21, 2005 03:05 PM

Huh, very interesting. So what exactly does the enabler team do? And can anyone have a blog?Is there any concern that someone outside of the company will see the blogs and are there guidelines?

Posted by Heather Green at June 21, 2005 03:44 PM

The enabler team provides senior level leadership to the project (the content of the project is around knowledge sharing about a particular set of corporate values, e.g. "Zero Harm" (we operate refineries and "Zero Harm" is one of our core values .. so different groups across the country will share ideas, best practices, etc. around the value "Zero Harm")).

At this point, not everyone can have a blog. We've rolled out the blog concept to this national team and they are our pilot for blog technology/principles inside the company. Ultimately, there will be about 150 blog-enabled folks for the first 6 months of this pilot. After that, we would like to roll-out blog capability to other workgroups or project teams who are interested.

As you can imagine, we have a big waiting list .. people on the pilot project see a number of applications for their other projects/workgroups as well.

Posted by Kate at June 22, 2005 07:13 AM