Three cheers for the DFID bloggers (or DFID Officials: Unofficial)
This is far from breaking news, but I am way too impressed by the DFID bloggers to let it pass by unblogged.
If you haven’t already, go check them out and add them to your reader. Things I love about this group blog include…
- it’s a proper group blog: individual reports that fascinate on their own but when taken together build a picture of DFID’s overseas work (literally, a picture)
- it’s officials being unofficial, and blogging from their personal experience. This is hugely significant in terms of pushing the envelope of government 2.0
- DFID ministers are commenting on their officials’ blog posts. What just happened here? The whole government blogs thing just turned on its head is what
- the blogs are prominent, integrated, showcased on the DFID homepage (which also now feels that much more bloggier)
- the voice and headline writing (unlike mine own) is perfect. I believe Shane, Griff and Dave have something to do with this but the DFID bloggers clearly met them more than half way
- it’s wordpress, expertly deployed, with a clean, elegant, light and airy design:
DFID is so well placed to do this: it does fascinating front-line work and not a lot of people know about it back here in Blighty. So well done Julia and team, the DFID bloggers and all involved in the project. Long may it continue (and expand, develop, and inspire others to follow…)
This, plus No 10′s wordpress relaunch, and DIUS’s continual innovation… I can’t help feeling just a bit professionally jealous. But as readers of this blog will likely know, my team and I have plenty of reasons to be proud too : )
More reaction to the DFID bloggers:
- New recruits to Gov 2.0 (Andrew Lewin)
- DFID starts blogging (Dave Briggs)
- DFID bloggers: tales from the front line (Simon Dickson)
- DFID blogs go live (Shane McCracken)
- More UK government bloggers (Griff Wigley)
- Plugins in the DFID site (Simon Wheatley)
- DFID starts to blog (Owen Barder)
- …More from Google
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Comments
You say program, I say programme… but I think it would be rash at this stage to call anything off.
Thanks for dropping by, Griff. Camtasia is good, we’ve had some experience of that. Basecamp I haven’t used, but aware of its powers and keen to use it when I get the chance.
[...] Neil has an excellent write up of the project, and also a round up of other coverage. So rather than repeat what he said, I shall point you there, here. [...]
Okay not to sound stupid or anything but, what on earth is DFID? I am not sure what that is. I would like to know though I am all for learning something new. I just happened upon this blog but, would love to learn more about what it is talking about. Thanks for any info you can give me on this.
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Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
Good to have you highlight the DFID blog in such knowledgeable detail, Neil. It’s been quite satisfying to be part of the team working on this. (I’m the blogging coach.) I wish we had more of this happening here in the USA with our gov’t!
It’s too early in the project, of course, to know how this will all turn out. But it’s a promising start — the bloggers are new at it, but they’re all quite good writers already so they’ve been easy to coach.
One aspect to it that’s not visible (which I really should have included in my blog post) is that all the coaching and project management communications is happening via two projects in Basecamp set up by Shane. He and I have both used Basecamp for many projects over the years and find it invaluable… esp for a project like this where everyone is spread out over many time zones.
Simon Dickson from Puffbox has deployed some real wizardry with the WordPress design/implementation on this project. See his explanatory blog post.
Other tools not visible: I’m using Camtasia Studio to create a series of blogging how-to screencasts, which we host at Screencast.com. We hope the project continues to expand to include other DFID staff and that these screencasts, used over and over, will provide the foundation of a cost-effective training
programprogramme. (Got to get better at UK spelling!)