Weblog Policy

One of the action points from our initial meeting was to come up with a "weblog policy" - some guidelines about how we should be posting to this, non-company, weblog. Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, and more recently founder of the collaboration company, Groove Networks, posted some guidelines on his blog a while ago. Probably a good place to start:

Please make it clear to your readers that the views you express are yours alone and that they do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. To help reduce the potential for confusion, we would appreciate it if you put the following notice – or something similar – in a reasonably prominent place on your site (e.g., at the bottom of your “about me” page)

• The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
• If you do put a notice on your site, you needn’t put it on every page, but please use reasonable efforts to draw attention to it – if at all possible, from the home page of your site.
• Take care not to disclose any information that is confidential or proprietary to the company or to any third party that has disclosed information to us. Consult the company’s confidentiality policy for guidance about what constitutes confidential information.
• Please remember that your employment documents give the company certain rights with respect to concepts and developments you produce that are related to the company’s business. Please consult your manager if you have questions about the appropriateness of publishing such concepts or developments related to the company’s business on your site.
• Since your site is a public space, we hope you will be as respectful to the company, our employees, our customers, our partners and affiliates, and others (including our competitors) as the company itself endeavors to be.

I think this is relevant, but I am aware that the guidelines above were aimed at individual employees creating their own personal weblogs. This is a group weblog purposely intended to help us explore stuff specifically for work.

Does this make a difference ? Thoughts please.