On the BBC's Connected Studio

Last week Sarah and I were lucky enough to get along to the first of the BBC's Connected Studio sessions up in Media City UK, Salford. The CS project is the organisation's latest attempt to negotiate what Project Lead Adrian Woolard terms "the tricky space between innovation and actual production". Previous takes on cracking the area include the Innovation Labs series. I participated in one of those back in 2006 in my role as Somethin' Else's Head of Digital, so I was keen to see this latest manoeuvre. In the event, Sarah and I came away very impressed, both with the quality of the ideas coming from attending teams and with the slick, highly professional and largely successful delivery of the day.

Each of the Connected Studio sessions will take on one of the BBC's so-called "products", which range in size and indeed taxonomical category from say, News or Children's to Radio or - in the case of this inaugural session - Homepage, Search and Navigation. The notion underlying the sessions is that the BBC lacks an easy framework for innovation both by internal and "indie" teams, something with which I think few of us "out here" would disagree. The Connected Studio sets out to rectify that. And before anyone gets suspicious of yet another large organisation paying lip service to open innovation and collaboration (two pet topics of ours here at UC, of course) let me point out that the BBC's Future Media chief Ralph Rivera has put over a million quid of innovation funding on the table. So this is a very real initiative. (Adrian Woolard again: "This isn't just about making staff feel better about themselves.")

The shape of the day was relatively straightforward. After an initial plenary briefing (Adrian introduced the whole shebang and James Thornett and Clare Hudson talked specifically about the HP, search and nav areas), attendees were asked to either get working on ideas either in existing teams or else "advertise" their basic concepts and pull teams together on the fly. I should emphasise that while the day took something from the hack day idea, it wasn't strictly one. Rather it was a "concept hack day", if you like; the hope was that by the end of the day teams would have ideas which, if approved (more of this in a moment) might move on to the early development phase. I particularly liked the fact that ideas in any state of preparation were welcomed, from the vaguest notion through to fully fledged paper prototypes.

While things got underway in the morning, a number of presentations took place in the "speakers' corner" area of the room and I decided to sit through these, out of personal interest but also to gauge what the BBC consider the wider context in which the sessions sit.

• Tim Fiennes discussed the broader search and homepage "market", highlighting in particular that social, search and app-based browsing had had a massive effect on the importance of the HP.
• Tom Broughton gave a very high level but extremely informative breakdown of the technologies the BBC use in this area.
• Phil Poole talked about the new kinds of take on personalisation and participation (which he broke down as Share, Follow, Save and Like); he also touched on how little "active" personalisation was taken up - only 10% of users had taken advantage of this aspect of the BBC HP V3.
• And creative facilitator Linda Cockburn gave an excellent quick masterclass on the art of pitching (keep it clear, graspable, relevant.... and pithy).

Throughout the afternoon these speakers and other CS team members were on hand to give feedback and advice on the developing ideas. The ability to be able to ask questions freely of the HP team and get open and honest answers was very well received by participants. There were also opportunities to test out ideas on real audience members. Some teams pitched in private, a recognition that IP ownership is often a hot potato in the innovation space and a prime concern for indies, although this didn't seem to be a big issue with any of the teams in attendance. I suspect that may vary at other sessions, according to the BBC "product" under consideration, but we'll see.

So, I've mentioned pitches there a couple of times, and here's how the day wound up. Any team who felt that they had an idea ready to pitch to the HP and Nav team could do so... and 23 teams did! Now I confess that, sat in the audience, hearing that 23 teams were about to pitch ideas made my stomach sink somewhat (and to be clear, it was my birthday and I was exceptionally keen to get to the drinks part of the day) but actually it turned out to be a real hoot. Teams were given just two minutes to present - and amazingly only a couple went over, and even then only slightly. The running of this particular bit of the day was exceptionally smooth, with the potential logistical car crash (23 teams changing laptops, monitors and so on) completely avoided. Most teams used paper to present, something which always gladdens my heart, and given the speed with which everyone was racing through their presentations, it reminded me obliquely of a 90-minute Subterranean Homesick Blues*. And most importantly of all, the ideas were all genuinely smart, well thought-through and engagingly presented.

Now I won't go into depth about each idea here, but instead say that a small handful of areas or similar approaches emerged:

• Hyper-local content and services
• Cross-BBC product user journeys
• Smart recommendations
• "Ambient" rather than "active" personalisation
• Sign-in-driven services
• Access to deep archive
• Time-based navigation - and "nowness"
• Editorialised packages  - with potential "talent" involvement

Teams will be told over the next week who gets to go through to the next stage of funded development and here I see the real challenge in the whole initiative. If several teams cover the same ground with very similar ideas - and they did - then how to choose between them? Moreover, is there a way to bring new teams together from those which overlapped conceptually? I was particularly struck that some of the BBC teams had an undeniable advantage when it came to their presentations: they'll have had BBC strategy properly drummed into them, after all! Is there a mechanism which would allow the coming together of internal and BBC teams after the day? I certainly hope so.

It remains to be seen how the initiative pans out - and we'll be watching extremely closely. My ultimate conculsion on the Innovation Labs back in the day was that it was hugely difficult to link the ideas into overall BBC strategy and output. (Short version of my experience: the brilliant coder Adam McGrath, now at Google, and I spent a week paper prototyipng a kind of mash up of Radio 1 and Last.fm; the judges from Radio 1 gave it the thumbs up but six months down the line there was no cash for it as it didn't match the network's strategy at that point.) The way Connected Studio has been set up is specifically to avoid that and I have to say, if the follow-through is a good as the set up then it might just crack this very difficult nut after all.

* For those too young to get that particular reference:

Universal helping make music universal

I am already pretty excited to see Universal Music Group throwing its considerable weight behind making the web more open and useful - it's even more gratifying to note that this work is being spearheaded by former members of the team I was privileged enough to lead at the BBC in a similar initiative. Let me catch my breath and explain.

The project that more than any other defined my former role as Interactive Editor for Music at the BBC was that of the BBC artist pages (here's an example)- creating, with clickable tracklists (another example), a central glue for all of the BBC's branded music offerings (radio stations, programmes, festivals etc) that served at once as navigation and aggregation (and, we hoped, a good SEO strategy to boot). What's more, we were keen from the start to make these pages last, and so we adopted the web-scale identifiers of MusicBrainz to ensure their longevity, as well as their interoperability with other parts of the Internet. I have bored on about all this in several places.

Musicbrainz furnished a ready set of metadata about artists and their discographies that also enabled us to scrape Wikipedia for biographies and pull in relevant BBC News stories (by means of inferring Musicbrainz IDs via links to official artist sites). It also theoretically made us interoperable with a number of digital music services - notably last.fm. But one of the frustrations of the project was the fact that the data in Musicbrainz, being based on commercially available releases, was only as good as the ability of its community of contributors to get hold of and input that data.

Like Wikipedia's editors, the MusicBrainz community are numerous, passionate, smart, quick, and largely self-regulating. But the thing about being a broadcaster is that we routinely got our hands on new releases - and indeed releases by commercially "new" artists - before they were sold, and therefore before the hive mind of MusicBrainz could get a purchase on them. The solution seemed obvious to me - get the labels to input their data directly into MusicBrainz (either directly or via APIs), meaning that they had control over the data that's out there on the Internet, as well as a ready-made structure and repository for their own data (plus it would save an awful lot of data entry by the BBC). But that in turn yielded a problem of its own: how to get the labels to play? I confess it's not a problem I was able to solve during my tenure.

It seems the solution was staring me in the face all along if I had only had eyes to see: embed a cadre of very clever people in the labels and let them do the heavy lifting. Step forward James Cowdery and Martyn Davies, both of whom I was lucky enough to have in my team at the BBC. James, as Universal Music UK's Innovation Manager, has been working with his predecessor Martyn, now evil genius behind Six Two Productions, to develop the Artist Gateway, using MusicBrainz IDs to create pages populated with data from Universal as well as from elsewhere on the web.

Now I should acknolwedge here that there are no current plans to include pre-release tracklist data in the Artist Gateway. Personally I think that's a shame, but I understand that established models are slow to change. But this is a huge step forward nonetheless towards creating a common language for music metadata online. 

A more general caveat is also appropriate: clearly I am bringing a rather warped and personal interpretation to this project, which is of course driven by the strategic needs of Universal rather than my preferences and whims. Plus it's early days (the Artist Gateway isn't launched yet), and I can't claim detailed inside knowledge of its likely contents or technical architecture. But the very fact that it's happening is heartening indeed.

Green shoots of linked (open) data around news

Based on Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch - some rights reserved (CC-BY-SA)

A couple of weeks ago Justin and I attended an event hosted by Talis, Data on the Web: The Benefits of Linking. It was a useful session all round (and if you are anywhere near Birmingham on 10 November, I note that another one is planned for there and then). We were particularly taken by this presentation by Jared McGinnis on the Press Association's thinking behind its recent publication of its ontology, and the part the ontology is set to play in the PA's strategy. This points to the commercial value of linked data - not only linked, but linked open data, and open in the read and write directions: PA has openly published its ontology, and it is ingesting geonames to provide IDs around location. The commercial angle is particularly significant, as the argument for linked open data is often couched in the language of public good, and often advocated by public institutions like government or the BBC. PA's advocacy - and we hope proven commercial success will follow - has the prospect of being something of a game-changer in perceptions of the value of semantic approaches. (Incidentally Talis' Tim Hodson provided a nuanced and useful explanation on their blog last month of the difference between publishing data, which often has a proprietary commercial value for its owners (or indeed is not always fully theirs to give away) and publishing the data model.)

But speaking of the BBC and the public service argument for linked open data, it is heartening indeed to see that the BBC is recruiting a data architect for News. I've linked before to Paul Rissen's article of a year ago eloquently setting out the case for the public value of this stuff, and it now looks as though he and like-minded colleagues are really being listened to inside the organisation.

I'm tuned into what's going on in news at the moment on account of my work programme managing the relaunch of ITV's News, Sport & Weather service, but there is clearly wider significance to all of this. I still hold out hopes for linked open data becoming a standard in the music industry; unfortunately the adoption of MusicBrainz that I oversaw as editor of the BBC Music website has yet to travel much further (beyond patchy adoption by last.fm), despite the benefits that I believe could accrue to record labels in particular from adopting such an open standard. As Simon pointed out recently, the ideal of the semantic web still feels like an idea whose time is coming, but we do need to start seeing proven commercial models if it is to make it into the mainstream.

Tony Ageh on 'The Value of Memory'

A recent speech by the BBC's Tony Ageh's to the 'Telling History' conference organised by the Prix Italia has been published in full on the About the BBC Blog and is well worth a read. Its theme is "the way the Internet is turning us all – or at least, WILL turn us all - into memory institutions." Ageh (the BBC's Controller of Archive Development) was talking to a room full of broadcasters, and his comments are particularly relevant to public service broadcasters in particular. But it's clear from the text that the "us all" can be read more widely to refer to other organisations and even individuals.

One passage looks at a recent project using the BBC archive to shed the light of hindsight on the 80s Miners' Strike. Probably the key line is this: "The footage needs to be balanced by personal input – by witness accounts – by the voice of people and the opinions of people who were involved." In other words, organisations like the BBC (and more familiarly museums and galleries) - squarely "memory institutions" - perform the most useful service to society's collective memory by opening their content to public recontextualisation and interpretation by other participants.

But we believe there is also a hint here for a strategic opportunity that could be relevant to a broader range of our clients, particularly in arts, broadcasting and publishing. The form that public recontextualisation of content takes is already getting more interesting. From a world of hosted comments we have moved into social media where users can take more control of curating their own commentary across the web. Services like Storify take a stage further the process of adjusting the power relationship between the traditional tellers of stories and the rest of us. What next? Ageh points to a world where much more content is made available. In order to make sense of this in the aggregate, it would help for content to be better-structured and semantically addressable.

And that might also help with a much more vexed question, addressed only fleetingly here by Ageh - the development of business models to monetise content (the other kind of value). The money question matters for public organisations like the BBC, because the right kind of answers might help to unlock content wrapped up in the rights of creators and contributors (and to justify the investment of public money in the complex technology involved in digitising and classifying content). It matters even more for the private sector. The Press Association's recent publication of its ontology, and the emphasis that the organisation is placing on the value of semantically organised data, represents a bold strategic move based on an understanding of the value that deep thinking about metadata can add to large bodies of content in a commercial context (albeit in this case B2B). This is an unproven area and therefore not without risk, but for the same reason those organisations that can figure out the right model have an opportunity to carve out a strong position for themselves.

As Ageh says, we are at an early stage of making sense of how to remember online. But if we don't move pretty quickly to address these questions with some diverse and creative answers, we might wake up and find that Facebook is basically doing the whole thing for us (more on this in a later, much overdue, post).

Working with children and animals or, Creating Great Digital Experiences in Salford and Bristol

Regular readers or at least glancers will know that a couple of weeks back I delivered a session devised by Justin for the BBC to a group of (mostly) young grads. Entitled Creating Great Digital Experiences, the session attempts to get away from what one might call the "must get a Facebook page" syndrome, by thinking about, say, digital platform choice or the question of tech, tools and skills only after thinking in some depth about our audiences/users/customers and how digital tech might connect them emotionally or intellectually to a broadcast strand.

I'm just returning home from delivering the session - which somehow seems to have spiralled from a three-hour to five+-one - in Manchester, at the BBC's spanking new Media City facilities and in Bristol, at the rather less flashy Broadcasting House. In Manchester I was working with people from Children's (CBeebies and CBBC) and in Bristol with the Natural History Unit. Unlike the Wood Norton session, in each of these cases we were looking at specific pieces of programming and thinking about interactivity around them. Now I won't go into specifics, for reasons of professional confidence, but I just wanted to say a little bit about of the process we use and how these two very different sessions underlined the importance of any tools which help us think in any depth at all about our users.

If we have one basic tool in our toolbox then it's the user persona. One way and another, we've been doing these for the best part of a decade, in truth ever since the classical UCD approach became something of a dogma amongst the digerati of the BBC.

Ever afraid of doing anything too hackneyed, I always feel the need to introduce the process by saying something along the lines of "I'm sure most of you have done this before" and yet, it's rare that I come across many people who actually have. I think this a huge shame; it's impossible to overestimate usefulness of building a series of fictional personas as realistically as possible in order to challenge our assumptions about the people we're trying to reach them with a product. The process might be questioned by some (it's certainly not scientifically robust), and there will be some in the design community who read a post like this as though it's decade-old news, which indeed it is. But, to be blunt, it works.

In Manchester we ended up thinking about a four year old girl (Maisie) living in Salford with her slightly older brother and young single mother; with the NHU we were designing for a 25-year old woman (Amy) living at home with her parents in Guildford. Again, without going into detail, both characters - and their families - are in many ways atypical of the kinds of viewers the BBC creates for. In both cases I found that the process at the least ruled certain ideas out from the get-go: itself invaluable. But I hope we went further than that and began to circle in on some strong ideas. At the very least, I hope that the teams involved might, when neck deep in production, at least occasionally ask: What would Amy do with this service? Or, Where is Maisie when this show goes out?