Kate Phizackerley Means Business

Not sure how I missed it before, but there's a new acronym people are using:

GRC = Governance, Risk management and Compliance

It may come in handy here too since I discuss all of those topics.

I'm quiet here because most of my efforts are directed at building an online Ancient Egypt magazine, which we are calling Egyptological Online. As part of the project, I have included an "how we built Egyptological" blog. There are four reasons for that:

1. As part of our project governance we have identified the need for strong supporting documentation.  Publication encourages documentation which is written to a high standard.
   
2. Our project is a community magazine and is written on open source software (WordPress).  Publication is consistent with that philosophy.
   
3. Despite the proliferation of magazine-style themes for WordPress, most are designed only to support a river of posts more like a blog.  Support for editions isn't available in most themes.  We suspect that we will be approached and asked how we have built the magazine and whether we could help somebody launch a magazine on another topic.  Publication of or development notes means we can direct people to the blog rather than answer dozens of questions.
   
4. Content equals traffic.  Search engines love links and traffic.  Unless a matter is confidential, it makes sense to publish it.

The latest post is a practical example of how we have approached risk assessment.  (A warning though.  As this post was written (February 15th, 2010), Egyptological is still very much under development.  There are still a lot of test posts rather than final content and the design is still only 60% complete.  That shouldn't detract you from reading a good example of risk assessment in practice, but please don't expect to see a finished site.  If you are reading this sometime later, then the site should hopefully be finished!)