From my notebook
What stops the BBC from sharing content, technology and resources with the outside world? Actually, the number one obstacle, if the many conversations I’ve had here at the BBC over the last few weeks are anything to go by, is rights. Rights rights rights. Rights rights rights rights rights. The Gordian knot of multiple, overlapping [...]
Openness at the BBC huge turn-off, survey shows
Is openness at the BBC just boring? I’ve been asking people (random people) for the last couple of weeks:
Should the BBC be more open?
Should the BBC share its assets with other companies and with the general public?
Should the BBC link to stuff created by outsiders?
Should the BBC provide tools and support for people creating their [...]
The BBC’s open source rules
In ten or fifteen years, when the BBC has finally been translated from a dark brown top-down industrial-era content funnel into a glittering archipelago composed of pure energy (you know what I mean) we’ll look back on this document as a kind of magna carta of openness, a foundation document for the new republic of [...]
Proper open source at BBC Vision
Rob Hardy who’s a software engineer team leader in BBC Vision (which used to be called Television) directs me to a couple of explicitly open source resources: a bunch of Perl libraries (handy software tools that can be lifted and freely used in assembling new applications) released by his own team under the GPL (the [...]
Huggers yammers
They’re trying out Yammer at the BBC. Yammer’s a kind of Twitter-clone for use within organisations. It runs secure (SSL) and provides a simple email-based authentication scheme to keep the outsiders out (if you can’t receive an email to your BBC address you can’t join). It’s growing like topsy here, not least because the Corporation’s [...]
Should the BBC recapitalise British Culture?
Is Mark Thompson a good proxy for Gordon Brown? Should the BBC move to rescue struggling media companies as the government is saving struggling banks? Should the BBC recapitalise British culture by taking stakes in bust public service providers?
Call this a flight of fancy but consider the circumstances. 1 We’re at the beginning of a [...]
Socialising news
Kevin Rose was in town for last week’s FOWA event. He was at the BBC the other day too, although he singularly failed to excite an otherwise eager audience of editors and technologists from around the Corporation. Anyway, his presentation at FOWA was a bit more interesting. His principle message was that Digg’s mission is [...]
Could the BBC do this?
NPR’s response to the credit crunch is a terrific new daily podcast from the station’s crack financial team. I don’t mean ‘could the BBC do something of this quality?’. I don’t doubt that. I’m just wondering if the regulatory and editorial regime would permit something so spontaneous and indigenous to the web to emerge in [...]
Kevin Rose came to visit
Digg founder Kevin Rose is in town and the people at FutureNow (which is part of the BBC’s training and development function) invited him in to speak to people from around the organisation. Interesting presentation but, seriously, not that interesting. In fact, to be honest, I found it puzzling to note how little has changed [...]
