Commenter Krishna alerted me to the fact that Members of the House of Lords are blogging!

The aim of the blog is to help educate, raise awareness and engage with the public on a range of issues relating to the role and business of the House of Lords.

The blog is authored by a group of Members from across the House. Each Member has their own profile and personal section of the blog. A ‘homepage’ provides an at-a-glance digest of the latest post from each Member.

The experiment is being run by the Hansard Society – an independent, political research and education charity based in the UK. Their stated goal is to “strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics.”

It seems that right now, about eleven Members are blogging and there is an open invitation on the blog for any interested Members to contact the Hansard Society to participate – further reinforcing that this wasn’t mandated but rather a little skunkworks experiment (that and the fact that it a WordPress.com blog!)

This is such a brilliant idea. For example, you can read about how Lord Taylor met with Barack Obama three years ago or read an overview of the debate the House of Lords had on the prevailing economic situation.

There’s a lot of talk about how companies should blog and have open conversations with their customers. How excellent would it be if the politicians we have elected to represent us start blogging? A blog for the House and the Senate? They should look to their colleagues across the pond for guidance.