Firstly I'd echo Tom's sentiment: >> Strange behaviours surface when you see bbc.co.uk at the end of your email >> address; fear of bringing opprobrium to the BBC due to saying the wrong >> thing in public can cause otherwise eloquent BBC employees to clam up.
I'm normally happy to shout to the rooftops about what we've been doing, but I find myself a bit nervy posting to this list because I know firstly that it is populated by a load of very intelligent people, and secondly because anything I say, typos and all, is being instantly pinged into the in-boxes of some of the colleagues and peers that I respect the most. SO I don't want to say anything stupid. >> - The front page archive. ----------------------- One of the objectives of Backstage this year is to make as many of the submitted prototypes live on bbc.co.uk as we can. The homepage archive is the first of these and going live next week. Matthew submitted the idea to backstage, we liked it, we contracted (and paid) him to do the work to make it live on bbc.co.uk. We'd like and want to do more of this and are looking hard at some other contenders. The hold ups aren't the strength of your ideas or how they've been presented and I hope that Tom's mail has given you a little bit more background in terms of what we think we need. Hurdles are sometimes rights, and tricky infrastructure stuff but mostly its persuasion and reassurance which as Tom has said perhaps we've been doing too much behind closed doors. Maybe we should have been more forthright about saying that we *were* doing this. It has been an interesting challenge not just on the legal/contract side but on the product development side. The work to get it running for the BBC rather than outside the BBC is being done in my production group. Turning a prototype into a beta service with a BBC URL is something we are doing for the first time, and suddenly all sorts of considerations come into it. Here is just one example, if we know that we are about to do a one-off special version of the homepage, which will cause the archive to register every single thing on the page changing, and that breaks the templates the archive is published in, that isn't a problem for us if it is a backstage prototype hosted externally. Once we are doing it *as the BBC* however, suddenly someone emailing my team "Your homepage archive didn't work properly over the weekend" becomes an email we have to answer. So does that mean the templates of the homepage archive have become or should become, a design constraint on the homepage itself? So leaving aside the infrastructure considerations, these kind of product development decisions are things we frankly haven't done before. And they have been fun - I wrote up an initial draft of how to turn the 'prototype' into a 'beta product', and one of my Assistant Producers looks to have done a great job with Matthew in getting it up and running for us. ! But that has all taken time, and the work has had to be prioritised against the other work in my production area. We've also been working on generating some new, and hopefully useful feeds - I take on board the point about asking you what the BBC wants. When we have them properly running on live I'll remember to be vocal about what I was hoping might come out of them all the best, martin -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeremy Stone Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 1:16 PM To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: RE: [backstage] Backstage - Stagnant Could you /please/ start sending us some sort of > ongoing status things on the competition. We have a short list of three for the (3) prizes and we're now arguing the toss about who's gonna win. There's some legal fine detail that we've just sorted. So we just need to get in touch with the individuals first and then we'll announce it to the list and site. This took longer than I'd hoped. Partly because Ben was away and partly because I was crap. That said I'll say again we were genuinely taken aback with the quality of the prototypes submitted and will feedback in greater detail what we liked and what blew us away to the list/site again. I've dropped a note offlist to Leo from MightyTV and I'll do the same to the rest of you who entered. > > giving weekly status reports Ok we'll give it a go. For now here's whats on the slate.. Tom has filled in as admirably as ever on the bigger picture but here's some more detail. - RSS / APIs ---------------------- Data, data, data. I know this is the key to making backstage work for a lot of you and the BBC still has a limited range of data that we can offer for all sorts of reasons. However, centrally we now have some live test feeds of the popular links within search, jobs, tickets, BBC press releases, complaints, the BBC front page and tv pages. These are relatively small projects but the idea for converting them came from suggestions on the list. So thanks for the suggestions. Various other content feeds seem to be popping up every few days from the rest of bbc.co.uk so we'll let you know as soon as we find out. We'll also be testing out some of the potential changes to News RSS formats on backstage in the next week or so. This is because you lot in the past have been consistently helpful in feeding back ideas, spotting errors and suggesting stuff so we wanted to share them with you first. For now here are the test feeds for jobs and the press office. http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/test/jobs.xml http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/test/pressoffice.xml - The front page archive. ----------------------- One of the objectives of Backstage this year is to make as many of the submitted prototypes live on bbc.co.uk as we can. The homepage archive is the first of these and going live next week. Matthew submitted the idea to backstage, we liked it, we contracted (and paid) him to do the work to make it live on bbc.co.uk. We'd like and want to do more of this and are looking hard at some other contenders. The hold ups aren't the strength of your ideas or how they've been presented and I hope that Tom's mail has given you a little bit more background in terms of what we think we need. Hurdles are sometimes rights, and tricky infrastructure stuff but mostly its persuasion and reassurance which as Tom has said perhaps we've been doing too much behind closed doors. - Creative Archive Placements. ---------------------------------- This has come up on the list a couple of times in the past week so I'm pointing/cross posting you to this announcement from our colleagues working on the Creative Archive project. http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2005/10/artistic_archiv.html They have just announced two 4 month placements (funded by Arts Council England and hosted by the BBC). An advert turned up in the Guardian last Monday for artists, creatives, developers who "will have the opportunity to develop their professional career by undertaking research and producing new art works that creatively reuse sound and television materials from the BBC Archives. The placements offer specialist support and hosting by the BBC. Each of the successful artists will be eligible for a bursary of £10,000." There are 2 placements. One for Unlimited Distribution and one for Unrestricted Access. http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/browse/arts-and-heritage/arts-and-antiques/vacancy-1026018-1.html http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/browse/arts-and-heritage/arts-and-antiques/vacancy-1026018-2.html Basically you will get the chance to play about with the BBC archive. Leave the Likely Lads alone please. ----------------------------------------- So Jim and Graeme and the rest of you who have contributed to these threads, thanks for the welcome feedback about what we could and should be doing and are not doing. It's a welcome reality check. Thanks for nudging us along. ta Jem, backstage team - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
