Web work and skunkworks at a museum

Nina Simon’s post of 13 May 2008 about Museum skunkworks is very timely. I think her third way to achieve change in museums, the skunkworks, is a good solution. But then I would, as we are about to do just that at, or something very like it, at the museum I work at.

In brief, senior management has just given us the go ahead to form a group of web workers from across the organisation to work together to make better use of our website, and the internet in general. We have the support of senior management, and a certain amount of authority.

Guidelines for social media

Reading Seb Chan’s post called Updating your social media and staff blog policies on fresh+new lead me to Jason Ryan’s post called Principles for public sector social media

It reminds me that I have to update the blog “policy” (more of a set of guidelines) that I wrote for work early last year, and which now looks very old and tired. I’ll be turning first to the BBC, especially the original 15 principles, which I love, and the more recent and comprehensive BBC use of social networking and other third party websites.

One of the reasons I like the principles so much is that support an approach, a way of thinking, rather than setting hard and fast rules. I think this is really important in a space where rules need to able to change quite quickly. For example, at the Memorial, we have been using blogs since October 2006. In that short time, we have changed our approach to blogs and how we use them, as well as to our static site. Having hard and fast rules would have made it much harder to go the way we needed to move.

Of course, instead of writing a blog policy, I’ll draft a set of guidelines for using blogs, external sites like Flickr and Facebook, as well as how to respond to public comment in any or all of these spaces, for my colleagues to respond to.