Euan Semple @ E20Summit

Now Euan Semple on the “Quiet Revolution” at the BBC and what they did at the BBC about 6yrs back. BBC’s cool, check out Backstage for a start of what they’re doing, see also Ian Forrester.

He starts off with the cluetrain, the power of relationships that’s underlying.

Tells us how troubleshooting and “helpdesk stuff” was handled in the BBC then, it was clear that they needed a way for users to find the needed information by themselves … when sharing knowledge via Email is cumbersome, distributed replies etc. make it difficult to compile and refactor “answers”

– the collective space (“Connect”) that they devised was a lightweight and very usable platform
– fostering communities leveraged existing informal communities, users were allowed to introduce their own spaces

Euan likes the term “interest group” more – as opposed to community – I can understand this, communities can’t be engineered and “ordered for”, yet they emerge around common interests and tasks.

– they added blogs to the mix, Euan shortly points out the often overlooked little things (permalinks for a start)
– wikis too, example BBC blogging guidelines, done with a Confluence wiki.

Then he diggs into some Web 2.0 tools that are in the mix too, like
– RSS readers
– tagging too, explains the rationale behind tag clouds (“a more organic way of navigation information”), mentions Thomas Vanderwal too …
– social networks as “information mediaries”, showing his Last.fm page and stream of played music, then Plazes too.

With the closing slides he’s putting on speed again, showing Innocentive open innovation network and Zopa p2p lending before leaving the stage to Jeff Schick of IBM.