The Wardman Wire

This week Blog Platform is about a new group blog that is being launched about now. A number of bloggers with a technical background on the Internet have got together to start a new blog called poligeeks.co.uk. This is the description:

“A collective of geeky people that are into politics too. We help other bloggers like Guido and Iain Dale on the right as well as LabourHome and and others on both sides with their geeky stuff. We thought it might be nice to have our own collective blog where we could speak geek and share ideas.”

Here is the introductory article by Mike Rouse.

Introducing PoliGeeks

What is it for?

PoliGeeks is intended to be a simple collaborative blog that will allow those us that are somewhat behind the scenes in political blogging and politics in general to have a place where we can publish things that are of interest to us and others that are interested in the nuts and bolts of blogging and technology. The collaborative approach is taken to help alleviate the pressure of running a blog. The people that are likely to contribute to the blog tend to be very busy with a wide range of projects and we don’t want PoliGeeks to become a burden, but instead a welcome distraction or break-away from a project to make a post syaing, “Hey, I’m working on this and thought that this was cool and wanted to share it” - clients and even colleagues may not think it’s terribly cool, but fellow PoliGeeks probably will.

It is also important to emphasise that this is a cross-party blog. I’m sure it won’t do any harm to have debates about political technology - such as Obama’s internet tactics compared to McCain’s tactics with two contributors taking opposing sides. However, in the editorial sense and hopefully in its appeal it will be a cross-party affair.

Why is it needed?

I hope that as the blog grows it will become a valuable resource for bloggers to learn how to do various things from the people that are in the same area as they are. Also, I hope that fellow PoliGeeks will find it a great place to discuss and share what they’re up to. I think that providing this environment along with the cross-party approach will enable a community to be born that is made up of people that know about IT and the internet and have political interests. They may be contractors, in which case a community like this may be helpful in sharing projects and getting new work.

How Will it Achieve that?

One initial aim is to build a team of contributors so that we can maintain a regular posting frequency - we’re all very busy people and a lot of us are self-employed, so time is money. I’m hoping that as the community grows the blog will grow and evolve and prove to be a valuable resource for our audience. Once we are able to get regular posting in place and find our “blogging voice” I’m sure we will start to attract good traffic. As the traffic grows I am confident that our usefulness will increase, the community will grow and the marketplace for PoliGeeks will be healthier.

Who is involved?

Currently the following people are involved:

• Cassilis
• The Devil
• Phil Donohue
• Mark Pack
• Mike Rouse
• Matt Wardman

Wrapping Up

If you’d like to get in touch about getting involved drop a mail to mike@mikerouse.net. The idea is to have enough people to give a good range of skills/opinion and prevent it becoming too onerous on any one individual.

I’m hoping that this site will become a genuine non-partisan resource, that will enable independent political bloggers to make the best use of the most appropriate technology - and keep us innovating to maintain our distinctive contribution to political debate going.

You can find poligeeks at www.poligeeks.co.uk, or the feed at http://www.poligeeks.co.uk/feeds/posts/default .