Joining the fray without a firewall

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, May 13, 2008 @ 1:06 pm

The 37signals folks know a thing or two about building a brand through open public discourse. Today they blogged about their "public communications policy." I like what they had to say:

When you trust people to make a reasonable decision, they’ll usually make one. When you require everything someone writes to go through an approval process they’ll probably write less and be less interesting. We don’t want people to be afraid to write or afraid to think.

That's certainly the policy here at Pathfinder, where everyone is encouraged to post about their projects, interests and specialties. For some of us, it's part of our job description; for others, it's an officially sanctioned extracurricular. In fact, my colleague Dietrich Kappe and I are presenting a brown bag about effective blogging tomorrow to most of the company. We're that interested in hearing from everyone.

For development shops, corporate blogs offer the chance to show off techniques, processes, philosophies and opinions to potential customers, job-seekers and fellow travelers. We target most posts to the developer community rather than future clients. But even the most nitty-gritty technical how-to serves an important marketing function. By virtue of existing, these posts show clients our company's values and methodology. As for the technical details, well, let's hope they make us look smart every once in a while.

Flickr photo credit:
Randy Son of Robert

The 37signals post gives me flashbacks to working at big companies where software development isn't the core business. Programmers at such corporations often find
themselves barred from communication with the larger development
community. The average bank or airline or even ecommerce storefront doesn't completely forbid
blogging and open-source participation. It
simply places an enormous number of hurdles between developers and such
outlets. Once you allow the legal and marketing departments to
determine who can communicate what, when and how, you've all but
destroyed the impetus to participate. Luckily, pure-play tech companies such as Google and Yahoo have led the way to a more open dialog.

As I approach my first anniversary at Pathfinder, I'm grateful for
the opportunity to work someplace where there's no firewall between me and the
larger Ajax community. In fact, if I weren't joining the fray on a
daily basis, I wouldn't be doing my job.

On a related note, we'll soon be moving these blogs from their current subdomain into the bosom of the main Pathfinder site.
In the process, we'll give them a much nicer coat of paint and a new
platform, too: an internally hosted WordPress installation instead of
the externally hosted TypePad. Dietrich is hard at work on our
migration scripts, while I'm busy cooking up our new UI. I'm excited
that our Ajax blog will soon feature some actual Ajax on its own pages.

More on our big move when the date gets closer.

agile ajax

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