Meet our Tweeter

My name is Helen Armfield, aka littlepurplegoth, and I’m to be your official tweeter for the day.

I’ll be on the @IntranetNow account, giving you a taste of the speakers, the content of the sessions, and all round running commentary. So if you make the day (do come – check the agenda and tickets), you’ll get a useful set of prompts to aid future recall; and if we miss you, you can still join us online!

I’ve been around intranets a long time, from way back in the days when colleges gave you email that only worked internally, and everyone’s accounts were actually folders hung off a single root directory (first by course year, then tutor group). This was hideously insecure, and the few of us who already knew ‘computers’ didn’t take very long to find other people’s accounts and look inside. Don’t worry, we stopped again, but a bundle of us took to avoiding the college’s email system in favour of communicating via leaving .txt files in each others folders.

I prefer the way we do things now, not least because its possible to choose who sees what – but this early experience of internal communications coloured what I like to see in use in organisations. It was open, easy to access and use, required a little knowledge up front, but mainly treated us as trustworthy individuals with brains – we could be left to use the tools provided and so we did.

There are now so many tools available. From relatively open systems like wikis, textpads, and Google docs / sheets, to the walled gardens of the corporate / legal / financial sectors, the form and function of an intranet mirrors the internet (and especially the world wide web) as a whole. The point of this conference is to give us all a chance to explore the people behind and within this, to build our community, to share examples of best practise, to find other solutions to intranet needs. To communicate.

I’m looking forward to being there with you.