In the news

First off, the landlord called again this morning. They found where the check had been deposited, their mistake. *huge sigh of relief*

An Open Offer to Utah State IT Employees -this is a good idea, let your people create blogs and share knowledge with each other, or even outside their organization. I’ve suggested the same thing to people here but there’s been no follow through at all on that. My thought being that since a large part of what we offer our members is tied to our Statehouse lobbying efforts, and so many people don’t know what is involved with lobbying, it would benefit us to have our lobbyists blogging on our website about the work they do, giving business people the opportunity to see exactly what is involved and why lobbying is an important part of the legislative process. State-level lobbying is important because state senators and representatives typically have a very limited scope of knowledge and need to be educated on issues outside of their small areas of expertise. For example, a rep from a farming community may get elected based on his expertise on agricultural issues, but may have no concept of the issues when it comes to a vote on spending for urban renewal projects. That’s where he should listen to lobbyists on both sides of an issue and learn the pros and cons of the spending. If your side isn’t lobbying, the rep isn’t going to just “know” what the issues are.

Now how much more informative would that little bit be if it came from an actual lobbyist, and included details about the issue and why we’re for or against it, and what you can do to help persuade your representative? That’s what I think our website needs to attract members, and I think I could convince a couple of the lobbyists to do it, but I don’t think management wants to lose “complete editorial control” over what is being said publicly. That’s too bad.

The other thing I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at is using news aggregators in the workplace. For my purposes, it works great. I’ve got tech news coming out my ears in my aggregator every single day. The rest of the organization, however, is not quite up to speed. Not because I couldn’t set it up for them, but because the feeds aren’t there yet. I need Ohio newspapers to create feeds, political organizations to create feeds, and I need other associations to create feeds. Once we have those in place, and people can reap the benefits of an aggregator, I could probably convince our website people to create feeds for our news releases, or even our blogs, maybe! OK enough dreaming for me, I’ve got some actual work to do. *L*

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