Bogging

Dear Sandwell Borough Council,

Please provide the total anticipated costs of hosting the Interim
Chief Executives blog as the "word on the street", namely
http://janbritton.org/ or any other derivative of such a domain
name for the financial year 2010/11

Please confirm whether the costs of hosting this platform would
have been cheaper to have been hosted by Sandwell Council own
computer section as opposed to external hosting

Yours faithfully,

A Sindu

Dear Liz O'Nions,

Many thnaks for your response. I have been contacted by another
individual who alerted me to the following:-

"Actually - are they telling the truth?
Source: http://juliac2.wordpress.com/

4. Dave Coveney – interconnectIT
Dave told an interesting anecdote: the story of Jan Britton head of
transport at a local council. He wanted a blog, went to IT, who
told him no. He surfed the web, found WP, signed up, and started.
Virtually zero cost (apart from time) and already saved the need to
print newsletters. Initially, it was a private blog, just of
interest to his team but still hosted on WP.com It gradually took
off. He had lots of views and comments, so began to want more
features – time to move to a hosted solution. It went went from
blog layout to more like a website – more newsy. Traffic went up,
more people read more pages.

Then, JB became interim chief exec of council, moved from a
departmental position to the top role, and interest in what he had
to say grew hugely. It was recognised this is now a primary
communication channel, and a single email which alerted people to a
new post was not smart – the servers almost collapsed, so there was
a need for tactics: aim to spread awareness gradually, eg send out
series of mailshots – not just one to all council staff, try
sending at different times of day. Popularity gave others pause for
thought, they realised they could add their material to this.
Communications team use it too – remaining careful to keep it as a
conversation rather than a dry more formal announcement/broadcast
channel – “I’m thinking about….” Widgets added for things like
quick straw poll or votes on ideas. It is now external too –
council staff, still look, but also but also local
papers/journalists.
Total cost so far – around £8k – I call that good value for money"

You should be able to see the full post at
http://juliac2.wordpress.com/. In the light of the comment as a
furtehr FOI request can you confirm the total cost spent by
Sandwell Council since Mr Britton first commenced his blog to
inlude each yearly hosting amount and any additional "set up fees"
etc.

Many thanks

Yours sincerely,

A Sindu