I have about a dozen or so word or phrases that Google Alerts looks for and one of them is the phrase “leadership blogging.” Today I got one alerting me to a ZDNet blog post by Phil Windley titled Blogs and the flu: eGovernment in action:
Last week, Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, penned the final post on the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog (PFL blog)-a blog sponsored by HHS. The blog consisted of over 100 posts from contributors in the healthcare, faith-based, business and community sectors. The blog is a great resource for current thinking on how the US can respond to the threat of pandemic flu. The blog is not ongoing, but rather was active for five weeks (May 22 – June 27, 2007). Each week featured a theme and half way through there was a leadership forum with people live blogging the event…
I think the blog is a noteworthy example of how blogs can be used as a tool in eGovernment to raise awareness, start conversations, and encourage public participation. The blog is well done and deftly avoids the pitfalls of official government blogs. Hats off to HHS.
I’ve not read it all but what appears to be missing is A) participation by the leaders in the comment threads attached to their own blog posts; and B) blog posts by leaders in which they indicate that they’ve read the comment threads and better yet, agree/disagree with or learned something in those conversations. Again, I could be wrong about this, as I’ve not read everything.
But I’m impressed with this effort for the same reasons Windley noted. I’ve done time-limited web forums involving leaders in Northfield since the mid-90s. I’ve also worked with some clients in which we’ve used a project blog in conjunction with a time-limited web forum. This stellar effort by HHS gives me more ideas about how my efforts could be improved upon, whether the forum portion of it is F2F or web-based.
