[A word before we get to today's topic. We contributors have agreed to post once a week, and that will be about all I'll be able to manage for awhile. I come home from work with all sorts of ideas stirring around in my head, but I'm also brain-dead and dead tired, so writing is going to happen after I've had a day to recover. I start with this caveat in case there are any expectations of immediacy. With that said, we're becoming very web 2.0 at work, and there's a lot to say because we are currently undergoing a complete overhaul.]

I have a few soapboxes at work; I stand on them a lot as we go through the process of redesigning our web site. One of them is that we need to support our technical community in two ways:

1. providing them with information about our systems so they know:
• how to implement them in their specialized environments (creating capability)
  
• what processes we follow for making decisions or changes (creating trust)
  
2. enabling them to share their extensive information with each other and with us (creating community)

Historically, we have very little information available for them. We are a black box. There's some information out there, but someone typically has to direct you to it. There's no findability, and there's no link to what is available from our product pages.

What's interesting is that I get a lot of support for the idea of providing better findability for the information that will create capability. Some aren't sure of the idea of creating community. I think this has two causes. We do have a few in our customer base who like nothing better to take potshots. They lie in wait for the opportunity to arise. The other cause is a fear, I believe, that people will not participate. I'm not too worried--we have good participation on our mailing lists, and I think we can translate that to forums and community generated content.

Where I run into resistance (fear) is creating trust by opening up the black box. We run centralized IT services (network, phone, security, etc.) that others can and often must use. They can also run some of their own services. We have a lot of power, and we can make things difficult for people, oftentimes inadvertently (these usually end up being labeled "communication problems," but that's another post). That makes people upset and more likely to take potshots.

So, we open it up. Listening to our folks complain about the complaints they get and talking to customers tells me that this is what we need to do. As we enter the content phase of the web site redesign project, we will integrate that at several levels of the site--mission level, SLAs, policies, product/service descriptions, and more. Exposing information creates trust.