I don’t suppose this project can really ignore the Civil Serf saga. In short, Civil Serf write eloquently, but disparagingly about the govt department in which she worked and about the ministers she worked for indirectly. It was an entertaining read and contained some quotes ideal for consumption in the national press. And last weekend the national press wrote about it and the blog disappeared as Civil Serf presumably fretted about keeping the job she didn’t really seem to enjoy.

Inevitably it will make some senior officials worry about letting staff blog about their work, but I hope that we don’t end up as far as some fear in that the Civil Service Code will be amended to specifically ban blogging.

Most people seem to agree with Jeremy Gould, the Whitehall Webby, in that Civil Serf “crossed the line”. It wasn’t so much that she was blogging but that she wasn’t abiding by the spirit of the code and bringing the civil service into disrepute.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.