The opinions expressed on this blog are only the opinions of…?

Hi – I’d love an answer to this question too. I – like many others – run a personal blog which has nothing to do with JISC, and I find the whole process very useful (even when I don’t get time to use it).

We are often sent out to talk about our JISC work at conferences/meetings etc, and people value the fact (i think) that we speak for ourselves rather than just being a corporate mouthpiece. I think part of the reason we have been so successful in building several overlapping communities is that we are approachable.

Surely a blog should have the same rules as speaking at a meeting? (and twitter, come to that?)

Nice blog, by the way.

David

My first instinct is to say you should be expressing some degree of personal opinion rather than simply toeing the corporate line – which I can get from the ‘official’ channels. However, that said, I actually feel that this blog has an’official feel to it – it is used to distribute information about JISC services, collections, etc as relate to access management.

I think the first thing is to be clear about the purpose and status of this blog. Is it an official communications channel? Is it part of your job to update it? If this is a team blog, do all members of the team agree on these things?

Although I don’t think platform is the only factor I definitely think that blogging on a JISC platform implies some level of ‘approval’ of the blog – so I’d say from a readers perspective if I was reading this on nicole.com I’d be much clearer you weren’t talking on behalf of JISC. At the moment it’s a bit like you are using headed notepaper.

A parallel of writing to a newspaper letters page occurs to me – this often lies somewhere between the official and the personal – although this is not always viewed the same by employer and employee so clear policies help.

As a crusted old bureaucrat, my view is that in writing on a JISC Involve blog, you’re doing so in an official role, and that the views you express could be seen as representative of those of the organisation, however many disclaimers you add. The same would apply to comments made in emails sent from your jisc.ac.uk account. As Owen says above, another analogy is something written on an organisation’s headed notepaper.

As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say about someone, come and sit down right next to me’

Both Joe and Owen have beaten me to it! Peoples comments and statements should all be regarded in the same way – whether they are on Twitter, a blog, at a committee meeting, presentation or whatever else. If you are ‘talking’ under the JISC aegis then you are assuming the authority of the organisation – no-one that I am aware of stands up, for instance, at a conference as someone from JISC and then says that what they are about to say are personal views. Simply adding a disclaimer to a JISC platform blog does not absolve anyone from their responsibilities – you cannot claim some sort of parliamentary privilege. A statement made in the JISC ‘world’ should be one that someone is prepared to defend and take the consequences for if necessary. This is not about constraining people or denying them the opportunity to voice views but simply about reminding ourselves that these are not comments made in a vacuum or without consequence.

I have often wondered whether some peoples blog posts and tweets in particular are simply used as a way to be critical of someone or something without being prepared to take the consequences of their comments – a recent Eduserv Twitterer seemed to have adopted this path.

Comments on a personal blog are however different and maybe it is here, if anywhere, that any disclaimer should be placed – so if referring to something work related then it might be more appropriate for the author the to claim that these are personal views and not those of the organisation. As Nicole says it is then for the individual to decide whether their identity is so closely bound to the organisation that they cannot be told apart – either way surely it would be prudent on a personal blog to make it clear that any work related comments are purely personal?

So what happens when you RESPOND on your own blog but as an individual?

By the way; “These are my personal views and not necessarily the views of JISC”

To clarify – I don’t think this is a black and white issue – it is all shades of grey. See also the discussion on Paul Walk’s blog (http://blog.paulwalk.net/2009/03/06/anything-you-quote-from-twitter-is-always-out-of-context/)

I don’t agree with Robert when he says “Peoples comments and statements should all be regarded in the same way – whether they are on Twitter, a blog, at a committee meeting, presentation or whatever else.” – I think these are different venues, and statements in each should be treated differently. I’d treat something you said to me down the pub differently to what you said in a committee meeting. My point about this blog is that it seems to me (and it is a personal view) like an ‘official’ JISC blog, so what you say here is more closely (for me) connected to your JISC role.

Since Twitter is clearly not a JISC platform I’d tend to take those things you say on Twitter as less closely connected to your JISC role – when I tweet “Another Sunday evening coming to an end, and I have yet again failed to do any ironing” I’m hardly doing this in a professional context!

There is also a question of your role in an organisation – I’d say it would be very difficult for a senior politician to blog about aspects of their work without it being linked back to their ‘official’ identity – if Gordon Brown muses on the economy it hardly matters which ‘hat’ he is wearing.

I have a personal blog which is purely personal, and I have another personal blog which is professional in its scope. When I started in my current role I did look at moving my professional blogging activity to a institutional platform – but my place of work (Imperial College) were unable to provide this (or indeed a blogging policy) at the time. I’m actually quite glad in retrospect, as I think it gives me a slightly freer hand (and something I can carry with me if I move jobs at any point) – however there is also some stuff I don’t blog about to avoid conflicts between my professional and personal identities.

Whether you feel you can successfully establish a personal blog that gives you slightly freer expression than a ‘work’ one is clearly a question only you (and perhaps your employer) can answer. I don’t think that Robert is right that this is ‘simply used as a way to be critical of someone or something without being prepared to take the consequences of their comments’ – if I wanted to do that I could set up an anonymous blog (as some librarians have e.g. http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/580000658.html) – and although it is sometimes tempting to get things off your chest, I’m not particularly in favour of this approach.

I do think we have a right to maintain an individual identity that is separate from our work identity – but this is not just an issue for the online world, as the suspension (and subsequent departure) of Lee Harvey from the HEA shows (at least according to the Times Higher) “His crime was to have written a personal letter for publication to Times Higher Education criticising the National Student Survey” (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403060)

This is ‘clearly’ a corporate blog; it says so in big letters at the top of the screen, it is on an institutionally-managed domain, and it’s even (almost) in corporate colours. Here you are absolutely, clearly, and irrefutably the Nicole who works for JISC. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous.

That said, you’re entitled to personal opinions, just as you are face to face in a meeting to which you have been invited as a JISC employee.

JISC isn’t the sort of organisation to employ sheep who will blithely spout the official line. You weren’t employed for your filing abilities, but for your knowledge and expertise in a particular space. JISC (should, and almost certainly does) value that expertise, and JISC should trust you to express your own opinions in a way that won’t bring you or your employer into disrepute.

That official role does NOT mean that you are unable to say things that might offend or ’cause trouble’, and it also doesn’t mean that you’re unable to criticise. As in any other forum, you should be trusted to exercise your own judgement as to when you might be about to go too far.

If things are ‘wrong’ or in need of challenge, and you fail to do so in order not to offend or get your bosses hot under the collar, how exactly are you being honest to yourself or serving your community?

I think working for JISC is slightly different from working for a university too because you’re a funding body and therefore need to be seen as objective and fair. Working for a university, even as academic-related staff, there is slightly more ‘academic freedom’. Nonetheless I still feel a lot more comfortable having my own blog not on an institutional platform.

Interesting topic. Its def shades of grade for me too. For example my twitter account (zakmensah) is personal in view, but includes work as my working life and personal interests often merge and I cant be doing with having two separate accounts. With that said, i am aware that I am followed by other JISC/community folk so there is no swearing etc. If some policy were to appear that stated no personal tweets, then I would have to stop using twitter, as if it just became a reflection of works blog then why repeat it, see point 6 of this post http://www.10000words.net/2009/03/top-7-mistakes-new-twitter-users-make.html .
Even in work I can have a personal view and regular do include this. I use what i hope is the correct etiquette for the web. If we all had no personal view then this blog comment would have to be vetted by my manager perhaps?

Look forward to others professional/personal views?

Zak

DVD commentaries -they go out on a studio DVD, yet sometimes arn’t the promo fluff the studio puts out. Its kind of accepted that they may not toe the official line completly -yet accompany “official content”

Blogging is a differnt paradigm from a presentation etc

I think these are issues that many of us have wrestled with and there’s no clear answer. As a reader, I expect a blog like this to have more of a personal voice, and I don’t expect them to be aligned perfectly with those of JISC. I feel the same way about myself or my team writing on blogs – we have them partly because they are a different, more personal form of discourse. But there’s still a professional realm to it, and our own guidelines distinguish between critical and disparaging comment, for instance.

I know that Chris Rusbridge has commented that he can’t but help write a blog from a personal, as opposed to institutional, point of view – and he’s probably more readable and more interesting as a result. But there are times when I’ve wished for a place to write which is more distant from my institution because there are things I would not be comfortable saying from that perspective.

That said, I wasn’t aware that the jiscinvolve platform was quite so official. We (UKOLN and ULCC) have been using it for a project blog for some time and I don’t for one moment see that as having any sort of JISC officialness to it.

I was musing on this subject last year (on my personal blog) and, like other comments in response to Nicole’s excellent post, I made the point that language and context are intrinsically interlinked and should be taken very seriously by all bloggers.

I run (rather badly) three blogs – thus none of them are that active – one quite obviously as a personal/professional blog that discusses events/issues that seem worth sharing with others. The tone is respectful (I hope) and considered and is a reflection of how I wish others to perceive me and deal with to avoid linking any comments back to my experiences as an employee of an organisation.

The second is a work blog, on a hosted platform of the organisation who employs me – in fact I have two platforms for blogging on that platform – one related to direct work responsibilities and the other a more reflective view on life as I see it within the organisation I work for.

Finally, I have a closed, private blog which I share only with family members.

The content is clearly different for each blog. The language I use is also quite different – because the contexts are different.

As for twitter – there’s a real skill in a tweet and I agree with those who’ve said that this is pure personal reflection and musing; it’s information sharing in all senses and meanings of the phrase and yes it’s pure “you”. It’s not JISC, Cardiff University, UCISA, WNL or any of the other organisations I’m connected with BUT because I have so many “identities” I’m (again hopefully) rather careful with the language I use in tweets. To date, I have only been caught out twice, but it is a discipline that leads me to think that teaching awareness of context and language is a new literacy that should be learnt by all who wish to engage in blogging or micro-blogging or anything that leads to publication.