The opening BBC – Telegraph Blogs

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Ian Douglas

Ian Douglas joined the Telegraph in 1999 when the web was young and simple, and is now head of digital production. He writes about technology, science, the internet and beekeeping.

The opening BBC

I was on a discussion panel at the BBC last night, asking Steve Bowbrick, a blogger-in-residence, questions about openness. He was brought in to push their desire to share their products, whether that's content or technology, and he's been needling people to think about broadcasting in an open-source way for the last six months.


Photo by Soapbeard at flickr.com

Two other BBC people were on stage, along with Emily Bell of the Guardian, and it was a keen crowd full of people who wanted the project to work, and be seen to be working. So keen were they to be seen as sharers that I felt a lot of frustration and defensiveness as the conversation went on.

I asked whether Steve had felt excluded by any areas of the corporation and he said that he hadn't, but also hadn't been invited to those meetings. Tony Ageh (controller of archive development) asked, with jokey exasperation in his voice, what more people think they could have done to be open, having employed a man for that very purpose.

This, then, is an organisation on its back foot. The odd thing is that it doesn't have any need to be. The criticism they perceive can come from several different sources, including people who believe that we as a nation pay for the BBC so we should have unfettered access to everything it produces and the right to copy, reproduce and build businesses on it; people who don't really understand the difficulties of turning a very large organisation from one that provides into one that shares; and people who don't like the BBC anyway.

Talking to the technology people afterwards it seems that openness is already second nature to the in-house developers, but we can see that the partnerships and rights issues stop the spread of whole products and standards (such as the iPlayer). Keeping whole projects open from the start requires careful management from the beginning, not just of code but of the choice of outside organisations to team up with.

From what Steve was saying, much of the resistance he has met comes from those who look after content creators. They worry that openness would lose income for the people they represent. The rights people understood that owners of images and pieces of film want to hold onto them, sit on them in the hope that they will one day become valuable. The images of Monica Lewinsky hugging Bill Clinton or Michelle Obama at a school dance were mentioned, Tony Ageh having brought up the image archive during the discussion.

The BBC is in a uniquely powerful position and the decision it makes on this issue will change things for all kinds of rights holders. If it decides that its archive and technology must be radically accessible then the public will love them more and be more likely to want to keep paying its licence fees. They will also be in a terrible mess that will cost them a fortune to sort out. That's a fortune of public money that would be better spent on making programmes that people want to watch.

They have tens of thousands of employees and contributors and scores of partner organisations, each with their own agenda when it comes to sharing what they do. Retroactive application of a wish to make things for people not just to take, but to take away, seems like an unrealistic goal. Forget the past and start now. Project Canvas, an open standard for video on demand on which other people can build technology and programming, seems like an excellent place way to declare new intentions.

And for God's sake stop worrying about what people think.

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