Reflections on our First Blogathon
Earlier this month, we gathered as a team for our very first Blogathon. We met up at the National Archives during National Storytelling Week, with a plan to dedicate time to think about, create and collaborate on content. We wanted to share our ideas, be together as a team, and to help each other to feel empowered to contribute to the company blog, which is designed to curate our insights and experiences for our clients and community.
How did the day go?
We started the day at 9.30am, enjoying a coffee and settling into the surroundings steeped in history. We reminded ourselves why we were there and discussed what we each wanted out of the session.
It was interesting to recognise the various challenges people had in blog writing. Some people found it difficult to ‘get in the zone’ and to find inspiration for articles to write about. Others didn’t feel able to write with confidence or authoritatively on certain topics. There was also a question of writing style and people not knowing whether or not their way of writing would be considered ok or not.
During the day there was a really strong desire to support each other in the writing process and to find the most effective ways of sharing our experiences with the world. It was impactful to know that the challenges we each felt were shared by others and that we were not alone in this process.
What blogs did we work on?
Many different topics were discussed and we were really delighted to have brainstormed so many ideas.
Some of the articles we worked on included:
Making data useful
Learnings the crafts: Programming and Software Engineering
UKGovCamp Design systems and AI session
5 Tips for a Junior
5 Tips to Support your Juniors
Data visualisation: Why is it an important skill for a data architect
Designing the Spreadsheet Importer
How to explain a data set
We are excited to share these all with you and will be dedicating time in the following weeks to complete as many of these as possible.
What do we want moving forwards?
During our lovely lunch at The Botanist, in Kew, we discussed how the day had gone and how we each felt about where we had got to. It was really encouraging to hear how positive everyone was about the experience and how powerful it was to be together. It felt as though we had achieved some breakthroughs and that many more great things were to come!
We want to hold more Blogathons like this and to ensure that we give ourselves the space and time to create and collaborate together. We are already planning our next one and hope to run them on a quarterly basis.
Over the years we have seen much growth in our blog. We are keen to keep building on this. If you’d like to see us write about a particular topic relating to data, digital, technology or something else, do let us know as we’d love to hear from you.