Five open source ideas to inspire a meeting

(I’ve written these words to provide some material for a meeting with senior managers and creators here at the BBC on Friday).
There’s a vast social and economic experiment – centred on the Internet – that’s been going on for ten or fifteen years: it’s called ‘open source‘. The evidence is accummulating that the open source [...]

Making meetings more open

Some people put a line of checkboxes like this in their email sig files:

Private [ ] Ask [ ] Bloggable [ ]
Do you think that a properly open organisation might do something similar in meetings? A red flag on the conference table would mean “private (no blogging, no nothing, don’t [...]

More on the BBC and Wikipedia

Pretty much as soon as I got my Wikipedia blog post up on Friday Roo Reynolds, who looks after social media at BBC Vision (which is what they used to call Television), posted on his own blog some guidance he’s written for Wikipedia wannabes at the BBC. His guidance was originally available on an internal [...]

Andy Parfitt, Controller, Radio 1

Andy Parfitt, enduring and super-successful Controller of Radio 1, sits at a small desk in amongst his team. No egomaniac then. But is he interested in openness? Well, on the face of it, yes. I asked him for some examples from Radio 1’s recent past and the two he came up with were BeckyCam and [...]

Count them—three IPTV Platforms!

The BBC’s always been in the platform business. It was BBC engineers who designed and built the broadcast platforms of your analogue youth. They built them without the slightest expectation of remuneration from competing broadcasters and usually did so in the spirit of international collaboration that spread these standards around the planet at a remarkable [...]

Saving Public Service Media

(I wrote this piece for iPlayer day over at the BBC Internet Blog but it was judged to be a bit ‘edgy’ for use there)
He’s an unlikely saviour for the creaking edifice we call public service broadcasting isn’t he? I mean Anthony Rose, of course: wiry South African firebrand and one-time buccaneering pirate-in-chief at Kazaa. [...]

Sacred and profane at Broadcasting House

Fascinating gathering last week in the sombre 1932 Council Chamber at Broadcasting House. Hugh Garry – who ‘makes interesting digital things happen’ at Radio 1 – organised a session as part of his mission to popularise Twitter at Radio 1 and elsewhere. He and others in the audience (including me) provided case studies and encouragement [...]

Six Common Platform projects for the next few months

Three months into my journey round the BBC I’ve come up with a list of six projects I’d like to tackle in addition to recording stuff here on the blog and generally challenging the BBC to open up. I think it’s safe to say that not all of these projects will materialise. In fact Nick [...]

The BBC could save local media

The BBC Trust has terminated the Corporation’s plans for a big new local news service. Here’s the nub of it:
In the case of the Local Video proposition therefore, we have judged that the proposal would not create enough value to the public to justify the investment of their licence fee monies and that this value [...]

Matt McDonnell and the mother of all gateways

This is a pretty long post based on a chat with the BBC’s head of search. If you’re interested in search, though, I reckon it’s worth ploughing through. I really learnt a lot from talking to Matt McDonnell: he has a very interesting and very important job working right at the heart of the future [...]