When Should Blogging Be Mandatory?

After my post Make Blogging Mandatory for Knowledge Management, there has been a continuing flurry of thoughts about mandatory blogging floating around:

• Knowledge Management Made Mandatory? from Mary Abraham
• Going with the flow from Mark Gould
• Blogging Mandatory Or Voluntary? from Mike Gotta
• Unsocialable Uses of Social Media from Mary Abraham

When Jack Vinson made his knowledge management start blogging he used the term flogging.

I think that is how most people would interpret forced blogging.

Forced blogging would just be another bad KM system that is poorly populated with content and outside the flow of most people's work.

That being said, there are situations where blogging can be mandatory. If the team decides to manage a project through a blog (or wiki) then the team can decide to make blogging mandatory. In that case, the blog post is replacement for email. The team blog is not asking people to take the extra step of crafting a blog post. You are merely asking them to change the way the team communicates. You are just changing the process, not adding to it.

As Michael Idinopulos coined the phrase you are putting blogging "in the flow, not above the flow."

You are not asking people to take individual positions in individual blogs. You are asking them to contribute to the flow of information for a particular project or case. You are merely replacing email communication with blog communication. That is a great idea.