On Collaboration #2: Robert Schukai, Thomson Reuters

Ahead of our next Group Think event in May (co-produced with the Barbican Centre), on the subject of collaboration, we've been talking to some of our friends, colleagues and clients about how collaboration fits into their lives and work. So we sent out a little questionnaire and, over the next few weeks, we'll be publishing what everyone told us.

This week it's the turn of our friend and uber-collaborator Bob Schukai from Thomson Reuters. We'll let Bob introduce himself but I'd like to point you at Bob's twitter profile, @iammobilebob, where he tweets prolifically on all things mobile and tech.

Who are you and what do you do?

Robert Schukai - Global Head of Mobile Technology at Thomson Reuters. My job is to oversee the entire corporate mobility strategy for the company ranging from technology and platforms to product line management, business development and monetization opportunities, and ensure we deliver best in class user experiences.

Why do you collaborate?

Our company has over 55,000 employees. I've found that there is a tremendous pent-up desire amongst many of these to play a part in our mobile strategy whether it is user interface definition, product development, and innovation. Collaboration allows me to set up different workstreams across the company so that people can unleash their passion in areas where we need additional thinking around our mobile efforts.

Which collaboration tools do you like and why?

We use the Jive platform internally quite well; I also find that bog standard tools like Skype are great for a quick face to face call or small group call. For bigger meetings, we also have Cisco Telepresence capability within the company.

When does collaboration tend to work best?

It works best when you have a workstream that is well defined, a passionate leader, and people willing to make a difference.

What framework or rules do you need for successful collaboration?

Successful collaboration needs good planning; needs to understand when to open up projects to a wider team; and maybe most importantly, needs to understand when "too many cooks spoil the broth." Sooner or later, decisions and delivery have to result from a collaboration project and there needs to be a leader who has the job of making a final decision.

Briefly describe a collaboration you admire and tell us why you think it works.

I think the entire open source community is a great example of one to admire. Whether it is creating unique and cool custom software ROMs for Android devices or the team of people who jailbreak iPhones - there is something to be said for having a mission, working on it together, and then delivering the goods. All of open source really requires collaboration to make it the success story it is today.

When has collaboration gone wrong for you?

In a previous life, collaboration went completely pear-shaped as a result of some people not wanting to play nicely in the sandbox with their peers. There is nothing wrong with differences of opinion - and you do need that to get successful collaboration. That said, if you attempt to undermine the efforts of others by not being open and transparent, you have no business being a part of a collaborative team. I think a "do-differently" on my part would be to directly confront individuals like this to see if they want to play a part in trying to create something or are just there to find a way to screw with others.

ITV News marks a paradigm shift in online journalism

I've been privileged to spend the last few months programme managing the relaunch of ITV News. The site went live yesterday, to a lively and predictably mixed reaction on Twitter. I say "predictably mixed", as the site is taking some radical steps that were always likely to upset some. But they come as a significant step forward in a direction of travel - towards real time online news - that's been clear for some time.  

The design and build were carried out by Made by Many, who have posted their own analysis of the approach, focusing on the central question: "What would news be like if we had networked digital media (and digital cameras and phones and laptops) but there had never been newspapers or broadcast TV news programmes?" The answer mashes up some of what users have become used to on Twitter, Tumblr and other blog patforms with some of the toolkit of the traditional news website (articles arranged in categories).

In so doing, ITV has turned on its head the current hybrid model exemplified by the likes of The Guardian, which I'd summarise as an approach based on articles grouped into categories, where some articles are live blogs. Instead, the very structure of ITV News is driven by the live blog model, with articles nested inside a stream alongside updates in a range of other formats (text, tweets, images, video, external links), freeing the blog to be a blog and articles to be articles. To dig further, the stream can be filtered, and tags and categories enable users to catch up with specific subjects.

We've followed the Agile philosophy in developing the site, which means a lot of discipline has been needed in judging the Minimum Viable Product to launch with. Expect to see more features in the future from the brilliant team at ITV. For now, we're simply proud of our role in helping establish them as a player to be reckoned with in online journalism.

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.

Using linked data to build context around news

In a post a few weeks ago on the excellent R4isStatic, the BBC's Paul Rissen outlined an inspiring vision of how news could be enhanced by embracing the possibilities of the web as a medium. Hold on, I hear you cry, surely news has been there, done that and is now hurrying off behind a paywall again? Hasn't the web transformed the way organisations distribute news, people consume it and even, through social media, the way that news is gathered in the first place? Well, yes, yes and yes - but.

Paul makes the point that while the inputs and the outputs might have changed, the product itself remains remarkably similar. A story appears, without context, designed to simplify and dramatise a set of issues enough that readers, viewers or listeners will be quickly satisfied. Paul outlines how a data-driven, semantic approach to news might situate it in a wider and more meaningful context, drawing out the latent power of the web to deepen and enrich our understanding. (In so doing he has some trenchant observations to make about how it's the conservatism of journalists rather than new technology that's responsible for our supposedly shrinking attention spans.) I urge you to read the whole post and subscribe to the blog.

And I mention it now because yesterday the Guardian announced that its Open Platform Content API will allow users to query its data by MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers. (I have to declare an interest; having overseen the BBC's adoption of MusicBrainz IDs as Interactive Editor for Music, I'm delighted to see another major content player take them up. Like any other standards, open data standards like MusicBrainz stand or fall by their spread and adoption.)

It's worth pointing out that this is essentially a developer-facing initiative, as a glance at the FAQs will make clear. So what's the connection with Paul Rissen's vision of a linked-data-driven news? One objection to that vision is that there is already plenty of context provided by the manual linking and proprietary tagging carried out by journalists now. And the Guardian's link-up with MusicBrainz and ISBN numbers doesn't immediately change the content or links on their own pages, which usually provide a great deal of context, again manually, in particular in the music area.

But the context that exists now rarely transcends the format of a point-to-point link or index page, and is very largely contained within originating organisations, limiting its scope really to change or broaden readers' understanding of concepts involved.

What the Guardian has done will start to enable third parties to build automatically on the context provided by their stories and the metadata around them; and (in theory at least) vice versa, pointing the way towards a much more integrated web of information around topics that might fundamentally change the experience and expectations of news consumers. And (again in theory at least), context could move beyond point-to-point links and begin to model visualisations of the information around concepts like, say, artists or books. (We did this very thing at the BBC - albeit in a very rudimentary way - around the concept of the play count for artists).

Of course this all raises a whole set of questions about business models. Paywalls represent a fundamental challenge to the viability of building open data around news (and vice versa). And thoughts about revenue models around linked open data are in their infancy. So it's a good job our own Simon is in a position where he can move some of these conversations on.