Case Story: PublicPrivate

Summary
Group / workshop	None	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

A local project with multiple partners across an institution. Project team members meet face to face once a month or so but are involved in collaborative work in between and need to be aware of each other's activities.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The project team needed a way of facilitating on going discussions about the project, some but not all of which would be of interest to people outside the team. The team also had to provide enough externally facing commentary to inform the wider community of their activities. The project therefore needed both internal and external (private and public?) communication mechanisms.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Initially two blogs were set up - one publicly accessible (set up first), the other for internal project use (added later) only. Blogs were chosen as the nature of the communication was to report (and then perhaps comment on) individual contributions and activities. Individual team members were given authorship rights on both. Team members were encouraged to post to either or both depending on the intended audience. This was changed as it became clear that only the private blog was being used. The private blog was removed, existing postings were copied to the public blog and new posts were made to the public blog. Anything not suitable was kept for email list communication.

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

When there were two blogs, team members almost exclusively posted on the private blog. There was confusion about what constituted "public interest" and members were reluctant to commit "work in progress" to the public blog. The confusion led in some cases to posting privately and in others to not posting at all. Once the private blog was removed, and posts from the private copied across to the public, usage of the public blog was much more extensive, the reluctance reduced and it gradually became clear that practically everything reported was relevant to this space. Genuinely internal discussions (primarily about process, budget etc) were confined to email list communication. However making the default public has increased the external dissemination of project activity (and improved internal communication).

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

Offered the choice of public and private, many will choose private, so if public dissemination is important this needs to be implied by the tool set provided.

Delaying commitment to placing material in the public domain seemed to encourage posting and remove initial fear. Delayed commitment might be a pattern.

Too many choices lead to confusion and nothing being achieved.

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.