With sites like wordpress.com, anyone can set up a blog. Five minutes after deciding to do it, you can be sharing your every thought at the internet at large. But just because the technology is there which enables you to do so, that doesn’t mean that you should rush in. Especially not if you’re going to be blogging in any kind of official capacity.
One of the things that I’m aiming to do with my posts to this blog is to write about the processes that we went through in order to set up this site. You could sum that up as “blogging about blogging” but I hope to be less trite than that, and to offer up some insights into the aims of In Development. Here’s a list of things that I think every blog needs to consider before it gets off the ground - please feel free to add your own in the comments. For now, I’m going to come up with some questions, and over subsequent posts, I hope to answer these questions.
- What do you hope to achieve? Is a blog really the best way to achieve your goals? Why are you blogging? We touched on this already. In my area of work we also have a really great Community of Practice around Participation, but that has somewhat of an ICT focus. We hope this blog cover more areas than that through our range of contributors.
- Contributors: Who’s going to be writing the site? Are they familiar with the blogging world already? What kind of time commitment are they able to make to the site? Are they aware of how they need to be interacting with the audience? We’re trying to have our contributors introduce themselves as they start, so that readers have an understanding of where the contributors are coming from, and where they’re aiming to go.
- The audience: Who are you writing for? What do they already know, and what do they want to find out from you? And how will your audience interact with you through comments?
- Terms and conditions: Richard’s already written a great post about the staff contribution guidelines that we have, and now I’d like to draw your attention to our terms of use. When we wrote these we tried really hard to balance ensuring that we covered all the necessary bases without scaring anyone off with legalese jargon.
- How will you keep going once you’re up and running? Who will be looking after the site in the long term? How will you build a community around it? What processes do you have in place to review how it is going?
And finally:
- What does success look like? Is it links, comments and other positive forms of feedback? Or is broader, like changing people’s mindsets, or uptake of information?
