Hi all, I know quite a few of you have heard the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast of last week, and in particular the bit where Jemima says that Backstage is being wound up. In essence she was correct, but clearly we'd like to have made the announcement ourselves, so there will be an official announcement from Adrian Woolard on the Backstage blog in the next day or so. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcbackstage/
As Jemima suggested, we are trying to avoid the project grinding to a dead stop, and we've been working hard to have elements such as data feeds and API's integrated into the BBC's core business. Other elements, such as the support which we give to the community that uses this forum, plus some internal functions which the project performed, are also being transformed. We're stepping up the efforts to make sure Backstage finishes properly, and we also need all of your help to make sure that the legacy of this effort is as successful as possible. Over the coming weeks we are going to try and find a way to take the best of the Backstage community into a larger grouping. We want to maintain a sustainable way to support you, and engag with you, but it seems odd to balkanise this community into small specific groups, when the real strength of open development is the aggregation of multiple platforms, data sources and pulling all of the above together to make new applications and services based around the users. So, we're going to see what we can set up that's better for you, and, by extension, for us. This is a community though, and a vocal one at that, so please do let us know how you feel about this. What have we missed, how can we do it better, what opportunities do you think we can take but may have overlooked? For the moment we will continue to support this mailing list, and we'll probably pop into the "friends of" now and again if we're welcome too. Thanks for your support, and sincere apologies that you've heard it first second hand, Ant _______________________ Ant Miller, Senior Research Manager mobile: +44 (0)7809 597757 BBC Research & Development South Lab, BBC Centre House 56 Wood Lane London W12 7SB http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/rd/ http://www.bbcarchive.org.uk/pmwiki/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/