Blogging the Bank-Fund Spring Meetings

The World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings took place this past weekend, and this year, we decided to blog about the meetings and all the events that took place around them. (In English and in Spanish!)

For a pilot, I think the World Bank Meetings Center did quite well. The preliminary traffic numbers are looking pretty good, and I've received some pretty good feedback from people that visited the site.

That said, there were very few comments on the posts -- perhaps not surprising considering the type of content and the timelines in which we launched the pilot. Going forward in the future, we're going to make an effort to make the tone more conversational but still keep the focus on providing quality information to people that don't want to wade through a series of press releases.

A good lesson learned for the upcoming Annual Meetings this fall.

A Bank of Photos

Blogging about the events did give us a chance to highlight some of the amazing photography in the World Bank Flickr stream. Unbeknowst to some people, the Bank's photostream has some high quality photos from around the world, all available for use under a Creative Commons license.

You can check out the photos from the Spring Meetings at the Spring Meetings 2009 photo set, or just visit the photostream to see the rich collection of photography that's available to use.

And a few quick questions before I sign off: does licensing these photos under a Creative Commons license make sense to you? Are these the kinds of photos you can see yourself using in various places around the web? How can we make our photo collection more robust and useful? Let us know.