Session in reaction to the collaboration session earlier which was focused on UGC as something people give to the BBC, and to look at how the BBC can give more content, not just data, back to the audience.

BBC Backstage are trying to do this, creating a new blog that’s creating original content and releasing it all, everything in raw form, out on Archive.org, wherever. Probably be under an CC-attribution licence. Video, put as much metadata as much as possible, so will release scripts. Will be available in a big bundle that people can download if they want, and be released in different cut versions that people can remix as well.

Radio 1 put together a cinema advert, and plan is to get the assets online and let people mash it up, even take the piss out of it then.

What happened to the Creative Archive? [Much laughter.]

Rather than it just being a big central archive, things are being released in different places.

But the rights issue was never solved. For a 3 minute news package, content came from lots of different rights owners, so assessing the rights for an archive is functionality almost impossible. One problem with the Beethoven release as that they discovered at the last moment that there was a freelance conductor and they weren’t sure about the rights.

Creative Archive is looking backwards. The Radio 1 ad is taking marketing assets and releasing it. Backstage is releasing data. But is anyone commissioning an entertainment programme and then releasing it?

It has been tried. one project tried to create a library of material from a variety of sources, but the uptake was small because there was no focus, there was no clear call to action. Made it so open that people didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t think that there was mush point.

Why try to anticipate what people want? Why not see what communities exist and give them the chance to do something. Why are we chasing down Dr Who knitters? That’s disturbing.

JK Rowling doesn’t mind people doing fanfic, so long as it’s not commercial. And so could do that with a lot of things with the BBC, how do you enable that?

Is anyone setting out to do that?

Why are we doing this? Is that the best public value? Talent management – they are unhappy about people saying nasty things about them on BBC sites. Content producers don’t like fans to do stuff with their content. If only one small part of the audience gets something out of it, and the producers dont’ like it, why are we doing it?

Most people here would give most things away, why not? But that’s not the broader mindset, because they don’t see the value of it.

Have to start somewhere, and people aren’t willing to try to start anywhere. Don’t know why no one has tried it, doing a story and letting people just run with it. People’s natural inclination is to subvert it.

It’s a leap of faith. One project was a story for kids, wanted to leave it open to see how they would engage with it, and it’s been great to see what they come up with. The second thing is that, for kids, you have to provide the tools as well. It’s fine to leave assets around, but not everyone has the tech available to them.

Why do we think that more is better? Wouldn’t it be great if it was democratic and let it go, but it does make sense to editorialise in a certain way.

One place that is doing that is Teachers’ TV, and the teacher’s are pushed to take it and use it.

Is the idea that content will naturally be subverted true? Will people really do that as a de facto response? And even if they do, is that a bad thing? In the right context that’s fine.

Dynamic of the culture is challenging. On the one hand you’ve people who want to give things away, and on the other hand you have people who want to control.

Do the lawyers ever talk to marketing before they get on the case of someone who’s doing something, because a lot of this UGC is great publicity.

Big Weekend, mixing up people’s own photos and the professional photos, in a programme, create something completely unique ad that’s small but popular.

Fear that people are going to be horrible if we let something out. So long as the product is good, and it does need to be good, brands are surprised by how positive it can be. Brand managers don’t realise that often people talk positively and will defend the brand, if the brand is good.

Great fear of being criticised in public. Ignoring it doesn’t stop it happening, if there is negative stuff, you have to engage with it.

Letting the audience take the piss a bit endears the brand to the audience.

None of this does not apply to the Middle East, where the state broadcaster is the voice of the state. If they took the BBC’s content then it might seem like endorsement from the BBC. Perception that by putting things online, it’s encouraging people to use it, and that would be seen as the official voice of the UK. [I’m having problems following the logic of this argument.]

What if the BNP uses the footage? Backstage has a “no political usage” clause in its licence.

But need to treat different types of content differently, so children’s content is treated differently to news footage. But we shouldn’t let concerns about certain types of content stop the development of uses of other types.

Technorati Tags: BeeBCamp2

Heard a lot about news, but there’s stuff around making TV programmes richer, more interesting. Quite often they want a list of books that are interesting or relevant. Sometimes they have a list, or they want people to contribute to a list. So where should people link to? Amazon is the de facto place to link to? Should the BBC link to Amazon? Probably not. Wikipedia would be nice, but if a book’s not there you could add it, if it was “notable”. There’s also OpenLibrary, which wants one page per book for every book ever made, but it seems early days. WorldCat is interesting, it tells you which library has the book near you, but mainly focused on US. There’s the Library of Congress, which has a lot of data. Then there’s LibraryThing and BookKeeper, which is about “my” collection of books, so people logged in could see which of their friends have also read that book.

On the music site, it’s quite clear, they link to official website or MySpace page. But for books there’s no clear source.

This is not about the text, unless it’s public domain and available, but about the metadata.

Link to the publisher. Author’s websites. Penguin tried to build book groups around their books, so there’s a page for each book and can do a book group about these things. Harper Collins have a network of interest that they’re building around, Authonomy, BookArmy.

Amazon are canonical, whether we like it or not. They have the metadata, synopsis, reviews etc.

Libraries have huge collection, but they don’t necessarily have the synopsis. They just have classification data.

Amazon have an API so could someone not just use that data?

Would it make sense for the BBC to make a page for every book it talks about?

How to you let users share their preferred link. Not sure if the BBC should be making their own library, given how many others are in that space. Should be partnering with another service.

Open Library website talks about how they might work with World Cat, so landscape may change in front of us. Shelfari, owned by Amazon.

Link to a variety of sites?

Every book as an ISBN, so perhaps use that as a gateway to other places that list books by ISBN.

Wikipedia has a page for every ISBN which links to pages that have ISBN built URLs.

Two ISBNs, the US and the Worldwide ones. Two standards. Library of Congress has its own identifiers which are broader than just books.

Do we need a way of marking up book titles, semantic web. Could you RDF8 tag to ISBN number in with the book, then later on you can scrape all those pages.

To make it more complex, ISBN refers to one edition to one book, but sometimes you want the whole work, rather than the edition. Need a way to pull that together.

This is why Amazon number, the ASPN, which shows you an individual book or collection of editions.

BBC policy about linking – what does the audience expect? Is it inline or in the sidebar? what are you saying? Here’s a place to buy it? Here’s a history of the book? Depends on what the audience expects. Technically, it’s easy but editorial problematic. Can’t be seen to be promoting Amazon. Would feel like that was unfairly promoting Amazon, but Amazon is the de facto place to link to for books.

Could link to something like Froogle, a list of places you can buy the book, but you’re pushing people to buy the book and promoting a site.

Amazon and Wikipedia are the main ones from an information point of view. BBC should work with open sources of data.

Think of the archive as a live thing where we add new things, like the list of books, that would be valuable. If the annotated book used by the researcher who put the programme together was made available that would be fascinating.

In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg, lots of notes from researcher but would need sanitising before it could be published because the notes are very detailed. After Our Time, wiki, set up but is a bit dead. If you had the research notes to go with the transcript, that would be great. Very thorough research.

What about other BBC sites, aren’t they doing already? Once you have an identifier per book in the system, you can aggregate content within the BBC site about “these are all the programmes or sites that are talking about this book” .

Something like Dewey Decimal system. BBC already has topics which functions a bit like that, if you have a page about the Cold War it aggregates all the BBC’s info about the Cold War, but should also link to thinks offline and books etc.

Namespace – Emma, the book, film, TV series, which one? Wikipedia deals with that ok.

Tom Coates did a lot of work around radio programme pages, analogous problem. When looking at a page on /programmes, the object is “episode” and it knows the broadcast of that episode. And with books sometimes you’re interested in a particular edition because of, say, the cover, and sometimes you want to talk about the text.

But that seems like an edge case, generally talk about a book, not an edition.

Some of the sites listed earlier are doing good work in aggregating them into works, not editions.

Books in translation with popular titles, e.g. Latin classics in translation, if you’re grouping the book in that how would you deal with versions? Publishing industry is struggling with that anyway – how do you deal with Ladybird version of the Three Musketeers, and the original version?

Should semantically mark things anyway, whatever is done.

What does the user expect? Do they want to go and buy it? Do they want to find out more? Do they already know the book and want supporting information?

Further reading is different to a bibliography. A bibliography would be relatively easy to do, but further reading would be something to let others do. Wiki, audience participation, which then leads on to gaming.

Technorati Tags: BeeBCamp2

Another session on collaboration. It’s interesting that there’s so much curiosity about collaboration here. Talking to Charlie Beckett, we wondered if it’s that collaboration is now almost a given, “We ought to collaborate”, but that it’s not entirely clear what it is or how to do it.

One BBC project is to build applications in collaboration with the University of Aberdeen. Project has been running for a year, started off quite vague, has been interesting and educational. A lot of things they’ve learned is that academia has a very different approach to the way that the BBC works. A bit of a clash of culture.

How do we go about prototyping ideas effectively and efficiently. Finding a real variation in the way people react to the project, some are very enthusiastic, others suspicious of the BBC’s motivations for being in that area.

Nottingham games festival, universities doing prototypes for games.

Why are we not doing more stuff like this?

Prototypes, games-based, interactive narrative. How do you take a story to tell and build a game around it?

Knowledge Connect, act as middle man between universities (professors) and companies, help companies get research done. Grants available for SMEs so that the academics get paid to work on it from the grant.

Frustration with indie developers in games market, they don’t know how to get to work with the BBC. May have a great idea, but don’t know where to go to move it forward. Need to make it easier to understand the commissioning process, give developers an idea of future shows they could get involved in.

Commissioning periods of up to 18 months in some part of the BBC, so there’s plenty of development time. IF your period is 2 months, then that’s too short of a schedule to develop.

Should be in the commissioning process. Advertising has the same problem, web site & app development left til last minute. Need to gather assets. Needs to all be thought about at the commissioning process.

Not had space and time to put as much thought into it as would like.

What is the endgame for Prototype – want to learn what is possible for prototyping, is it valuable for students to work with BBC teams? Also to see if any of the ideas are worth putting more time into it.

Collaboration between HP and Bristol University. Someone at Lancashire (?) also doing interesting mobile games. NESTA do a lot of stuff in Bristol, big new media community there.

Running games and competition to find people to collaborate people. Cancer Research did one “Develop an ARG for Cancer Research”.

Try to break “who do we know” and be more “how to we reach out to more people to get as many as possible involved”.

Still pockets of people at the BBC doing interesting things.

First collaboration is to figure out what you’re doing, what your message is.

Is there a need for “Public Service Gaming”? Difficult climate, and BBC is in a unique position.

How does collaboration work within other areas? Is it just gaming? Have done some things with MTV, Radio London, didn’t work brilliantly, was ok.

How do you work innovation into the rest of the BBC. Project Red Stripe existed in a bubble and ended up going somewhere slightly strange.

It’s easy to forget to tell people what you’re doing, and lose the value of what you’ve learned, even just about what it’s like to work with a university.

Useful to write up what you did, what they said, what it might was like working with students, where did you work physically.

Values. Different values, different setting, so would be interesting to know if the students looked at the BBC as a different thing because of their involvement in the project.

Technorati Tags: BeeBCamp2

Russell Davis, got a model house and offered to send one to people so they could decorate it as their house of the future. Had more demand for houses than he could fulfil. People blogged about what they would do with their houses, what things might be like in the future. m2050 tag. Whilst doing this, Hugh Garrick put together a collaborative Spotify playlist about what the tunes of the future might be. Collaborative story.

Five Live do it every day, say “this is our story” and people give them additional information to flesh out the story. Crowdsourcing.

During snow storms, network radio’s traffic and travel news was out of date, audience had better information than the official version.

So many tools out there to use. Spotify is a great example of collaboration.

ARG’s are about building communities, story being told, the people themselves make as much of the story as the people running the ARG. We Tell Stories, work with Penguin, instead of putting a book PDF online, which is not that much fun, ways of telling stories that are native to how you behave on the net. One told through Google Maps, one through Twitter where the characters were telling you their daily lives.

Twitter & GPS, BBC Sport tried that during the Beijing Olympics parade.

How do you highlight the voices? How do you bring those voices forward that don’t loose their editorial line in the process.

Messageboards, where people throw up ideas, and then the writers write the next episode for actors to learn.

TwitPanto, got a bit too much to follow, tools not quote there.

People want to converse and if they have the opportunity then they will. Conversation not the same as storytelling.

Are conversations not stories within themselves? Conversations can create interesting stories, but not always.

In BBC, we love being collaborative so long as it’s us talking. Collaborative storytelling that works more richly, someone at the BBC has to take control of the narrative, terrified of the audience might tell a story we don’t want to here.

Not sure that’s really true. Telling a good story takes into account timing, sequence of events, when you try to hand over too much control to too many people, you have more than one story very quickly. If you structure your story to handle that, that’s great, you have lots going on at once and it can be compelling. But if you want to tell a story.

Someone has to facilitate, else it’s just noise.

But allowing a person to own that editing, terrified we’re not going to get the narrative that’s wanted.

Fanfiction, most successful form of story telling, responses to other people’s storytelling. FanFic has very organised system of proofreaders, (betareaders), challenges, etc. Generally managed well as a community to allow people to find and contribute to stories that they want.

Isn’t there a natural built-in story telling process, so stories edit themselves because the best stories rise to the top.

More about giving people the tools to rate the stories?

Maybe a guest editor system? All these contributors, all these comments, some are better than others, and were thinking “we know what we think are the best”, but for the others that’s not a satisfactory experience for someone who’s taken the time. Room to have a guest editor, or filter. People have the chance to join in, it’s not taking control from the top.

radio Five, comments inform your work, but how do you get to the point where you get that sort of material in, because you look for content that conform to your expectations.

Fuel protest, didn’t see it as a valid protest, took a long while for it to be “allowed” the platform. Digital divide, but an editorial divide.

Media decided what the narrative would be after Diana’s death. Media was behind the curve on the hysteria. None of the media wanted to do it, wanted to run with it.

Important to think about story building, not story telling. Pull out themes, timelines etc.

Google epidemiology, can track colds and flu, tap into the zeitgeist before they know, before the press have told them to think it

Teenagers want to be involved but they lose interest quickly, don’t often have the internet. Stories via text messages, can text back, putting all their replies into a “box”, then reflect the opinion of the teens in the ending of a sub-plot for the TV show. Its a type of multiple choice. Teens use mobile more than watch TV. Was set up as a trial but was very popular, some people reply to every text messages. Sometimes get some very surprising responses, very philosophical. People are getting very involved in it, they’re not being forced to do it.

Story is a closed item, but most successful collaborative storytelling is MMORPGs, where everyone has their own story, but they work together on a larger arc. Not traditional storytelling with a beginning, middle and end, but it’s very successful.

But you don’t play these, necessarily, for the big story. It’s more for the community, the doing stuff with their friends, the collaboration, the sense of belonging.

Story building – Coproducer, a YouGov survey platform project, to make a film and there’s 40k to 50k people co-producing the film. Various different levels of interaction from free-for-all, to voting for one of two things. Decided, at a certain point, they are going to have to employ a professional script writer to tidy it up. Sounds like Swarm of Angels.

Joys of aggregated social interaction. But we are also each individual storytellers. But what about discovering other storytellers? Where the storytellers out there get a chance to be powerful in the way that we are. Kind of thinking of them all in a collective, socialised way.

People putting together their individual story to share with others, and collaborate around a theme, but which is, within that, personal.

Technorati Tags: BeeBCamp2

Kevin and I are at BeebCamp today (written yesterday!), a BarCamp gathering at the BBC, out in White City. There are a lot of BBC people here and a few “interesting outsiders”, and a bunch of interesting sessions already on the white boards for the day. The first session that I’m at is being run by Charlie Beckett and is about whether the copious amounts of user generated content (UGC) actually adds anything to existing journalistic content.

First problem wih UGC, is how do you filter it when there’s so much of it? Marvellous for the public to be involved, but that also can be seen as threatening journalism, but having said that it’s marvellous, does it add anything editorially? During the snow, 60k people sent in their pictures, which is nice but why not just stick it on Flickr or YouTube? What made it different to be on the BBC? The nation decided that the BBC was going to be their snow story platform. But what was done with it? Snow isn’t terribly controversial, but what would you do with UGC from Gaza? What systems are in place? Editorially, why does this matter? How does it change things? What are the transaction costs? How does the tech and design enable this to happen, and characterise what you end up getting? Does it add anything?

BBC thinks it ads something, as an organisation has the view since July atacs on London, UGC adds something, almost an industry in its own rights. Moved away from thinking of it as editorial in its own right, but instead see it as supporting. Maybe it’s time took a step back, there’s enough of it, we can just say “comment/content from the audience”, all different applications are useful, but not sure systems in BBC think that way.

Who gets the value? The fact that someone can have their say is valuable to them, regardless of the value to the BBC.

Third party, the larger group of people who don’t contribute, and aren’t the BBC, does it add value?

Demographics, 30 – 45, sneior managers, so quoting UGC is representative, it’s an error, it can alienate peope, beucase they feel that everyone who has their say isn’t “my kind of people'”. Study from Uni of Cardiff, focused on news.

This area moves quickly so is that study now out of date? Input that you get depends on platform, subject.

Which part of the public engages? Anyone actual act upon the issue of which demographic contributes? People engage in trying to get different people to contribute, language services, different parts of the world. Maybe not as joined up as it could be at the BBC.

But everyone in the BBC who runs a social media service thinks about this.

But is universality good?

What are you trying to achieve? Mass participation? Or trying to uncover information about a story? Much focuses on mass participation. Lots of focus on how to we structure, evaluate it? There’s a lot of opportunities missed, there’s a lot of content out there, call the Internet. If you’re covering a specific story, going on blogs you can find amazing content. During Hurrican Katrina, found someone podcasting as they were evacuating, and got them on air. That’s not mass participation, but it’s valuable. Is it mass partipication or are you looking for new news sources? Crowdsourcing.

That’s an important point. I don’t think we understand how to deal with smaller communities that re very high value, relationship between journalist and sources, 20k is unweildy, 30-40 si manageable. What are we using these communities for. UGC used to be called the ‘phone in’. Fallacy on radio, the more calls you gett the better the programme, important not to fall into that trap. How does UGC help you produce something that matters.

turn that question on its head. What does the BBC add to UGC. Lot more freedom for people on the internet than on BBC.co.uk, can only provide a type of UGC experience for uses, which is often limited and frustrated. What are we achieving by inviting people to post?

BBC often loved, treasured, invested in, because people thought that the BBC would “do something”. What can the BBC do to serve other people.

Katrina example, shining a light on someone’s content that they’re making themselves. If you provide a forum where the value is totally equal, how do you give that person something? How do you find that content?

What about the fiction that the BBC produces? How can the characters and stories be given back to the audience to do things with?

How is the BBC supporting other people’s communities? How can the BBC give their own content back to the audience, who arguably paid for it in the first place.

Not just about how many pictures of snow were sent in, but how many were used?

But should the BBC do anything with all these things? BBC pursues this UGC because it wants exclusivity.

Is it not our job to take that vast amount of UGC to filter out the good stuff and give it back? Look at what we would determine to be a good picture, becaues there’s a lot of stuff that should be filtered out.

Problem with UCG is the vloume, varies in quality, so some sort of tech solution to surface the best stuff. LA Times tried to do tag clouds of comment words, never had a way to sufficiently automatic it. Would get 20k comments on a given topic, make keyword cloud that gave people a sense of what was going on.

Two tensions in BBC, one is BBC as publisher, one is BBC as enabler. Publisher says “‘why publish 60k photos of snow”, and the enabler side says “because it’s a learning experience”.

Challenge is, when we take in 60k photos, and only publish 100, lots of people go away feeling disappointed.

Weather is a good example – why couldn’t they use it in the way that BBC Berkshire did with the floods, create a story about it.

Still struck by opportunity to marry pubisher/enabler. If we show what we know, we may change what people send to us. If we’re sick of sorting through 60k photos, opening up that mechanism may affect what people wanted to share. Might get better, by opening up what we know, it will affect what people think is new and interesting for us to see, more eyeballs on the problem, and more interesting solutions.

Burden of verification not there with snow. Other stories where that’s a real issue, can’t forget about.

Publishing it, we make an editorial statement about it. Different to hosting photos.

Need dialogue. If this is a process around which you might create something, has to have dialogue and that material is discussed, it raises the bar because people understand why a picture isn’t used.

Technorati Tags: BeeBCamp2