This Mothership as an Intranet?

One thing which a lot of people around here seem to agree on is “we need better internal communications“.

So I thought I’d spend a few minutes playing in the mothership to explore if and how it could help. This is therefore not an official initiative, although:

• “Blogging the Change” has been included in the “Add value to users/clients by reinforcing engagement” project, which is meeting for the first time this Thursday
• the idea of blogging both internally and externally about the introduction of participatory governance has been generally favourably received

More on that to follow.

In the meantime, this post can serve as a place to discuss if and how this blog could serve to improve internal communications across the EurActiv network.

To begin with:

• I’ve created an Internal Comms category for the entire internal comms blog
• … and an ‘About’ subcategory for discussions about this internal comms blog

The problem I foresee is that Mothership has been conceived more as a Resource Centre than a communications tool. As a result:

• every post will appear on Mothership’s menu, left – if this blog was to work, that would render the rest of the mothership unusable
• there’s no ‘Internal Comms Home Page’
• there’s no usage of tags to find content
• there’s nowhere to put an ‘all comments’ widget to make it easy to see where the conversation is

The obvious solution is to create a subblog of the Mothership for Internal Comms. As Maxime mentioned, this could be linked to a public EurActiv blog (i.e., some internal posts could be checked and ‘promoted’ to the public space).

All thoughts welcome…