Just Do It!

I get impatient when the wheels of change move too slowly. That is why I maintain a URL outside my work space. Ahhhh…the relief of being able to go to my own URL and just do it. What is “It”? “It” might be:

  • making my site xhtml 1.0 strict
  • upgrading to the latest version of PHP in less than 30 minutes when I want to
  • installing an open source application and using it immediately
  • saying exactly what I think

And rather than these actions just being personally satisfying…I’ve found over and over again, that a “just do it” successfully implemented in my own space spurs change within my workspace. Not always…but often.

At this very moment, I’m reading a fascinating article by Andrew McAfee entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration“. Highlighter in hand…I’m marking my favorite passages. And I can’t resist sharing this one about the value of informal rollout of new technology.

You see, I ‘ve been begging for blogs for all students, faculty and staff at UT since 2005. And while some progress has been made…we still don’t have it. One of the many hurdles is the perceived need to write a policy to handle inappropriate content that could be created on blogs. (deep sigh) Why? Why do we think we have to write a damn policy just for blogs? Blogs aren’t any different than free speech on the west mall. Blogs aren’t any different than the free webspace we have for all students, faculty and staff.

So, I really resonated with this line in the article about wikis and blogs in organizations:

“…explicit policies about hate speech and harassment were unnecessary. Any (one) familiar with the organization’s culture and norms would already know that such content was forbidden, regardless of medium.”

I’ll keep begging for blogs and wikis for all at UT until they become a reality…because I believe they are a critical piece of the knowledge puzzle. Blogs and wikis bring out the storyteller in all of us, making it easier to discover what others are thinking. Everyone (yes, everyone) has something to contribute whether it is a comment, a fact, an insight, an edit, a link, a tag or knowledge.

6 comments

  1. an “anonymous” comment that I received via email:

    Just for another view. Blogs are often sources for bad guys to harass and sometimes even stalk (or worse) folks – so many people feel safe posting their pictures, names, addresses and other ways to find them, etc., assuming that nothing bad will ever happen to THEM. Without any parameters – while I understand the concern for creativity and free speech (and desperately support both) – students could get into trouble (even students who are fairly knowledgeable about the Internet). The university could be seen as liable in such situations; I understand their hesitancy (as frustrating as it may be). The nature of blogs seems to be that people want to show and write lots of personal information – which is what creates the quandary.

  3. Fantastic Matt! Now…tell me what you think of WordPress MU? I had considered it for the small “student journal” project we just implemented…but I ended up going with b2e. I’d love to compare notes with you.

  4. I’m astonished that UT feels the need for a new policy to cover inappropriate content in student blogs. Haven’t they offered students web space for over a decade? How does putting potentially inappropriate content in a CMS and organizing it by date make it any different? And what does this mean for the dozens (hundreds?) of blogs already running in odd corners all over utexas.edu?

    Now there are other institutional obstacles I could understand: like finding a free (or affordable, but with a budget of zero affordable == free) blogging platform which is stable and scaleable across ~50K users.

    Pity that BlackBoard is such a dinosaur. The enterprise-scale access control issues have already been solved for BlackBoard, more or less, and if the company had a lick of sense they’d be eagerly leveraging that investment to become their customers’ blog/wiki/social networking platform of choice.

  5. You might be interested in a study about corporate blogging. Of course companies like IBM or Sun have decent policies, but “be smart” seems to be sufficient for Microsoft. So why bother, just do it! At least that’s what we did for my corporate blog. Otherwise I’m sure I would still be waiting for my bosses to approve a formal policy.

  6. @Martin, thank you so much for the link to the study on corporate blogging. I will add this to my case for blogs at UT…and keep reminding myself…to never, ever give up!

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