“We do need to be careful of developing policies and procedures for blogging with in our organisations. The lack of organisational policies and procedures is the reason that may of us turn to them. It is what makes them so accessible”

I think the key to Jude’s point is the reference to ‘our’ organisations, which aren’t actually ours at all! By this I mean, ask any employee of and large TAFE, School, Uni… in Australia if they feel they have any influence on the direction of their organisation, and most would say emphatically ‘no’.

So as always, pushing for a policy for blogging might likely encroach on the (risky) personal freedoms we exercise without such a policy. The introduction of CMS’s in educational organisations for example… was it an effort to improve online education, or control the independent teachers out there setting up their own course websites in the absence of anything organisational? Did the CMS/LMS improve grassroots/coal face control of the online delivery method?

But there realy is no avoiding what you are proposing here, and we can only hope that our managers and directors will make the time to carefully consider articles like yours, and the discussion around it. More likely though, they will set up their own discussion mechanism and expect us to repeat ourselves there…

I guess my thoughts are:
1) Policies suck, guidelines _can_ be helpful and encouraging (depending how they’re constructed). I think the emphasis in most of the guidelines linked in the post seem really good - they’re really just helping people to be confident in their blogging. Just giving people the go-ahead while being aware of some good practise.

2) Like you said Leigh, it seems inevitable to me that we think about this. We’ve got two options, we can (a) wait until someone else develops guidelines (or even scarier, reactionary policies) that aren’t helpful to innovation and learning, or (b) start encouraging/developing some helpful guidelines for blogging now to help others get started with confidence in what they do and help the upper echelons of our organisations see the benefits for themselves… am I exposing my naivity again?

A couple of points to note. Not all organisations apply policy the same across the global, look at Cameron Reilly’s experience last year at Microsoft, http://radar.smh.com.au/archives/2005/06/post_4.html. The legal environment here in Australia is very different to the US and this will impact what happens here.

Interesting comment from Reilley in that article:

Although Microsoft hosts a website for its employees to blog (blogs.msdn.com), Reilly says the technology giant lacked policies for its bloggers. “If there are no formal guidelines, then there are inconsistent approaches [by managers] and your employees don’t know what they can and what they can’t do.”

Strange, I thought MS had great guidelines (perhaps not formal?) by Scoble in the post above? Why didn’t Reilly make his managers aware of it? Or were they aware of it? Hmm… I see, this is what you’re saying Michael, that the guidelines are not applied the same around the globe… Why would that be? I mean, it sounds to me more like a manager who doesn’t understand the benefit of such transparency and doesn’t like MS’s own guidelines? Not sure I understand the situation well enough! (Maybe Cameron can help us out?)

Seems like a good reason to try to get blogging guidelines supported by management… but I guess the other side of that is if the formal guidelines go beyond being responsible and are more like a list of don’ts, people will either not blog (and IMO the organisation will miss a huge learning benefit) or people will blog anonymously.

1. identifying the stakeholders:
Students, Students under 18years and Under 16 years, Teachers, Managers, ICT Services, Legal Branch,
Others?

2.Defining the purpose of BLOGs and the purpose of the guidelines

3. Defining the scope of the guidelines - for this institute? for all teachers involved in the trial? for all teachers and students using Bogs or other spaces

4. Duration of the guidelines

5. any procedures or guidelines

I have had a look at the IBM guidelines and I thhik there is appicabnility ot TAFE especially as the guidelines are to inform managers as well as users.

I also like the simple easy to follow guidelines for users from the Sun etc

So maybe we develope two sets. One for users teachers and students and one for managers.