Skills day: Stuart Yeates, OSS Watch: User Feedback on the JISC blogs pilot
You can download the slides from Stuart’s presentation on the wiki. The blog which is the focus of this talk is here: http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch
What
We participated on the blog with short articles, open source relevant, an article each evey week was the aim, with tags. We’ve got about 100+ articles now.
Why
To communicate with the wider JISC community bout the kinds of things OSS Watch does, what kinds of things are going on in OS contexts, what’s happening right now, providing that could be aggregated in other places
Successes
Feedback suggests a substantial numer of people are reading it and a number of comments have had comments from the “right person”. The RSS is repurposed by a number of websites. And we get a lot of spam…
Failures
Not as many articles we would like because of lack of time. The content is not as tidy as we’d like. When I moved from my US blog to the JISC blog I lost all those readers, there was a noticable drop.
Failures (hosting end)
Lack of resource, lack of control: setting up and maintaining user accounts, handling spam, styling/branding (not branded as JISC or OSS Watch), plugins (RDF)
Point of view
I believe that the point of view and subject matter are (nearly) all that matters. On my previously blog I’d covered a wide range of subjects but the new one was very closely focused on OSS and education. Ross and I also have very different writing styles. Decided not have editorial control over what went in and what didn’t because we wanted to be able to respond quickly to events, to have posts on the eg weekend. We did have a clear idea of where the blog was inr elation to our comms strategy. We kenw what we wanted it to do and how it would fit in with the wiki, events we attended and so on.
Different people write differently. Copy-editing and approval mechanisms are slow. Each blogger needs to maintain their own standards and speak about their own area of expertise. We decided to let them speak in their own voice about what they know about.
The way forward
- easier account management
- better spam management
- engaging with more writers (guest authors, advisory committee, Mike our manager etc)
- engaging with more readers (web analysis, better rdf, better tagging, better syndication etc)
- cross-blog-tagging - our tagging is very rigorous, every post tagged with a JISC theme or a work package or both (would be good to see this reflected through other blogs in the JISC folder)
Aggregators
[blog which takes in other blogs presented as a single blog - takes in different points of view in a community and brings them together]
Question: issue of quality control with having people post what they want? what about using an editor?
Stuart: we fix grammatical errors as we see them and deal with errors of fact as they come up
Ross: made a conscious decision that on website would have v strict quality control process but decided that needed a faster way of getting materials out and the blog fills that purpose. we don’t change the text of errors we discover but point them out and that tends to generate discussion
Q: OSS Watch has a fairly low number of contributors but we have 28 staff members blogging which is why we have that editorial control - how scaleable is an open policy?
Stuart: no idea - may depend on the diversity of the community
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