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. The first thing the three of will have to do is to get other members. Another early task will be to work out the best way to collaborate. We are testing some ideas about the collaboration side of things: we want our work to be transparent, we want to use online tools to help us achieve that, as well as minimise meetings, and we also want to be able to produce (simply) the sorts of reports that will be required from time to time. Our idea is that we will lead by doing, as we have learned from our forays into social media that quickest way to work out how something works is to use it.

We also have a rather interesting issue of how to deal with different levels of skill, engagement, knowledge and permission from supervisors. That is, as with any organisation, we have staff who range from super web users to those who use computers because they have to. Trouble is, if we focus on the super web user end of the spectrum, we miss out on all the wonderful things that the other folks know, and that we are pretty sure our visitors will love. And then of course there are supervisors who need to get projects completed, and may not, understandably, see the value in the short term of losing staff time on some web work that appears to have little relevance to what they need to deliver. Added to that are a range of policies that tend to put barriers in the way of people trying new things: the barriers are generally there for good reasons, but they can have a dampening and divisive effect on people.

It is, I think, going to be interesting to see what happens next.

I found this interesting, as we set up this internal, democratic blog not so much to share information (though that is a useful function) but to let people practice blogging in a relatively safe environment. That is, if they blog on the internal blog, only other staff will ever read their posts. There are no restrictions on what people talk about, so we have posts on digital preservation, Super Car races, wikis, blogging, conservation, conference reports, social media, projects of various sorts, museums, libraries, cataloguing….. the categories are really out of control. But we are not concerned about that, as we think that the blog is serving its purpose. There are people writing on it who would rarely speak out in a meeting, people who are working on things that might never normally make it to an exhibition, or be reported in the annual report, but which nonetheless are interesting. There are people who are trying it out, using it as the sandbox it is meant to be, and then blogging externally quite happily. There are some who have posted once or twice, and may never post again, but at least they have tried and understand more than if they had never had a go.

The notion of a democratic blog is probably not what blogs are for, though they work quite well in practice. I agree with my colleague that a good blog has a clear voice, and that that is hard to achieve with twenty authors. But I also believe that people need support to try new things, and an internal blog like our staff blog provides that.

Of course, the crux of the issue is: if the best writer does the all the writing, then the stories won’t be as real. But if a lot of people are doing the writing, there is no one clear voice. We are experimenting with this on our newest external blog, which has a growing number of authors. I like the notion that many people from one organisation are blogging, as it shows the breadth and depth of what is happening at the museum. But perhaps that does not make the experience as good as it could be for the reader. I don’t have any answers to this yet, but will look at our democratic blogs with fresh eyes from now on.

The journey has been an interesting one, and we have learned a great deal by taking it, arguably more by doing than by watching. But we are still learning, and it is this that interests me. Looking back on what we have done has the effect of skewing the view, as it is easy to forget why a certain choice was made at a certain time.

The difficulty in talking about events as far away as October 2006 -or even October 2007 – is that hindsight gets in the way, and it is hard to remember how things really happened. It is easy to see the results of decisions, but not so easy to see what was decided when and in what order. After having to read a lot of glowing case studies for a university course in marketing that I am doing, I realised that the problem with tehm is that you rarely read about the bad or even poor decisons, the last-minute panics, the long discussions about risk management and dealing with the “what if” questions that come up over and over again. And yet these are the very things that we seem to struggle with all the time. Maybe if I can record some of what we are dealing with day by day, and how we manage to figure out what to do, it will help me find a pattern in what is happening which will help me better prepared next time. And it may even help someone else.

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.

More museums should be building these programming skills in internal teams that grow expertise from project to project. Far too many museums small and large rely on outside companies for almost all of their technical development on the web. By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution.

I agree. At my museum, we are fortunate to have had in-house programmers and developers. While sometimes this means that things are not done within the time frames everyone wants, the end result is one that works and is understood. The experience we have had with some externally developed websites have been less than satisfactory. This is not because of poor work, but rather because of a lack of a deep understanding of what we about, what is in the collection, and how all the parts of the museum fit together. An outside company cannot hope to understand these things in the sort of time frame allowed for the development of a website, no matter how brilliant they are.