Wolf Richter

To continue the OII’s tradition of gathering all active (and wannabe) bloggers at the OII to share their experiences and discuss about possibilities to further improve the visibility of the OII’s blogosphere, Malte Ziewitz has called in another OII blogging roundtable. For the first time, also the new DPhil students were invited to join the roundtable. The OII webteam presented on the OII’s development agenda and their priorities for 2007/2008: In particular the RSS feed and the possibilities to include new plug-ins in the OII’s WordPress blog caught on with the crowd.

The major area of concern was how to further broaden the range of topics covered in the blogs and how to even better expose the richness of the OII experience to the outside world. Three major initiatives were approved by the roundtable and will be implemented as soon as development capacity allows:

1. The blog will be used to introduce visitors at the OII. Continuing the early success of the email introduction of visitors to all OII members established last year, we should also use the blog space to portray the variety of visitors currently visiting at the OII. This is also to encourage visitors to document their time at the OII in the blog or to include their existing blog into the OII’s blog during their stay. The same also applyies for the new DPhil students, which have just joined the OII and are eagerly exploring the space. We should expect to see short introduction by the new DPhil students soon, and hope that many of them will join the blogosphere as active bloggers themselves.

2. Priority will be given to use the OII blog to cover the numerous events taking place every week at the OII. The roundtable found that instead of posting the official event description on the blog, we should strive to cover all events in a short blog post. To achieve this ambitious goal, the webteam will approach bloggers in advance and encourage them to cover certain events.

3. Another priority should be to announce successful papers produced at the OII. We agreed that the OII blog should not only serve as the window into the OII’s social community, but also mirror the academic life. The blog should serve as an amplifier for the amazing research projects going on at the OII, many of which have relevance far outside the traditional academic networks and deserve appropriate visibility. Even prior to the establishment of a publication repository at the OII, which is planned to launch in the near future, we should aim to post abstract or plain English descriptions of all publications produced under the roof of the OII.

In order to lower the barrier of entry into the blogosphere, the webteam will explore the feasibility of installing an email address through which posts can be directly posted to the OII research blog without logging on to WordPress. The email address will be announced to all OII members after implementation.

And last but not least: the next blogging roundtable will be coming up soon! We will continue the tradition of inviting prolific and outspoken bloggers (e.g. last year Wendy Seltzer) to share their experiences and give first-hand advice on how to start and maintain a lively blogging culture.