Refocusing on the Future

In the last week or so the R&D department has laid its plans for the future out in some detail, at least internally. The intention is that by the beginning of April we will have a solid 'workplan' for the next year or so, and will begin a new, regular cycle of quarterly review, and twice annual reassesment.

The first cycle of assesment of projects, and the general reorganisation that has followed, has been pretty radical. Overall we have decided to end 51 out of 90 current R&D projects. Over the next three to six months the research effort within the BBC will be wound down, and documentation, software hardware and other materials will be collated, archived and, where suitable, published to our colleagues and in some cases the wider world.

This doesn't mean that the projects come to a dead stop though- for instance the Dirac effort will go through a full certification process, and will continue to be developed for key applications, such as archival file formats, but it looks like the focus will shift away from formal research.

At the same time as some long running efforts have been marked to conclude (or transition into development), five more projects proposed by R&D staff have been given the green light, and another eight requested by the business are to begin- so it's not all about 'endings'. Plus, and for me most importantly, we are shaking up the structure. Now, instead of the traditional 'portfolios' we are having 'sections'- seven of them in four key areas. And one of those sections is explicitly focussed on archive work, and includes all the previously distributed (and slightly 'cinderalla') Archive R&D effort. Whoot!

The Big Archive Project

Very very occasionaly i may have alluded to a 'day job' taking up some time, and being tricky to work around, and seeing as this role is rather 'peaking' at the moment in terms of its demands it warrants a little bit of visibility.

The project is called AVATAR-M, and it's a uk government part funded R&D project in which the BBC, and partners, are investigating large scale audio visual archival. There's a wide range of technology being explored- Dirac is being used as a platform for developing archival optimised video file formats, there's software to plan video storage needs over time, and we're building demonstrators of new sorts of disk storage systems.

All the effort is coming to a head at the moment as we prepare for a week of demonstrations at the NAB show in Las Vegas, from the 19th to the 24th of April. Umm, we have a web site on the way, and a stand all booked, with a stand number and everything, but here I am blogging from my garden and they're just not to hand, sorry. I'll update this inthe week.

Anyway, what's the current flurry of activity? Well, we're populating these humongous storage devices currently being constructed at a secret facility on the south coast with huge amounts of HD video- not in Dirac yet, that'll follow in a few months. A pair of these machines (jokingly refered to as portable storage devices- they weight 200KG+!) will sit on the stand happily munching several dozen terabytes of video all day. Excitingly for me, we're also going to demonstrate the kit hooked up to 'broadcast typical' edit facilities- so I get to be trained up in Final Cut Pro in a couple of weeks so we can show this capability on the stand. We've even got some very nice Mac kit to hook it all together.

At the same time, we're shooting a video to show on the stand and to distribute. We're working with Milo creative on this and they're doing some tremendously exciting and original stuff for us. All the principle photography has been done against chromakey backgrounds, and the concepts for the video are brilliant! We've also been lucky enogh to get Tony Ageh, the BBC's Controller of Archive Development to appear on screen to open the film- the picture here shows him in TC10 last week shooting with the guys from MILO, and Reece De Ville from our internal comms team.

So all in all this project has plenty to keep me busy. Upshot being that as soon as the Vegas demos are done and dusted, I'm taking a week off and driving to San Francisco, where Rowan and I shall chill out and destress- I can hardly wait!

We went, we saw, we made

Our team is making it back into work today a little fragile, but thoroughly elated that we were able to be a part of the spectacular inaugural Maker Faire UK. The new BBCWeatherbot (not to be confused with the IRC bot one ) made a couple of very well recieved appearances at the end of Sunday's show- exploring a Tony Hart style hand drawn giant map of the UK, and diplaying the weather at various locations. Video is being furiously logged and sorted for editing now, and I hope to have a few little bits online in the next few days.

I'd like to thank everyone who put their heart and soul into what was a fabulous event, for exhibitors and I hope the public. For us at the BBC R&D it was a rare opportunity to engage with a terrifically broad range of our audiences- if you were one of those who came and said hi, thanks! We hope to be able to come to more such events (we hope there are more such events) in future.

In the meantime, feast your eyes on the flickr pool for the event, and see the videos that are already popping up on Youtube.

nixie_tubes

nixie_tubes, originally uploaded by meeware1.

I just love nixie tubes. And this guys sells single tube clock kits. I think I buy one today.

Makers in Brighton

circuskinetica1, originally uploaded by meeware1.

Today Row and I took a leisurely stroll across town for lunch at the Sanctuary (top little cafe and chill out space). Then we decided to check out a little art exhibition in the old boiler room of Embassy Court.

As we approached the gallery the way was crowded with glorious articulated geegaws, seemingly hewn from the sort of scrap that litters the dereliuct corners of town.

Inside the magical exhibition continued and there were some extraordinary musical sculptures too.

The guys behind the bizarre and magical windmill devices can be found at Circus Kinetica and I'm very keen to encourage them to come along to a Maker Faire at some stage.

Also very worthy of mention is the guy who is the main reason we ewent along at all- the very excellent and not at all short James Beasley- was doing live custom embroidery. Drawing quite a crowd too! James's work can be found at Alias Everything.

Archive Projects 'Flocking'- Timelines for All?

From time to time I realise that there is a tidal system at work behind the great institutions of this country and the wider world- it's not just economic cycles, though that's clearly a major factor, but also the social, the technical, and the political. At the moment this seems to be leading to a general resurgence in research into archives, and in particular, public access to them.

In the last week I've seen several completely unrelated demos and discussions of projects that seek to present harmonious, integrated and user friendly interfaces to a wide range of disparate archive assets, and what is striking is the congruence of 'vision' of the user proposition. Timelines! It's all about timelines!

As it goes the BBC has some pretty groovy timelines in service, but by and large these are exquisitly hand crafted pieces of digital interactive animation. The next generation of tools are going to have to give that same slick and accessible interface, but to widely heterogenous assets, sometimes from widely different sources! A timeline of the the next generation will need to provide access, meaningful access, to resources from across a broad federated archive, and include all manner of objects, including text, images, video and even 3d models for manipulation and exploration.

Within the BBC this is beginning to stretch beyond the relatively simple domain of linking web resources, into exploring how we can make the broad sweep of our online offering 'time taggable'. We are also contributing to JISC funded projects exploring how assets from us can be combined with others from archies, libraries and academic collections across the UK can be combined. This project is not universally welcomed- there have been objections to the threat of the BBC archive overwhelming other collections. We recognise these concerns and our current efforts in partnerships are very much focussed on bringing benefit to our fellow partners, and avoiding crowding out others. For one thing, we hope to help pioneer tools and technologies that will be then available to smaller archives for lower cost, because we and other 'big hitters' a
have made the initial research investment for the benefit of all.

For myself I do love a good timeline, but I do fear that the smoothness and accesibility of a graphical user interface is often at the expense of it's flexibility and power. Having said that- Gapminder demonstrates that power, flexibiliuty and beauty can be found together, if a clear idea of the user is maintained.

One last link: check out this Smashing magazine review of top graphical interface examples for Gapminder, BBC History and many more.

beebcamp2

beebcamp2, originally uploaded by meeware1.

Last week saw the second Beebcamp held at Whitecity. Top kudos to Philip and all the organisers, and many thanks to all the invited contributors who came in and really added to the event.

For me one of the best things was bouncing the BBC Micro for the 21st Century ideas off a new crowd- there are at least two good leads now, outside of the BBC, for me to explore further, in addition to the existing ones.

And in other news, I got the promotion I was going for- Still not entirely sure of a start date (so much still to do on Avatar, including Vegas!), but I hope to soon in in the saddle so recently vacated by Matt Cashmore!

Where Steam Punk was Born

Friday saw me in a facinating meeting with an EU technology research programme representative, and people from some of the most active research groups in the UK- that was great, but it's a topic for another day. Today's post is about the venue- the Institute of Mechanical Engineers- and their decorative stuff!

The I Mech E as it is usually called sits at the bottom southwest corner of St James Park, at 1, Birdcage Walk. A nice spot, tucked in behind the Foriegn and Commonwealth Office, very desirable. And our meeting was in the Whittle Room. The Frank Whittle room, Frank Whittle inventor of the jet engine and total engineering hero, and this room was absolutely stuffed with Whittle memorabilia- it was fantastic (and ever so slightly distracting when the gentleman from Brussels was explaining the finer points of the managment of conflicts of interest in proposal assesment schemes).

So that was completely brilliant, and then, on the way out, I notice that the hallway was lined (literally lined floor to cieling) with working model tractions engines. Working in as much as they could work if you fuelled them up etc- they were sitting in glass cases that day. All well and good you say, but this was to traction engines what the Natural History Museum is to bugs- this was the most incredible collection of the freaky, funky and downright weird traction engines that ever were. This then, in the heart of London, is clearly the true home of the Steam Punk ethic- the sanctum sanctorum of engineering mastery, the motherload of victorian gentle-person design and makery, and they know it!

Maker Faire Newcastle 2009- Update

The deadline for getting your Maker proposal in is the 8th of Feb, this coming Sunday, so if you're going do let Josette know as soon as poss! The BBC has now commited to being there, and we have a cunning plan.... robots, weather, RFID, etc etc.

More to follow (maybe even a URL to the project!)

Snow Day!

quentin the snowman, originally uploaded by meeware1.

Quite a few people have blogged about the BBC's central role for our audiences during the recent weather events,but you might like an insight into the way the corporation as a whole coped. Whilst you'd be absolutely right that our public facing infrastructure held up magnificently (offering travel info when so many train companies web sites gave up the ghost), some of our internal business support systems weren't so fortunate.

Perhaps it's obvious, since I made this spectacular snowman yesterday, but our ability to allow staff to work from home all came to a juddering halt around 9.15 yesterday when the majority of the staff in the south east tried to log in from home. I shan't go into the details of the whys and wherefores- it'll take a while to figure those out, and much of it will remain 'private' to the BBC, and rightly so. What's particularly interesting from my point of view is that there were so many other ways to get on with work. Twitter, Gmail and especially Yammer provided a vital channel for us to coordinate efforts and continue work.

Whilst it is critical that the BBC retains control of the excellent audience facing infrastructure that lets us continue with our Television, Radio, Web and other IP based services throughout the most trying of challenges, when it comes to the 'non-broadcast critical' bits and bobs that keep the office going, I'm wondering if we may look more to the cloud and to distributed and open systems to provide, if not the core functionality, then at least a managed backup.

The BBC does have to be careful about it's cyber security- we are, in the eyes of many, a 'valid target'. It's shocking the number of people who see us as an arm of the UK government, even in the UK! Sensitive data, critical communications, the whole of the broadcast chain is, and should remain a well protected central spine of the business. However, we've recently been debating the use of Yammer, and whether we'd be better to run our own Laconi.ca servers internally for the same function. I think we've just had one good illustration of why that might not be such a great idea.

After all, those Darpa guys did have resilience at the top of their wish list all those years ago,

Planning for the Maker Faire

As in plans to do some 'making'. As in come March the 14th/15th, O'ReillyUK will be hosting the first Maker Faire in these islands *. The Backstage and BBC R&D (yes, it's an aging site, new one due soon!) teams have decided this would be a really fantastically interesting thing to get involved in, so we are putting together a team at the moment to go along and "Make Stuff".

We're not absolutely sure what we'll make just yet. Inspiration is coming from the excellent videos from previous Faires, our own experience with Mashed and other big events, and the fact that this is in National Science and Engineering Week, in the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, at the Life centre .

We want to keep it "open", so pretty much anyone can have a go at doing at least part of what we do. We think environmental science and exploration is a good element (the Darwin/ Life thing). We'd like to use loads of great BBC content, and we also need to be in the spirit of Make, and have lots of noisy, messy, smelly breaking and mending and making and hammering and gluing etc. and we'll also be filming it too. As plans develop I'll post them here, and you may even see tweets from me as the cunning scheme comes together, but for now, watch this space!

Oh, and do let me know if you're going too- should be a hoot!

* There is actually a simultaneous event a lot like a Maker Faire in Glasgow called McMADSAT (great name) but O'Reilly can really only do one at once. being the lazy sods we are, our team are doing the one nearest, but we're really keen to hear how they do in Glasgow.

Bettr

Having a facinating time at Bettr- this unconference is a little small, and perhaps not as fluid as some, but the level of attendee engagement is excellent and the discussion is very wide ranging and eclectic. For instance, just at the moment the guy from tinker.it is leading a discuson on the best way to socialise innovation in teaching, unconferences and the ilk. headconference has been explored, but I think we're looking at lower level, grass roots stuff.

There's a brilliant twitter backchannel under the #bettr tag.

Ice Tilt /Shift

Ice Tilt, originally uploaded by meeware1.

I love tilt shift photos- those cheeky bits of photoshoping that make real life look like a really badly slapped together train set- but I'm hopeless in Gimp (the OS photoshop equivalent). There are gazzilions of tiltshift tutorials online, and all of them fox me utterly (same goes for HDR natch). However- this site: http://tiltshiftmaker.com is totally brilliant and makes cool tilt shifts in a jiffy! I really need to get some good material for this, so spot me in the next few weeks atop every multistorey car park I can find!

Northward ho! or, not.

Today we finally heard how the great big BBC north project was going to be taken up by R&D, and I think the approach we are taking is a very sensible one, but also a little scary. Basically, we are committing to set up a world class, top drawer kick butt R&D lab in Salford by 2011, but no one is going to be forced to go. The opportunity looks amazing, and for those with the flexibility to make the move, it'll be great. For the rest of us, there's still a lot of uncertainty.

Sadly there's still no clear idea of where the South East R&D lab will live- W12 is a possibility, though space is dreadfully tight there, and expensive, and the facilities management is deeply underwhelming. A Surrey base looks unlikely, as does a Cambridge one I think, but both options are being seriously considered. All in all, it was a day of progress, and a call to arms for those on the staff with the ability and the gumption to make a go of a future in the North. For me...? I just don't know.

Plans

So, I promised to post more, so here we go. This is a quick outline of the things I really hope to do at work this year:

1. Do NAB- the big Las Vegas broadcast technology conference and trade show. The Avatar project will have a stand there showing off our prototype large scale A/V storage system, and current plan are to have one paper in conference and week of demos. Lots to do to get ready for that- I need to learn how to drive Final Cut Pro on macbooks first- and we are planning on shooting a film to take out with us too!
2. Turn the ideas about a BBC micro for the 21st century into a real live project- no idea how, or where or what, but there enough great ideas swirling around this idea that it just has to fly.
3. Get some of Steve Bowbrick's ideas about openess in the corporation into action- some of these are revolutionary in ways I can't even post about (hows that for irony!) but their all capable of properly shaking this place up!
4. Fly more rockets.
5. Visit more great out of London offices- Glasgow was a highlight of last year- I need to return to Manchester and Birmingham, and I really ought to get out to Belfast and Bristol!
   

OK, that'll do for a first stab, especially considering how fragile I feel after last night.

Resolution!

I shall blog more next year- promise! Till then, have a great new year's eve and I'll be posting more in 2009.

L8r!

We Took a Break

Opatija Flying Dutchman, originally uploaded by meeware1.

Like I mentioned in the last post, Rowan and I just got back from a break in Hungary, Croatia and Italy, which was great. Not only did we have long sunny days soaking up the Adriatic sun, but Rowan also had her teeth finally fixed up, some fourteen months after her calamatous bike accident.

I really can't tell you how relieved and happy I am that she has made it through to the other side of this. It's a horrible horrible thing to see the one you love in constant pain and discomfort, and I'd have moved mountains to swap places with her. At last she can smile again in confidence and comfort, and did so on the lovely Opatija Riviera. Rowan's photo's are, as ever, far better than mine, but this is a nice one I got whilst enjoying a very fine capuccino at Cafe Levandra.

Awake at the Wheel

My usual refrain in this blog has been how in spite of all the great stuff going on at the BBC's R&D area, basically it's going to hell in a hand cart. Against that background the last 3 weeks sojourn in Hungary, Croatia and Italy was a blessed release from the pressure that working in such a state of apparently terminal decline can bring about. Great holiday by the way- will blog some pix via flickr later.

About eight weeks ago Eric put the whole relocation of R&D on hold- a move I was worried by (and I still do think it will have cost us some difficulties in setting up a space in the White City buildings). Yesterday we saw the first elements of what he has cooked up during the hiatus, and it delights me to say that everything we saw looked great.

There are three key points as far as I'm concerned:

• The decisions about where to put R&D geographically, and how to structure it internally, are all being based on a serious 'back to basics' review of what the BBC is doing R&D for- and they're being quite up front about saying it's a philosophical enquiry. This is tremendous exciting, and appears to be really progressive too- Eric considers R&D to be an asset at several levels, including nationally and internationally.
• The relocation plans, as were, are scrapped since we were going to loose too many people with those. That's not to say that some elements won't look familiar, but the fundamentally cavalier way that the relocation of staff looked like it was going to be handled is gone. That, plus the clear, sensible, and intelligent context the analysis above is providing will give us a much better chance of keeping enough key people. We must retain critical mass, and this move will be designed to acheive exactly that.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly and most tellingly, Eric has appointed Matthew Postgate to be controller of R&D. This is great- I've been working part time on an innovation strategy for mobile for the last few months, and he is a rock solid bloke. Eminently proffesional, technically savvy, open minded and with a radical streak a mile wide- he was running the BBC Mobile area for a few years and under his managment we've seen some great launches (iPlayer on iPhone and Nokia n96, Electric Proms, and the great Olympics coverage to name just a few). The fact that this appointment has been made early, and in advance of Erics wider scale rejig of the whole of FM&T, gives us confidence in our place in the dvision and the wider BBC.
  

The atomosphere at Kingswood was better yesterday than I have seen it for years, perhaps ever. We used to feel that there really was no one at the wheel, or at best we'd get occasional nudges from a sleeping, part time, frankly un-qualified and un-interested journeyman manager. Now we have Matthew, and we have very high hopes indeed.

The latest greatest meh!

Just returned from Fly Me to the Moon at the Odeon in Brighton- rainy afternoon,weekend looking after 4 yrar old nephew, so we check out the latest animated feature. This was different though- this was in 3d using circular polarized projectors and glasses.

Of all the 3d technologies I've experienced this is possibly the least worst- no colour weirdness, no flipping out if you tilt your head or move an inch to either side, but it was still a vaguely nauseating hour and a half, with perhaps twenty minutes spent with uncomfortable eye strain and unresolved stereoscopy. The Film sucked too, very much so. No humour of any kind, some very laboured 'jokes' and in the end credit, Buzz Aldrin appeared to tell us it was a 'scientific impossibility' that there had been three talking flys aboard the Apollo 11 mission. Nice touch!

Avoid this like the plague unless you absiolutely must see every single 3D tech going. I'm off to lie down in a darkened room.

A BBC Micro for the 21st Century?

Wow, just done my first flying solo Barcamp session, and I'm relatively please with how it went. It was a pretty loose exploration of the last BBC Micro (late 80's, hugely influencial, but with a gestation and reasoning behind it which might not agree with your preconceptions!), and an exploration of whether and what the BBC could or ought to do along the same lines some 25 years later.

Thanks a gazzilion to Rain for blogging it. That's actually rather more structured and complete than anything I had written down about it!

I'd also like to thank the audience, who not only seemed really attentive, but at the end everyone engaged in a really spirited discussion of the potential avanues in which this could develop. I hope to continue this dialogue in Backstage, keep eyes peeled for a blog post there.