RE: [backstage] backstage.bbc.co.uk TV Schedule competition

[Luke Dicken]

Title: Message

For my part, all the interesting things I came up with were very AI related, which meant they were really just ways of procrastinating from working on my dissertation and commercial-type stuff, so I couldn't legitimately justify spending the time on it. I think in general this sort of thing will take a long time to produce results - the kind of people who have the expertise to do this well are the kind of people who already do this professionally, and after a long day on the job I know I wouldn't be wholly interested in coming back home and code-monkeying some more. As far as the prize goes, a rackable server again limits your target audience - perhaps something more mainstream would bring in more people who aren't techs-by-profession? Off the top of my head a top-of-the-line desktop (or equivalent value) would be of wider use.

 

Of course, thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.

 

Luke

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ben Metcalfe
Sent: 01 September 2005 14:39
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: [backstage] backstage.bbc.co.uk TV Schedule competition
Importance: High

Dear all,

I'm writing to let you know that the inaugural backstage.bbc.co.uk competition hasn’t gone as well as I had hoped.  In fact, at the time of sending this we haven’t received any entries at all.

backstage.bbc.co.uk is very much about the BBC experimenting with new ways of engaging with it’s expert user base, and clearly this specific exercise hasn’t worked.  backstage.bbc.co.uk also strives to be a publicly open and transparent project, which is why I am writing to communicate this to you all.

Moving forward, I’ve been trying to think about why this has happened – and my guess is that it comes to one of two possibilities:

* The TV schedule data we provided over-complicated and in an alien format that was difficult to parse, or
* The idea of developing around a BBC-led theme, even for a prize, isn’t an approach that is of interest to the backstage.bbc.co.uk community.

I’m keen to gather whether either/both of these reasons are the case, or maybe there’s something else I’ve completely missed?

All of your thoughts and views are very subject are very much appreciated, so I’d be really grateful if you could let me know what you think – either publicly on this mailing list or privately (ben.metcalfe [at] bbc.co.uk).

I don’t want to pre-empt your views on this, so I will get back to you with some more thoughts and action points on my part, once I am able to gauge where we stand (and thus what we need to do differently next time).

Many thanks

Ben Metcalfe
Project Lead, backstage.bbc.co.uk