Informal learning for organizational writers

It’s been a while since my first posting . It’s also been a while since I have been working at all, so the blog had to wait as well.

Anyway, here is my latest informal learning initiative:

One of my clients, a big financial organization asked me to help the people who write their procedures. Workers in this organization complain the procedures are not friendly, difficult to understand or apply. All the writers are not professional writers, but rather high ranking experts, each in their own field. We have some 200 of those.

My usual response to such requests is a course or workshop followed by some OJT coaching. This time, true to my Informal-learning resolution, I’ve added some informal components to my response.

We decided to start a special page/site in the organizational knowledge management (KM) system. I’ve called it Procedure Writers’ Doorstep.  I use the term "doorstep" often to indicate something smaller than a whole portal.
The site will include a forum for writers, and also a forum for readers who wish to respond or feedback the writers. We shall also publish some weekly tips and principles on the subject of effective writing. These are open to comments in a way similar to our blogs, so there should be some more focused conversations there.

Here is a question I would like to pose: since solutions like the one I’ve described reside on organizational intRAnet platforms, how can we use tools like blogs or wikis? Are there special intranet versions? Are they safe? You know, financial organizations are data-safety nuts, and for a good reason. Well, truth is all my clients are…

By the way, talking of effective writing, I do not know how many people here are aware of it, but we are very honored to have Bob Horn  as a member of our community. In all my writing seminars I talk about him and his Information-Mapping concept. For me he is a real genius, but I have never had any contact with him until this unworkshop. His concepts were later used by famous gurus especially Ruth Colvin Clark  (one good article to read is: Recycling Knowledge With Learning Objects) who based most of her training design models on Horn’s work.

Hey, this is my first experience with creating links in a blog. what a feat! I realy hope they work…
I used the very elemntary method of the linking icon of the editor here, but peeping into the documentation showed this is just the tip of the iceberg. It seems linking is an art I'll have to master here.