Today is a good day. I’ve written before about the need to celebrate the little wins and I am doing that again. This time though it doesn’t feel that little. It feels like a major achievement. Which is weird to say the least.

Today we launched a blog for our organisation. This isn’t my first rodeo – the first blog I helped setup was the long departed Common Information Environment blog which seems to have been eight years ago. I launched a blog network at JISC that hosted dozens of blogs. I’ve been blogging here a couple of times a month for five years or so and I was involved with blogging projects at HEFCE, Becta and Jiva as well.

Today is something different though for a couple of reasons. Firstly I work for a very risk averse organisation. Alot of that is based in some very real issues that surround the work we do and some of it is a side effect of an organisation that has been around 100 years-ish but nonetheless making this happen was a big deal and alot of people didn’t think it could be done.

The other, really wonderful, reason this seemed different was it wasn’t me pushing it. For years I was trying to convince the powers-that-be of the power of the social web and have had my share of head/desk moments as a result. This time though I was very much in the role of technical support. The momentum for the project came from our Science writers – Kath in paricular – looking for a new channel for their content.

Hoops were jumped through, patience was shown and as a result a really impressive plan evolved. For anyone interested in our work I think this is going to be a great showcase – with a steady stream of rich media to keep things lively alongside the always great articles [something due to the limitations of our main CMS we have never really been able to embrace.]

I just built the blog 🙂 Thankfully even I can’t mess up a paid for WordPress theme [Linen] too badly and thanks once again to the Goodchild I wrangled the CSS into something sufficiently on brand and the platform Mr Gray built us means its nice and secure as well.

So thanks to everyone involved – especially Kath. It is a small step but in the right direction 🙂