Comments on: Policing vs Guidelines

By: Julie Hewett

Julie Hewett — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:53:20 +0000

Thanks Roo … a very sensible way to approach the subject. I wish more followed these guidelines.

By: Anne

Anne — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:35:19 +0000

Very useful Roo. We’re looking at this at work too so it’s good to see how big organisations are approaching it sensibly.

By: Roo

Roo — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:01:30 +0000

@minifig – There were similar fears in many quarters when desktop IM was introduced. I think your comparison with email is a good one (and in some places it probably way painful to begin with. Maybe in some it still is). Today, most people seem to be trusted with an email address that makes it possible for them to send confidential and/or private things externally. Blogs shouldn’t be difficult for management/IT departments to understand in that context.

@John – Lots of companies did borrow IBM’s guidelines and pretty much insert their own name. Interesting idea to make it into something more like an open standard though.

By: John

John — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:41:09 +0000

I think there’s an opportunity here to do the same thing Conduct Guidelines as was done with creating open generic software licences years ago.

It seams that for many of the sections on could replace IBM with [insert company name here], just like the CPL or GPL.

Then a company could say “We subscribe to BCG V1.1″ and everyone would know what that meant. I would assume we’d see a reasonably fast consolidation into 20-30 BCGs that are seen as generally good.

By: minifig

minifig — Tue, 20 May 2008 08:36:28 +0000

I think that you know where I work, and we’ve recently been attempting to create a forward-looking intranet with blogs, wikis, etc etc. Nice eh?

Except our management are terrified of it. They seem to think that allowing the staff to say what they want to online is tantamount to handing them a gun and telling them where to shoot. We’re now in the situation where you can’t do anything anonymously (fair enough) creating a wiki, or a blog or anything of that type requires reams of paperwork to achieve.

I wholeheartedly agree with what you say about trust in here, but the thing that I find strange is that it appears to be the fear of the technology that’s most pronounced. I mean, when we got telephones, were people scared that people would use it anonymously and say rude words? When email first arrived, did people have to apply in paperwork to our directer to have an address set up?

Where I work, the fact is that both of those things are pretty probably…