Andy Reitz (blog)

 

 

Believe-it-or-not, but I actually had a good day at work today!

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So, I couldn't have predicted this when I woke up this morning, but today was a pretty gosh-darn good day at work. For the last several months, I have been evangelizing blogging, and how I think it could really help EDS. I actually started thinking these thoughts after attending Bloggercon last year. My first attempt at blogging was to pitch the idea of allowing me to start up an external blog on eds.com to some random people within the company.

Obviously, that didn't go anywhere.

So, I refactored my idea, and pitched the idea of blogging internally, to my immediate team. Well, my boss bit on the idea, and gave me the freedom to explore this (after we shipped our code two weeks ago, of course). So, I grabbed some OSS blogging software, and got something setup at work. I've been blogging for about two weeks now, and it has been going pretty good. At least, it's making me feel better about work, and it is something that I really look forward to. So far, I have been posting about once a day, except for this week, where I have been posting twice a day.

In fact, I was getting ready to write my first post this morning, when one of my co-workers alerted me to the fact that EDS announced a corporate blog today [registration required: use bugmenot]! The url is http://www.eds.com/blogs - go and check it out!

So, it looks like I won't be "the one" who brings blogging to EDS. But that's okay, I'm just happy that there are some other folks there who are on the same page that I am. What's good is that I am now getting plugged in with some people in EDS who "get" blogs. My whole master plan for this blog that I'm doing at EDS isn't just for me to have a place to write, but to get lots and lots of people in EDS sharing information through blogs. Stage one has been to setup a platform (done), and now I'm in stage two, trying to recruit blogging soldiers for my war on how my company communicates internally. I felt like I made a lot of progress on this front today -- so yeah, it was a quite unexpected, but all together good day.

-Andy.

 

 

3 Comments

Did you think at all about starting a Wiki? We had a similar problem with internal communication at my work, so I started a wiki about a year ago. It seems to go in fits and starts, but at least there's a single place where people can jot down notes.

I am all over Wiki! I started off this year pitching three things: Blogs, Wiki, and RSS. I decided to start with blogs, because there was so much stuff that I wanted to write about, that it was killing me.

Now that I have that going, I can pursue Wiki. I think that there are a lot of low-hanging fruit with what my team is doing that Wiki is quite suitable for. I plan to start trying out some OSS Wiki's, and blog about my journey along the way!

:)

-Andy.

For what it's worth we use TWiki which is really easy to set up and administer, very customizable, and seems to have some good features.