Tag: lecture

British Digital Corporation? Radical thoughts?

Jeremy Corbyn and Labour

You might have noticed I haven’t been blogging much recently (there are many reasons) but I’ve been doing a lot of reading and have a ton of things to blog.

One such thing is Jeremy Corbyn’s 2018 Alternative MacTaggart Lecture or rather his big, bold, radical thinking on the future of our media.

Big and bold maybe, radical? I’m less convinced but the interesting part is section 4, where he outlines plans for a British Digital Corporation.

The final idea I’d to share with you today, which I hope will generate some new thinking, is about how we, as a public and the media, as an industry take advantage of new technology.

I want us to be as ambitious as possible. The public realm doesn’t have to sit back and watch as a few mega tech corporations hoover up digital rights, assets and ultimately our money. This technology doesn’t have an inbuilt bias towards the few. Government is standing by and letting the few take advantage of the many using technology.

So, one of the more ambitious ideas I’ve heard is to set up a publicly owned British Digital Corporation as a sister organisation to the BBC. The idea was floated by James Harding, former BBC Director of Home News in the Hugh Cudlipp lecture earlier this year.

A BDC could use all of our best minds, the latest technology and our existing public assets not only to deliver information and entertainment to rival Netflix and Amazon but also to harness data for the public good.

A BDC could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform with real privacy and public control over the data that is making Facebook and others so rich.

The BDC could work with other institutions that the next Labour government will set up like our National Investment Bank, National Transformation Fund, Strategic Investment Board, Regional Development Banks and our public utilities to create new ways for public engagement, oversight and control of key levers of our economy.

It could become the access point for public knowledge, information and content currently held in the BBC archives, the British Library and the British Museum. Imagine an expanded Iplayer giving universal access to licence fee payers for a product that could rival Netflix and Amazon. It would probably sell pretty well overseas as well.

I find this interesting mainly because I still think the BBC is still best placed to do this, rather than set up a new corporation. If I didn’t think this was still true I’d be rethinking what I’m doing at the BBC.

The thing I do think could work is a collaboration between different existing companies/institutes/organisations to a make something like Corbyn is talking about.

Now that would be radical…?

See a future in Dot Everybody…?

Following Paula Le Dieu’s talk at OpenTech 2015, I looked into the dotEverybody.org.uk.

We have an opportunity to make Britain brilliant at digital. We’ve been going too slow, being too incremental – in skills, in infrastructure, in public services. We need to be bolder.

A new institution could be the catalyst we need to shape the world we want to live in and Britain’s role in that world. Today, we’re letting big commercial technology platforms shape much of our digital lives, dominating the debate about everything from online privacy to how we build smart cities.

fact, I probably wouldn’t call it an institution at all. This is no normal public body. It’s time to balance the world of dot com so let’s create DOT EVERYONE.

I was impressed with the scope of the ambition. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is a great starting point, just the audience alone was equally impressive with some seriously smart people including Tony Ageh, Tom Loosemore, Matthew Postgate all in the crowd along side the director general and many others. But its worth  reading the transcript, reading huffpost and watching the lost lecture which digs into the earlier thoughts including a mention of knowle-west in Bristol. Likewise the parliament speech is also worth watching.

Its strange that I heard about dot everybody and some how overlooked it, rather than having a proper look at it. They certainly are saying the right things…

Tim Berners-Lee started thinking about this with his recent Web We Want campaign.

Here’s a specific example: we wouldn’t make policy decisions about health care matters without consulting doctors and medical ethicists. According to the same logic, we shouldn’t make privacy and data policy without consulting technologists and encryption experts. The Snowden revelations and subsequent tribunal this year found that up to 2013, GCHQ had been undermining encryption and bulk collecting our data. Whatever you think about the effectiveness of executive oversight, everyone agrees that the legislation governing our data is woefully inadequate.

Right now, many of the people responsible for renewing that legislation don’t have all the technical knowledge required to do the best job possible. Surely this has to change.

There is no shortage of other issues to be explored.

Do children need different rights online?

What are the implications of wearable technology? Of an internet embedded in devices in your home?

How do we make sure that ‘smart cities’ are projects for the public good not just private profit?

How should we prepare for the so called “second machine age” and the increasing use of robots?

How do we protect against increasing cybercrime?

I believe we should make sure that the original promises of the internet – openness, transparency, freedom and universality – are a national asset, as integral to our soft power as the Queen, singing superstar Adele, JK Rowling, Shakespeare, or dare I say it on this channel, Downton Abbey.

Of course, the cynical could say well thats nice but wheres the action?

Like the Open rights group in 2005, things need time to grow and mature. You also need to be there at the conception of the idea and be willing to shape it, not just sit there and watch it fall over. This is why I sign and put money towards the pledge at the Change.org site.

I want to see this happen very soon, and I’m happy to pay a little to insure it happens for sure.

Memes where do they come from?

I’ve taken my eyes off mydreamscape for a few weeks recently but I’m back on the case. Recently attended a nice lecture (I was recommended by my hypnotherapist Shannon) which reaffirmed what I’m trying to do with mydreamscape.

The organic chemist August Kekulé claimed that a ring in the shape of Ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.) that he saw in a dream inspired him in his discovery of the structure of benzene.

As noted by Carl Jung, this might be an instance of cryptomnesia (cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.)

In the session/lecture I attended Susan Leigh who was the guest speaker, talked about dreams but from the point of view of a hypnotherapist. The idea being if someone comes to you for help, you might be able to get an idea of what and where there problems take root. However there was still lots to learn for someone like myself.

I wrote notes down while she was talking but here’s a few of the key points.

  • Dream descriptions are not as important as how they make you feel.
  • Within the first 30mins of falling a sleep, you are treated to a preview of all the dreams you will have that night. Like a set of trailers for that night
  • Repeative dreams obvioulsy say a lot more you that one offs.
  • The dreamer is the best person to describe and make sense of there dreams. The whole dream dictorory thing is questionable, although broad concepts do still some what apply.
  • Friends and family who know the dream may be better that a expert at understanding elements of the dreamer dream.
  • Food and drink can have a serious effect on dreams
  • Using self hyponisis its possible to artect your dream
  • Mental fatigue creates images which are not helpful
  • All manimals dream
  • Dreams are symbolic and people generally have 6-7 dreams a night

Susan mentioned the work of Dr Keith Hearne who is a internationally known British psychologist who conducted the world’s first sleep-laboratory research into ‘lucid’ dreams. Funny enough I didn’t know but I’ve actually got a book of his on my bookshelf Understanding Dreams.

So going back through the key points, I’m wondering if I should focus more on the metadata of the dream that the description its self. But also interestingly the concens about gaming or spamming the system isn’t such a worry anymore. The descriptions will be interesting but overall the descriptions won’t be that important plus will only really be interesting to friends and family who know that person.

In actual fact there was quite a lot of talk about the fact people close will be able to interupt the dream. I’m not sure what this means in the face of dream dictionaries (i assume there very generalised).

Lots of food for thought, but it strikes me that until we can confirm what kind of dream the person is having, the ephasis should be on the metadata collected. Roll on the dream recorder…

My BBC talk at Ravensbourne College

Ravensbourne

So on Tuesday afternoon, I gave a lecture at Ravensbourne College to a mix of interaction design, broadcast and graphic design students. John told me, it just needed to be inspiring. So I was torn between my day job at BBC Backstage and things I think about daily. So I started with my presentation about what is backstage. I got to the 3rd slide before the whole lecture turned into a dynamic conversation about the BBC. It was fantastic, the students and staff wanted to know where the BBC was going in the future. Along that path we explorered the questions of advertising on the BBC's international facing website and the Microsoft BBC agreement. Miles did say this

I did find myself reminded of John Battelle's description of AltaVista as it was fucked over by DEC (just prior to the sale to Compaq): “a mammal chained to a dinosaur more likely than not will get trampled.

While I don't know the details of the agreement, there were lots of thoughts and worries about the future of non-DRM content coming out of the BBC. Someone mentioned Dirac and asked whats happened to that? There was also a serious debate about why we didn't write our own DRM? The suggestion was that DRM in understandable if we can't make up our mind between DRM and NoDRM at this point. And you know what thats actually a good question, even if we internally couldn't build it. Maybe someone else could have from a netrual position. I've heard good things about Open Source DRM but not seen any marjor adopters. This would be an ideal project for the BBC to trial. Hey maybe even a Backstage Project? Someone (i think miles) did ask what would happen if someone today created a videoplayer which looks and feels like the BBC player which is being worked on? I said we would certainly be interested in it from a prototype point of view and if it was that good, who knows what might happen.

Although most of this could sound like BBC bashing, it was far from that. It was concerned people wanting to understand why certain choices were being made without them and wondering what they could do to make sure the BBC values lives on in some form into the future.

For any students who might be reading, I uploaded the raw html from the cache of my desktop RSS reader. I hope to clean it up a little more in the near future.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]