Some kind of miscommunication has resulted in our last meeting being completely missed by our software consultant.
This concerns me because our time horizon is somewhat brief.
The LATimes reports that a WSJ reporter has been placed on "vacation" after a piece of personal email got widely-dissseminated.
The email discussed her opinion that the situation in Iraq is catastrophic and details a bird's-eye view of the lack of reporting on huge numbers of civilian casualties, and a growing cooperative trend among insurgency factions. She speculates that Iraq will now be a long-term terrorism threat far greater than we are being told.
Information is now so free that we can more readily question the idea of "unbiased" journalism and we should. Reporters have opinions and they share them with their friends. Do they give up their rights to have opinions when they become jouralists? I think that no, they don't.
Traditional journalism outlets are struggling to hold onto the idea of presenting information that is "unbiased" even though we as people are universally bias-ridden by nature. Our news organizations are biased by nature because they are full of universally bias-ridden humans. Robots do not write the news.
Fox News calls themselves "fair and balanced" and the laugh is heard around the world. Those who choose them for an information source and those who stay away from them make those choices because they know the lens through which Fox News reports the world. I think it FAR more responsible for journalism to define that lens than to claim it doesn't exist.
Bloggers believe that it is better to put one's bias on the table and allow readers to view the product accordingly. That seems like FAR more responsible journalism to me than trying to pretend that your reporters, who have access to far much more raw information that we media consumers, have no views.
The blog group met yesterday.
Primarily the conversation was about strategy. When you are in a room of believers, the biggest hurdle to overcome is your own belief.
We spent some time defining the problems that we see in the Department in terms of areas that lack formal processes or whose processes are not completely documented. Built into that are subject matter experts that hold all of the knowledge but can only give it to those who ask due to time limitations and maybe a tough of territorialness.
We then talked about what types of spaces we could create online to encourage the capture of what processes there are in place.
We talked about who really owned some of the common processes and who would the most likely candidate for a trial run. The idea is to take one person, collect the processes they "own" and see what falls out of it.
At the same time, we'll continue to evaluate software choices. What we don't want to happen is to jump into a software solution that doesn't fit and force a bunch of changes upon the group. Many group members are leery of change, and the closer we can map the blogging routine to their own current method of communication (email) the more useful it will be because the greater participation there will be.