Ben,
Thanks so much for your time and commitment.
I guess you'll let us know more of your plans at http://
www.benmetcalfe.com
from the outside it's difficult to see the politics inside any large
corporation.
best wishes
Jonathan Chetwynd
On 9 Jun 2006, at 12:28, Ben Metcalfe wrote:
Dear all,
Today is my last day working for the BBC, and therefore working as
Project Lead on backstage.bbc.co.uk.
It's been an honour to have been given the opportunity to not only work
on such an amazing project, but also to interactive with all of you guys
in the backstage community. You are, after all, what makes the project
- without you guys backstage is nothing!
Looking back on my 18 months since we set this up, I have mixed
emotions. At times it's been a real battle to get the rest of the BBC
to understand what we - the remixers, hackers, makers and innovators -
are trying to achieve AND what the BBC has to gain from embracing it
all.
But there have been highs too - getting many of you into the BBC to meet
people, to discuss your projects and to work with you to take them to
the next level. That bit has been fantastic.
But I'm also aware that whilst I've been fighting fires internally and
working on some other equally important things (blogs.bbc.co.uk, reboot
competition, etc) I've at times been too distant from the community -
and I'm very sorry for that.
The BBC has many cool projects going on at the moment - the iPlayer
(formally MyBBCPlayer, formally iMP) and the new "BBC2.0" project. It's
an interesting movement for the BBC away from being just a content
provider to being a service (mainly aggregation) provider too.
And of course, in this weird world of developer networks and Web2.0, its
service orientated API's that have really been successful. Just
offering pure content - which lets face it is what the BBC does best (at
least for now!) - is not an API in itself and never will be.
Until the BBC is ready to leverage API's against these new services it
is creating around it's content, I hope backstage can become more
community orientated - a place where the commons can gather to innovate
together and cross-pollinate ideas about APIs, feeds and web services
from ALL providers. That, ultimately, is what the BBC can offer above
and beyond its rivals in this space.
Lots need to happen for that to occur - there are all sorts to policy
reasons why we've never had a forum or any other social-media platform
for backstage to really occur. Maybe it's time the community created
on?
Which brings me onto the final, perhaps most important part, of this
email (sorry it's been a long one!).
I will continue to participate in the community - I'm not going
anywhere. But from tomorrow (Saturday 10th June) I will no longer work
for the BBC and as such anything I say on the backstage mailing list,
put out as backstage prototypes, etc will not be on behalf of the BBC
nor will it necessarily represent the views of the BBC. Sadly I also
won't be able to help you with any BBC-related issues or questions
either.
There will also be a period of hiatus here at the BBC-end of backstage
as there won't be any staff working full-time on it for a while. This
is a real opportunity for the BBC to really decide what direction it
wants to take backstage, and so in the long run it's probably worth a
period of delay whilst that all gets agreed.
In the meantime I ask you to be patient with Jem and everyone else here
at the BBC whilst the period of change occurs.
Many thanks for everything!
Ben
PS: Please continue to email the backstage email address
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) if you have any queries, questions, etc and
someone will get back to you.
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