Almost any requirement to share knowledge depends upon the dedication (voluntary) of the contributors. This dedication can be either to the technology (blogging is so cool) or to the discipline (communication is so important) or to one's professionalism (I do this because I feel an obligation to my peers). I wonder if any of these is sufficient motivation to spend significant amounts of time blogging, especially managing the blog.
Almost any requirement to share knowledge depends upon the dedication (voluntary) of the contributors. This dedication can be either to the technology (blogging is so cool) or to the discipline (communication is so important) or to one's professionalism (I do this because I feel an obligation to my peers). I wonder if any of these is sufficient motivation to spend significant amounts of time blogging, especially managing the blog.
For my project, I'd like to document the process of creating a blog (or K-log, as it would be called in a business application) for a documentation publications group at Sandia. I am a graduate intern in the publications area, I am both an outsider looking in as well as someone who must work within the current procedures to get books published.
The problem: In an area where secrecy is so prized, and information is rationed out on a need-to-know basis, often things that people really DO need to know don't get shared, or when they do get shared it is done piecemeal. That means that not everyone has access to the information they need to do their job effectively, and there is constant duplication of effort because multiple people work on the same things, and some of those projects are done wrong due to incomplete instruction.
There are one or two individuals who hold a lot of the information necessary to the publication process but no one person holds ALL the information.
My solution to this is to create a repository of process information for the creation, revision, and conversion of publications. This repository would be in blog format which allows multiple people to contribute knowledge without making them responsible for constantly-updating and formatting a whole document. It would live as part of the Group's home page, and would eventually replace it. Ultimately, it would be the information source for the whole group and would replace the random emails that get distributed now.
I would like to blog the process here on my personal blog, www.weeblog.com. Scott Sanders at UNM will be overseeing my documentation of this process and will provide guidance.
Because Sandia is a secure facility, I needed to clear that with my boss, David Olson, first to make sure that I did not violate any of Sandia's policiess. He has given me that approval, so I move on.
I have decided not to talk about the exact nature of the publications being produced.
I have a meeting with a systems administrator that can help us evaluate software and produce a plan. We have not yet selected which blogware we will use.