Since Monday 28th we have been using a blog in one of our projects (project blog, or p-blog), with the intention to cross the divide between communities of practice. After just two weeks, it is becoming apparent that not all the expectations of the usage of the blog will come out. Some early observations:
Where it succeeds
- The p-blog is creating a chronological diary of ideas and thoughts, allowing members of the project to track back and recombine thoughts but also to reflect. It's looser than memos because it includes considerations, doubt (where else would you find that?) and opportunities and does not by far have any formal status.
- Because the blog is not structured and informal, it allows discussions and thinking to go beyond the scope and domain of the project and come back, providing interesting angles and inclinations of the project work.
- It replaces email to share notes and ideas
- It is more continuous and extremely high turnover of thoughts, in contrast to the more formal reporting methods (memos, reports, evaluations etc.)
- It is quick to set up (assuming authentication and security mechanisms in place), it's searchable, replicatable (XML) and very cheap. Once the authors have abandoned the blog, the information remains available as a 'website'
Where it fails
- the current technology of the blogs are created for internet sharing, which was an issue due to the internal character of the project ideas and information (no! rss feeds and everything has to be password-protected). That means that there is no longer an easy update / notification / subscription mechanism.
- though the p-blog has proven excellent for 'brain dumps' of ideas, thoughts and considerations it has failed as a way to actually discuss those ideas in the blog. Without this collaborative component, it becomes little more than a collective diary of informal thoughts.
- The blog is about conversation and not about project-related issues (tasks, co-authoring of documents). We had this right from the start, but the limitations of what the blog is good for comes strongly forward as the need to do these project-related issues, arises.
- there is a barrier to participate in the blog sharing thoughts and ideas because of the feeling that it formalizes people's vision and opinions (because of the publishing aspect) - similar to what we experience in communities of practice.
Even just weeks into the experiment with the p-blog, the venture has proven its value next to the other tools (community, project management software, email etc) because it has distinctive advantages that allows the project blog potentially to unite (glue) all the other tools together.
They may be not strategic yet, but the narrative exponent of the blog will further down the road allow the project evaluators to use it as record of dialogue that has lead up to the project results.
This happened at 12:18:42 AM or
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