links for 2008-04-25

• On The Media: Transcript of “The Future Perfect” (April 18, 200
  Jonathan Zittrain on the future of the internet
  (tags: internet, Zittrain, future , oxford internet institute)

innovation wars: Radiohead vs. Reznor.

A while ago I attended the Convergence Think Tank second seminar organised by BERR and DCMS looking at convergence in the media, telcos, advertising, policy etc. There is a good write up here by Simon Waldman. The most interesting thing for me (and I wasn’t officially representing the BBC) was the momentary conversation about the need to try new models of distributing content. Dawn Airey talked about this briefly in terms of potential experimentation with content in the long tail.

While detail was elusive I was glad to hear the thought was there. I tried to make a point but was not called and the point I wanted to make was that while there were organisations there representing Artists creativity and rights there were no artists a this event. Why might that be important? Because Artists are doing it for themselves…last year Radiohead, this year Rezner.

Go vote at the Wired Reznor vs Radiohead Innovation Smackdown and see who readers vote for most innovative in terms of distrubution, user generated content and more. The Evidence is here!

It would be great to get some hard facts about this artist-lead distribution models. And see what it might bring by testing it with video or tv clips owned by talent/artiss rights holders online…

Oh Lord: Lordsoftheblog.net

I am definately going to have to take an interest in this.  It’s gone live today and was brought into being by the Hansard Society.  Things definately seem to be moving on. It’s desribed as a “meeting room without walls”

 This is what they have to say:

“Apparently we are going live today. So far, our blog confessions have had a very limited audience, but now anyone may see what we have been doing.

Not that I have anything to hide. Indeed, I suspect that most members of the Lords would be only too happy if the public could and did take more notice of what we do on their behalf. Some of us spent a lengthy afternoon last Thursday debating the best way to get more people - and especially young people - interested in the way Parliament deals with their concerns, hopes and fears.”

In the interests of full disclosure: must see if my other half is going to blog here or how many will join in…. .  He is no longer in the Government, hence the speeches are going down in number, but a blog might be just the ticket.

Just a reminder.  All the views I express on this blog are personal, and not the official view of the BBC!

http://www.lordsoftheblog.net/

Ofcom scraps PSP and Channel 4 goes for Innovation

Ofcom has scrapped the PSP. This is very interesting. At the Oxford Media Convention in January this year, at the session about the PSP and ideas about the future of public service broadcasting I made a comment from the floor as the temperature rose on the panel. Perhaps I just do too much facilitation at the moment. But what I said was that it seemed to me that the PSP proposal had always been a carrot or a stick (rather than a real thing). What had happened in the last year was that the industry, in its criticism, had taken it to be a stick and tried to kill it but it could have been seen as a carrot. Am beginning to wonder having just listened to the new Channel Four Innovation Strategy online this morning whether Channel Four might have taken it to be a carrot. I think we should be told….

Whatever has been going on behind the scenes, the Channel 4 Innovation for the Public fund sounds interesting

“Designed to “kick start a wave of new investment in public service digital media for audiences around Britain” the £50m 4IP fund will launch in July as a collaboration between Channel 4 and a series of development and media agencies from around the UK”

as does some of their language around creating value for the public and a new public value framework.

“Behind the Scenes”: how we make media @ the BBC

I’m working on a new project and in the early phases of scoping what it might be. It’s been described formally like this:

“ The Director-General informed the Trust that he has commissioned a major new online project which will enable the public to explore how contemporary media content is produced. The BBC believes this will be a major contribution to media literacy in Britain.”

So I have been looking at what other organisations are doing, and what BBC people (past and present) are already doing by way of talking to audiences about how they make what they make.

I’m tagging what I find on the internet on my delicious stream. Current told us how to make media from the start. Four Docs from Channel 4 is also telling you how to make but also asking you to comment.

On the media is from NPR and they say ” For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of “making media,” especially news media, because it’s through that lens that we literally see the world and the world sees us”

I like MediaShift by Mark Glaser at PBS. Recently he interviewed Patrick Ruffini on the use of mobile and social media in the US by Presidential candidates. And while this post is not about how we make media, it is about how media shapes our lives which is the media literacy part of the project. Looks like he has started a new area called IdeaLabs whose tagline is “Reinventing community news for the Digital Age”.

I see that Dan Gillmor is writing there, about bringing entrepreneurial thinking and behaviour to the creation of new journalism projects, though not from Beijing where I think he is right now!

In my next post I’ll describe more what we are already doing at the BBC and how some research conversations are already leading to people talking more, and showing more, about what we do “Behind the Scenes” which is the working title of the project. Alright it’s not very original. But it does what it says on the tin. Also how other people talk about us and what we are up to.

But I’d love to hear about what else is going on in this area. Who’s doing what? And any ideas about what you’d like to know about too.

Blog feeds right to the new beta front page

What a week to miss back at base - check out the new bbc homepage beta version here.

The thing that leapt out at me was the prominence given to our blogs - and how you can customise which feeds you want to see right up on the front page. This is a bit of a landmark as I instigated the project in 2004, then a research project, to get the BBC into the blogosphere. We got our framework together in 2005, started the trial in 2006 and have just come to the end of an 18 month trial - you can see written about here and here. Martin Belam has been writing about the early days - but I really want to pay tribute to two or three key people. First I really have to thank Julie Adair , now Head of New Media in BBC Scotland soon to leave the BBC to work with Disney. It was Julie who pushed me hard to send her off to BlogerCon but also importantly to get some new development work commissioned for Scotblog and Island Blogging in Scotland. Julie is very persuasive (in this case though she was pushing at an open door) and she also went on relentlessly (as I recall) to push me to organise a pan-BBC blog event internally to push everyone forward a year before we did it. I also want to thank Richard Sambrook (the first BBC divisional boss to start blogging inside the BBC firewall) for agreeing to be the internal Champion for the project that launched the Blog Network. Kevin Anderson was lured over from the US by Nic Newman to help encourage BBC News to take the plunge, Ben Metcalfe (an actual blogger at the time…) helped advise - and even the people who argued vehemently that it was not the route for the BBC to go down helped us all move forward. Six divisions agreed to go forward for a trial and happily Jem Stone had some money to pay. We modelled ourselves on the BBC Podcast and Download Trial (now a service) and set out to try a few different things. I am sure there is more to be said about the research commissioned to look at the trial so far. What interests me is some of the softer metrics, harder to measure. How blogging has or hasn’t affected correspondent’s TV or radio styles? How examples of things tried with the audience on one blog may be transferring to other blogs or programmes. How the experience of blogging may be changing how we speak to our audiences and, indeed, each other?

Note to self: must go and thank Richard Titus for the icing on the cake!

Annniversaries everywhere….and the birth of new research projects too

While I was away in KL back at base at the BBC we were marking the 10th Anniversary of bbc.co.uk The Internet Blog is hosting a nice series of articles looking back as we move forwards into the next ten years. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is also marking its 10 year anniversary . I’m looking forward to following their News Re:public study. It’s going to look at how people who are not professional journalists are changing the information landscape and civic life as well as how traditional media outlets are using new sources and interactive tool to engage their readers, listeners, and viewers. They’ve got a conference coming up in March 2008 to bring researchers and practitioners together on their way through the research programme. Colleagues Rowena Goldman and Brendan Crowther are doing their bit for our research effort on this front. Check out the details of the new research projects their Arts and Humanities Research Council/BBC Knowledge Transfer project Meanwhile it’s Creative Commons 5th Birthday this weekend too.

DiploFoundation in Second Life at GK3

According to Rita J. King of DancingInk Productions, Gartner predicts that by 2011 80% internet users will have avatars. Jean Miller, Head of International Initiatives for Linden Labs introduced herself and Second Life in world to a group of global conference delegates at GK3 - her prediction for the next five years was all wrapped up in one word “interoperability”. She talked about their work with IBM and how many companies were now trying to bridge the gap into Second Life. We heard from Stefan Geens about the House of Sweden in Second Life , and Jovan Maldives Embassy and Embassy of the Philippines . Joshua Fouts of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in answer to my question about new research said much more research is on the way coming out to time with a conference next Autumn. What’s more the questions and chat from Second Life, the contributions and quality of the sound for Jean Miller’s contribution and linking with the real world crowd in Kuala Lumpur worked really well - no mean feat. Congratulations to session producers DiploFoundation.

KL_GK3 040_Diplomacy_Panel

Originally uploaded by seriousgamesinstitute

GK3 + WEMF

I’m just back from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where I was speaking on two panels. The first was at the World Electronic Media Forum WEMF and the second at GK3. It’s a long story but when I worked for a while earlier this year at the World Service Trust, a GKP partner organisation, I was asked to organise and produce a panel to look at how participatory media and citizens’ journalism could and did impact Development issues. The original line up featured Dan Gillmor, Ory Okolloh, Sina Motalebi and Ethan Zuckerman with yours truly as moderator.

In the end the conference asked us to merge our panel with another panel being organised by YATV so Ethan and I volunteered to step down. In a strange turn of events I was later (months later) invited to speak myself on another panel that coincided with the my original offering - and happily Nancy White liveblogged it!

My own panel on the future of innovation took place in a ball room . The speakers were high up on a podium and the audience down below in the hall - it’s been a while since I have been that removed from the audience but happily everyone muddled around each other at the end.

My fellow panelists were all fascinating and we only had a few minutes each to talk about the future of innovation in our field. The organisers wanted to draw lessons from science futures, media futures, Asian futures and grassroots network futures - a tall order in one panel session. Ged Davies,Co-President of Global Energy Assessment, Futurist, and Former Managing Director, World Economic Forum, Kamal Jeet, representing Prof Anil K. Gupta, Co-ordinator, SRISTI and Honey Bee Network, and Executive Vice Chair, National Innovation Foundation, Markus Mettler, Chair Brainstore IdeaFactory, Sohail Inayatullah, Visiting Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Q&A from the audience focussed on how to match innovation and futures thinking with the development agenda and particularly a grassroots approach. Kristine Pearson, Chief Executive of Freeplay Foundation (fellow panelist on my WEMF panel) pointed out that I was the only woman on this panel and made a wider point about women or lack of them in key Innovation roles which sparked some interest. It does seem to be true as I begin to go to more conferences in this role and I am struck, for the second time in my career by this phenomenon. but as I said from the panel creativity is not dependent on wealth or lack of it or gender come to that. It’s simply human. It’s how we organise it, rate it and value it that becomes divisive in this respect. What I liked about this conference was the global mix - everyone was from somewhere else.

But the question from the audience that took the biscuit on this issue came at DiploFoundation’s session on Diplomacy in Second Life when it was claimed that Second Life is 50/50 men and women. “So, you’re saying that’s real gender or virtual gender?”

The Skoll World Forum 2007 :enabling innovation

I’m at Skoll World Forum in Oxford looking at at ways of enabling social innovation. And while you might think the BBC as an organisation is not in this field, I would argue strongly that it is. While we are not social entrepreneurs we do have a pro-social remit enshrined in our Charter. Namely,

sustaining citizenship and civil society;
promoting education and learning;
stimulating creativity and cultural excellence;
representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities;
bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK;
and helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.

Indeed a colleague, Tom Loosemore, at a recent seminar at the RSA, suggested that programmes were but one vehicles for delivering these purposes.

In the earlier days of analogue the Open University was a huge social innovation brought to the people of the UK by the BBC from the idea of Michael Young, a serial social entrepreneur.

The enabling of innovation is central to what we do, both as someone working in a dedicated innovation team, but to many or most of my colleagues in their day to day jobs. Speaking for myself though we have studied and incorporated innovation practises from business, from academia, from the world of design and from our licence-fee payers, amongst other fields, and of course, grown some of our own. Currently the team I work in runs a series of innovation initiatives with research partners, lead users, SMEs and independent producers, and academic partners.

As our business units and organisation changes and restructures so too do these processes, from high to low - and that is what is so fascinating about this ever moving field. Units come and go but the need to innovate remains crucial. What an organisation chooses to do in this field at any one time is quite an indicator of what is going on more widely. In my own organisation I can see innovation all over the organisation - springing up into newly forming groups all of whom want to get ahead with embracing the world of digital media and it begs the question. Do you really need experts, or are we all innovators now, social or otherwise?