Shall I just give the camera a quick nudge?
And I'm recording my screen, but... Do you want it a bit more...
I've got a shiny face, I'm just gonna de-shine it with a cushion.
Why don't you just go n' make telly, do News n' that?
All right. Let's do it!
Hello and welcome to BBC R&D Explains, where we lift the lid
on our big projects and chat directly to the people behind them.
This is our fourth and final episode about a big project of ours
called New Forms of Value. Catch up on Episode three on that link
or here's a super quick recap of where we've been so far.
What could people love the BBC for as well as radio and television?
What would it look like if you had a single store for all your personal data?
Over the next few months we're going to be testing out
a whole range of prototypes with as many users as possible.
This is where human values came in for new ways of doing things new
ways of working, thinking value first being values driven. In this episode.
we're talking about the internet, what might be wrong with it
and how we could help build a public service internet
that works better for everyone.
Bill Thomson with me again, thank you so much for being here.
Why exactly are we looking at the internet.
What are we doing? Are we redesigning it? Why? Just Why?
That's a very good and pertinent question and we get that quite a lot because it does seem
why should the BBC care about how the internet works?
The BBC obviously cares about how broadcasting works.
And for many years the BBC owned a transmission
network - sticks on hills that broadcast radio signals and
broadcast television to people and it was seen as an understandable
part of our business and we still spend a lot of time researching
broadcasting. Well the internet is, is the medium that we use for Iplayer
and Sounds and News and all the other great services
the BBC currently has. If you're sending stuff out over today's
internet then it has to go through a number of internet service providers.
Each of whom has its own kit and technology.
It could possibly be being monitored
while it's going out there. People are tracking it. We know
there are hackers and phishers and spam artists. There are all
sorts of things happening on today's internet that we feel
get in the way of the BBC audiences experience of our services and
so we've been working with a number of organisations that also
care about the health of the internet to try to figure out what
would an internet that served the public would look like.
And that's not to say there would need to be radical
changes to what actually happens. But we want to ask the question.
We want to ask the question in two ways.
The first is just in an engineering context, the internet works
because there are a whole set of international standards
that make up something called TCP/IP, the Transmission
Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. Together they make bits
move around between a web server and your phone or between two computers,
any two computers. The design of those protocols standards was
largely shaped over the last 30 years by the interests of moving
data as quickly and efficiently as possible and other aspects,
like, security confidentiality or reliability.
or trustworthiness were not baked in from the start. So we want to ask
OK, are there ways to start reshaping those core internet protocols to make
them more usable by organisations like the BBC that really care about
those principles. And then we also want to ask about the nature of the services
that are built on top of the internet and how they can rely on how they
can rely on the network itself to deliver services that delight
that entertain, inform. Services being designed according to the
human values framework. that look after personal data properly,
using personal data stores that provide a whole range of exciting new
experiences like augmented reality. So how can we create an internet,
which will sustain an organisation like the BBC in the future.
And it's a big job. It's not just a job for the BBC, many other people
are interested in it, but it's one that we absolutely think we have an interest in
taking part in trying to solve some of these really difficult problems.
So, with me now is Ian Forrester.
He's a senior fire starter producer at BBC R&D.
So you are headed up our work on public service internet, Ian.
So you're talking about the network layer. Can you pick apart
some of the technologies that may be involved here and some of the work
that you've done so far to explore how we might exist on this on the public service internet.
We're looking at stuff like the underlying network
protocols, y'know
what does that enable, what does that not enable. We've been focusing very much
on the decentralisation, distributed networks and federate networks.
So centralised model is that everything evolves around
one thing. So when you go to something like Facebook or even the BBC,
currently, you go to one place and this one place is where all the stuff is.
And that from a governance point of view is useful because you have
complete control over everything. In a decentralised model
what happens is that you move the power from the central place to the
edges, so to you. So you can actually have some of that data locally and you
have control over that. A distributed model is where, it's not that
it's all just at the edges, it's distributed around the network.
That's a much more difficult thing to do and understand, but it's quite
powerful because that allows you other type of experiences which,
um, which we are not even aware of right now,
but the point of what we're doing is to explore what the,
what the possibilities are not only for ourselves,
but also for our audiences. How can we empower the audience
to have control over their own data and to make choices
which makes sense for them. OK, so what are the next steps?
What are you gonna be looking at exactly next to move this forward?
It's also about reaching out to other partners, it's about that bigger network.
So, for example, the W3C, the World Wide, umm
World Wide Web Consortium. Ummm, they have a lot to say in this.
And they also have lots of partners and so working with
them for example would be a great thing for us
and for the web and our audiences.
OK, thank you very much, Ian. It's a fascinating piece of work.
It sounds like there's a huge amount still to think about, kinda early stages and
working with partners to kinda define how this public was internet will look
Can I just say something, so I think that the thing
I'll also add just to finish off is that this is not a defined thing.
This isn't about the BBC deciding this.
This is about a kind of, a pool of collaborators
working together to focus more on a public service
internet to focus more on people and ultimately, if you want, if you
if you've listened to anything we've talked about and disagree or agree
get in touch you know that's
that's probably the most important part of this. This is not about us
going away squirrelling away in our lab and then kind of go tada look at what we've done
It's not that, it's much, it's a much more open space and than that.
OK and how, for anyone that's interested
how can they keep up with the work that's going on?
So we have our blog, which is bbc.co.uk/rd/blog
The best thing to do is look there.
But also just to get in touch you know
we have a Twitter account, which is worth following
we'll post more and more stuff there, but you'll start to see more
experiments popping up here and there and they're worth checking out.
OK, great. Thanks so much Ian for telling us about the work that you're doing,
thanks so much. Thank you very much.
We heard from Ian Forrester there about the public service internet and
the work we're doing to explore that. So this extended research programme,
New Forms of Value. It's a huge body of work, Bill
where will take us, where are we going to end up?
I don't know. That's half the fun of it.
I have a pretty good idea, though, that what it's giving us and
what the amazing researchers and engineers and designers and social
scientists who are working on these projects are doing are starting to
map the territory because our real goal is to ensure that as the BBC
makes decisions about what services it wants to offer, what programmes
it wants to make how it wants to reach audiences,
it can do so confidently and our goal is not to build those services,
but to make sure that the decisions are made on the basis of evidence and understanding. And so public service
AR and all the work we're doing about human values framework,
the work around personal data stores and data stewardship and the
work on the public service internet all fit together as part of this
larger picture of the online world and my hope is that the work
we're doing will enable not just the BBC,
but other public service organisations to understand it better
to act bravely and correctly as they make very difficult decisions and
to ensure that organisations like the BBC thrive in this online world.
Well, that's it for this episode and our mini series all about BBC R&D's
project, New Forms of Value. As always let us know what you think
in the comments, like and subscribe. See you next time.