Let’s start at the very beginning.

Yesterday Martin Belam made me smile a lot with his post on MyBBC.  I    It reminded me I had this draft waiting to go about just how long it can take for things to get out to the public or even into awareness.  t’s not always possible to know when the beginning of a story is. And although I’m researching the first twenty years of the BBC on the internet starting in 1994, the story certainly does not begin there.  Generalising madly it’s often said that things usually  start about twenty years before they become noticeable to the public.

So in my case 1974 would be a good year to choose.    But wait! No , actually 1954 looks like a good beginning.    It’s in 1954 that the BBC first sets up a Working Party on Electronic Computers.  Whilst this bode well it took a full further seven years before the first computer was bought by the Corporation. According to Asa Briggs  (History of Broadcasting in the UK Volume 5 part 2) it was a National Elliot 803B and it belonged to the “Central Establishment Office”.  I am thinking that the story of that seven years worth of meetings , papers and even the appointment of an expert to tell the Corporation it was OK to buy a computer is one which would be repeated throughout the period I am looking at.

So, what was 1974 about?  Apart from being the end of the period Asa Briggs covers in his last volume he suggests there are three  areas of development that heralded the application of computers around the BBC .  They were: that the Engineering Division had begun to use computers in their designing of of aerials and analysis of equipment faults, generating electronic music and computer graphics; that management had set up a “management information service” in Television (TMIS)  ; and that Radio (External Services) had  installed a microcomputer to control the output from all the radio studios In Bush House.

I think  it also meant the BBC would increasingly need staff who knew how to work with computers , and those who were interested in exploring some of the new technologies as they began to emerge, and even possibly those who would be able to think about how computers would change the nature of communications in domains outside the military and academia.

When I worked at the BBC from 1993 to 2008  I was repeatedly told that the BBC is an Engineering Organisation with some programmes atttached.  In  1974, as the significance of some of the developments were being realised “Information Engineers” were asked to explain the implications of their work to the public  so that an “informed discussion” could begin about what the BBC does and has done for the public.

There are moments during this project when it feels like time has stood still. This is one such moment.

How do organisations tell stories about themselves?

I’m looking for examples of good storytelling within and about organisations.  Mostly you find the CEO has written an autobiography or someone has written his/her (mostly his) biography.  My hunch is that historians of the present and future will look to blogs and tweets, social media and digital traces for clues and a way of deciphering changes in strategy or direction.  But what of intranets? Or internal oral history projects?  Memories of employees past and present?  History from below? How will they be found?  We can’t just rely on Google.

I’ve been looking at an interview, or more precisely, piece to camera that  Frank Gillard lay down for his own BBC Oral History project.  He is very lucid about his own role as a BBC employee and the terms under which he conducted the interviews.  It was recorded in 1995 and feels like another age.  The BBC is making excerpts available under its 100 Voices page

I have now recorded some interviews for this same archive.  Looking at the period from 1994 to 2014.  But I’m not concentrating on the people at the top of the organisation or politicians like Frank Gillard.  Rather trying to choose people who , whilst not voiceless, may not historically have been chosen for such an archive.  I did also go to the then top.  You have to to understand the BBC .  What is interesting about this period and the subject I am looking at – how the BBC became aware of the World Wide Web and the internet and what it did about it is how a rather divergent group of people could unite around the implications of a new technology and create clusters of interest which would, eventually , get together and get the organisation moving. I only realised after interviewing Professor Lizzie Jackson that she is related to Frank Gillard.  Which is a nice piece of history in its own right.

BBC’s first twenty years on the World Wide Web – or how to try and tell a digital history.

A couple of years ago I had the idea to chart the history of the BBC’s first twenty years online as a research project.  Why? A couple of approaches to me since leaving the BBC in 2008 and as Professor of Digital Media and Innovation at WMG made me think.  First could I answer a few questions to help a then PHD candidate at Kings College London Department with some background for his research on Blogging and War reporting and the BBC?  I gladly helped out and it was fascinating to see how contemporary history is codified.  It’s somehow different when its your own history that is being laid down however.   It compelled me to turn to my own archives of how we set up the Blogging Platform at the BBC , who came to me first with the idea  and what the confluence of influences were that brought the platform out into the open.  I shall write about that separately another day.

The second approach was from Tim Jones, an Innovation Expert and practitioner whom we had worked with at the BBC but who ran an Innovation practise and who was working on a group of people writing a book called Growth Champions: the Battle for Sustained Innovation Leadership.  Someone had got sick or left the project and I was asked to co-write a chapter at very short notice in the summer of 2011.  My chapter was about Apple and Lego  subtitled “Bringing Magic to the Everyday” the book looked at how companies kept sustaining their innovation leadership.  It was a great time to look at Apple rising as high as it gets.  I had a  problem though.  They don’t grant interviews.  They didn’t even reply to my email request which is a bit of a first in my experience.  To cut a long story short I turned to desk research to start out.  And what did I find?  Only people who loved Steve Jobs, or people who did not love Steve Jobs – hagiography and its opposite.  Then thankfully I found an open archive in Stanford containing Engineers memos and then I found Folklore.org.  Far from ideal not being able to get new material but it taught me a big lesson and raised a few questions.  How is the story of digital change being told?  Is it only CEOs who get to publish their autobiographies, or have their biographies written? In the age of the computer where is the history kept? On hard drives? But the stories prior to blogging where are they? Don’t suppose many people are writing memoirs or keeping diaries in the digital age, or are they just taking other forms?

Anyway it got me thinking about the BBC, how it tells its own story and how others tell it.  I worked there from 1993 to 2008 and witnessed and took part in a very exciting period of organisational transformation.  I felt sure that a lot would have been kept visible via the website from 1997 , in the written archives , perhaps in the oral history archive, and importantly in staff memories and experiences published on their own blogs or on BBC blogs.   I took my idea to Roly Keating, then Head of the BBC’s archive and Online Editor and now Director of the British Library and we talked it through.

Many moons later  I have now started the project  with the BBC History Unit and the BBC’s oral history archive and many of my assumptions have been squashed as I explain on the BBC’s About the BBC blog and develop further here.  Before April comes around again there should be a web page up with some excerpts of the oral history interviews we have conducted so far.  The first step to creating a time line that I had supposed would exist somewhere on paper!

….three years on.

It’s been a while.  I am very grateful to a few people nudging away to get me back into writing.  Even reading my own blogroll tells me a lot about how times have changed.   I have been Professor of Digital Media and Innovation at WMG, University of Warwick for almost three years, albeit working part time.  I’ll be blogging about my work and the digital media and innovation landscape from now on.  But first the credits!  First thanks to Daniel Bennett a PHD candidate at Kings College, London who asked me to review a chapter of his PHD thesis about War reporting and BBC Blogs.  Second to Dr. Tim Jones, who asked me to step in a co-author a chapter in the forthcoming book “Growth Champions” to be published by John Wiley early in 2012. Third to the Berkman centre for Internet Studies whose blogpost round-ups keep me informed and excited by new work in this field all over the world.  Why thanks? With time and money short there seem to be fewer and fewer people writing and blogging in depth with their thoughts.  Facebook and Twitter have changed the day to day landscape of communications beyond the graphs of early analysis. So to review in depth work like a PHD chapter or two on the history of the BBC and Blogging or to contribute to a discussion about what makes certain companies excel in Innovation leadership forced me to step back from the everyday hurlyburly and think about the last five years , or 10 years or in the case on my chapter on Apple , 35 years!  More of which to come in time.

social media for innovation at the BBC (and elsewhere)

We’re trying out Yammer inside the BBC to create conversations outside of email. As we are always on the look out for better ways of communicating across collaborations inside and outside the BBC’s firewall and because we test a lot of tools opinion about which might be best for us is, of course divided even in our own community.

So I read with interest on Ethan’s blog that Telefonica in Spain have gone one step further. They use Yammer but they have also introduced an internal video sharing service.

Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues – some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his (Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit) team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.

Now that’s what I call useful. I may have to suggest it back at the ranch. I have always thought that learning to collaborate and communicate well inside the organisation (“everyone can speak to everyone ” should be one of the mantras of any creative company) made it a lot easier to go down the open innovation route.

Companies which were born as digital natives have less of an issue with this it seems. Google put their video conversations about their research online .- Google roundtable has Researchers and Engineers talking about their R&D and their Tech talks are there there too – on You Tube, of course. But they also post women@google talks and authors@google and musicians@google talks amongst other things.

Euan Semple at the BBC lead us down the path of more open communications when he introduced our internal wikis and blogs way back in 2002/03. I remember that as a complete breakthrough. Places where we could share documents and actually reveal what we were doing and perhaps even discuss that with peers around the organisation, it sounds like nothing now, but it was huge. That paved the way (another post for another day) for our external blogs (the project I Iead on the innovation side ) and staff blogs in 2005/06. By the way the guidelines for BBC staffers blogging were all written up internally and collaboratively on a wiki masterminded by Nick Reynolds (and now published externally too)

BBC Backstage got through it’s own beta testing and launch at the same time which was no accident.

You’ll find lots of talk at the moment about opening up the BBC further through partnerships of one kind of another but these are and were , I think, necessary preconditions.

In the past you would have said the BBC really communicates what it is about to the public only via its programmes as well as via press releases, annual reports, consultations and complaints the historic tools of corporate communications.

But now many staff on official blogs and personal blogs offer additional insight into what is going on behind the scenes in terms of how we do our jobs, how the BBC works, how we make decisions and importantly who we are. That’s incredibly important for collaborations and partnerships of any kind – knowing who you are doing business with, or talking to and being able to talk to them creates a virtual circle of information leading to understanding and participation being able to be used effectively

Serious Virtual Worlds, Coventry : Second Life, Forterra, IBM et al

Am wondering how the predictions made last year in Kuala Lumpur are going – so taking a day out to visit the SGI and the Serious Virtual Worlds Conference in Coventry live streaming on their page. I got here late but my colleague , Rain Ashford, has written up the morning before coffee.

I am no live blogger but I am highlighting something of a theme in this session which is all about interoperability. And that theme s that interoperability is not simply a technology issue. I’ll put in some more links and pictures later.

John burwell from Forterra– told us not underestimate technophobia as interoperability issue.

He went on to say that it’s people who need to do trials and want to. So make it possible for them or teach them how. Beware of Lock out – dangers of single source solutions. Make sure you can move around. Interoperability needs to be driven by commercial forces. Necessity is the mother of invention = mash ups and native integration. Delays in pilots and implementations as a result of these issues.

What other elements need to be interoperable? This is the list that Forterra’s clients keep on coming back with.

Content = eg clothing. Answer – adopt industry standards eg 3d studio max, maya, sktechup instead of building modeling systems

Interchange formats – eg Collada = answer they developed native importer for collada

scripting and animations

legal issues and intellectual property – who owns the data? Cap off to Linden – if you make content in SL you own it and you can take it wherever you like.

terrain

beyond islands and fractals

non-player characters

learning management systems

avatars , log in s etc

Next up was Jim Purbrick from Linden Lab – “a little interoperability goes a long way”

In Second life you have always been able to upload content and take it away . He went through some examples of this, but dwelt longer on CarbonGoggles – more later, with a nice plug for the BBC and in particular that he did some work for this application at  Mashed 08.

Images – James Au remix

Audio –

Animation – standard motion caption

Streaming Video – is enabling us to have this conference in Second Life now- people go to Second Life for speakes but stay to talk to each other – there will be more of this in the future

Streaming Audio

Web = embedding web pages in SL – not static – seen as huge step for interoperability

Should web browsers be enbedded in virtual worlds or should virtual worlds be in web browser – Jim thinks former

Web services – objects built in SL have links to real world services to pull data in – making the invisible visible – eg carbon data . Can’t do it in real life , can do it in SL. Takin gexisting stuff in SL and overlaying with data – much deeper integration – can actually pull in data from real world by reaching out to the web LINK here to carbon emissions data – app built in 24 hours at MASHED, nice plug here. Real deep application bang for buck most important type of work CARBON GOGGLES.

Machinima – most important area for ip in SL

Economy – i need some chairs, here are some good ones, they are here for 20 linden dollars so I will buy soe of them for my virtual world who needs a 3d artist – that is becase the economy is interoperable

have been working with IBM and Virtual Sims – The Future

Virtual worlds to be operated by different people eg IBM, Forterra, Linden , Uni – and some screenshots of Open Sims being teleported into SL regions and elsewhere.

Early work, long way to go before it can support big applications and reliability but in other ways very interesting, building in modular ways , using phsyics engines etc not for the fainthearted.

Open Source and Open Sims means you never get stuck (never get stuck good title) can always download source code if necessary! so small scale is poss, and so is large scale – this sounds good to me as a layperson as it will allow lots and lots of people to experiment.

Second Life has always been interoperable – this is not new. It has had media upload streaming media web embedding, web services, but imperoperability is not just about technology and talking to the web is more than puting viewer in a browser.

Innovation and location: BBC R&D at Kingswood Warren

As I pack my holiday reading I realise that the books I am taking might be considered to be “work”orientated but after a momentary hesitation in they go to the suitcase. It’s clear now that my work interests are very close to my own life interests, and that is a good thing So books I have dipped into are going to get the proper attention they deserve. And my big question is this : is the power of the network strong enough to overcome the advantages of proximity?

I am thinking about this again as people I work with regularly are all on the move.

I am sad to miss the Kingswood Warren 60th Birthday party however obscure that might soundKingswood Warren has been the home of BBC R&D for 60 years and there is a party to celebrate next week, and a day of demos. But I read in the Guardian yesterday that there may be strike action to coincide with that day. That was news to me and got me thinking about the relationship between innovation and place.

You may have read articles in the press about the closure of Kingswood Warren and what that means to the the BBC , and there is undoubtedly a lot to think about when you start a discussion about the relationship of innovation and creativity to a place, geographical location or to a building.

BBC R&D at Kingswood Warren

But the fact that this building looks so opulent and other worldly obscures a proper discussion about the relationship between a place and the work that goes on it it. When we talk about an “esprit de corps” in an organisation or team, it’s a body of people we are talking about and their spirit we are highlighting – but does the place in which they work together count in the equation and if so what does it count for? Or can we say that wherever teams who know each other well work it will be the same? Is the power of the network strong enough to beat the power and advantages of proximity?

At the BBC this is the first move for the Kingswood Warren staff to London and that is likely to be followed by a second for some of them and many others to Salford to the MediaCity Development. This is a very interesting and exiciting development and the opportunity to create a groundbreaking research and production centre – but it will be a few years until it is all up and running and lots of transition time is hard for even the most dedicated to handle while keeping productive .I say this as someone who has worked in an organisation for many years whose propensity for change is high, and whose need to change is great.

BBC at MediaCity

This is not only being debated at the BBC, but more generally by writers such as Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater writing about collaboration and the network. What can be done virtually and what has to be done face to face? My take on this has always been that innovation is a social process. The place can be a garage or indeed a dingy forgotten basement such as the birthplace of BBC Imagineering, but the spirit needs to be willing. Networks work well virtually when there is a common purpose and a vision or mission. They also work in real locations for the same reason – the key is in relationships, language, camaraderie and cooperation – in other words in the social.

esprit de corps Definition

esprit de corps (-də kôr′)

noun

group spirit; sense of pride, honor, etc. shared by those in the same group or undertaking

Etymology: Fr, lit., spirit of a body (of persons)

esprit de corps Synonyms

esprit de corps

n.

morale, group spirit, camaraderie; see cooperation 1, fellowship 1

Organisations need to move people around and change their location a lot for good business reasons. They also need to move people in and out of their organisations for business reasons too.

But what people find hard is when the web of relationships is broken by movement and limbo and so despite best endeavours output can become invisible, less important and at worst ignored as people try to preserve what they feel makes them tick – their teams and their esprit de corps.

What people like is to create webs of relationships which give them meaning beyond transition, or in transition and that is why the social and human will always drive innovation, whatever new technologies come along for them to investigate, explore and exploit. The social web gives people that opportunity whatever is going on in their workplace, but I wonder if anyone has measured the true cost of limbo and transition?

People skills in managing transition and change are vital as is vision. In my own area we do have a new leader, and there is a great sense of hope about the place that he will pull us all together and integrate and capture all the undoubted energy around and between our buildings. Who knows, I might come back to a whole new landscape.

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…

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.

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!