This months’ Social Media Café Manchester (or #smc_mcr to the twitterati) was the usual fare of various sessions, catering to the different types of people involved or interested in Social Media. I’ve not talked much about smc_mcr here simply because I’ve not been updating this as much as I’d like. If you want to read more about what it is, or how to get involved, then check the wiki page here.

This month was rather special though, as Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) (the head of BBC Backstage) paid a visit – and as best I can tell – was persuaded to do a suprise talk.

I’ve been to a fair few of the smc_mcr nights now, and for me this was the most interesting talk I’ve seen – which, as most the sessions do, turned into a lively discussion.

Digital Events Calendar for the North West

Ian talked about two separate things, the first of which was that he is looking into the creation of a digital events calendar for the North West. He recently moved up to Manchester from London and found it difficult to find information about digital events going on up here, which included finding out about smc_mcr itself only recently.

There was a strong positive audience reception for this, and personally I think this is a great idea. After researching various software solutions, he has settled on using the open source software behind calagator.org – a website set up by a group of folks in Portland, Oregon who were trying to achieve the same thing.

While I think even a basic calendar is a useful tool for those looking for relevant events, I think it needs to go deeper for it to be widely adopted. RIght now we have a multitude of different event websites – upcoming.org, eventbrite.com – and the one you’ve probably used and not even thought about it like that – facebook.com, but what we don’t have is a way of having them all talk to each other.

Right now if you are creating a public event, you will likely add it to more than one event website – at least facebook and upcoming. But if you, as an attendee, mark youself as attending via either one of these services there is no propagation.

This has several downsides, the first of which is that on the least-used event site it has the potential to make your event look as if it has gone stale. If there is no activity on an event after it has been created – how do you know it is real?

Secondly. In my experience someone RSVPing Attending on facebook tends to mean nothing more than “i like the sound of that” – and rarely equates to people actually turning up. There seems to be no downside from marking yourself as coming, and then not turning up. A Maybe is more often that not, a straight up Not.

What we need is a service that will communicate between these sites, link them up, so that everything you say on one site will be transferred to the other. WIth the advent of Facbeook Connect and the upcoming.org API’s I’m surprised this hasn’t been done already.

If the people running these digital events in the North West could go to one site, and be sure that when they create an event it was propogated to all the major listing services – and that people responding on any of these services were all fed back to one central place – I think it would become an indispensable tool, and repository for information.

It was also suggested that event pages could have twitter hashtags associated with them, as well as flickr search terms – so that it would collate information about the event before & afterwards. This seems like a sensible suggestion, and due to the plug-in nature of the calagator platform, should be more than possible (though I’ve not looked at this in detail myself).

All in all, I look forward to seeing progress on this site. Launching with a basic service and adding features to it as it grows seems to be the norm nowadays anyway, so I look forward to seeing it live (which we’re told could be in the next month or so, though we shouldn’t hold our collective breaths!).

R&D TV

I want to say from the outset, that I am not going to be able to do this project justice – so if it does sound at least a little interesting to you, please check out their site.

Ian hinted afterwards that this second section was really meant to be a quick sneak preview of the soon to be released R&D TV Episode 2, but it is this section that turned into the most fascinating discussion of the night.

If you missed the first episode, R&DTV is a pilot show, designed to be shareable, remix-able and redistribution. It was built for the internet era and we release all the assets which make up the show under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. The show its self, features interesting tech stories inside and outside the BBC. We’re also looking at how we distribute content in various encoding methods and formats.

After a variety of questions, Ian explained the licensing issues that surround TV and the BBC. He also described some of the internal culture battles they had to overcome to release the first show. It exists, as it is at the moment, as an attempt to prove to the old-media types within the BBC, as well as outside, that releasing your work as creative commons is not only safe, but a smart move.

Unfortunately, so far there has only been one remix of the shows content.

The general consensus appeared to be that they had a Catch 22 on their hands. People won’t remix the content until it is content that they feel they want to remix. And the BBC won’t release their main content under create commons (or similar) until they have a viable reason to do so.

It would not be trivial for the BBC to do this, and licensing is a cause of several headaches at the BBC – for instance, shows can only appear on the BBC iPlayer for 7 days after they have been broadcast.

The discussion went on into other areas, how to get people involved and market the R&DTV show etc. But the main sticking point seemed to be that the content people were allowed to remix had to be the same “main” content that the BBC used.

While the shows content may not be “second-rate” (and after watching the second show, I certainly don’t think that it is), the attitude of the BBC is that this content isn’t deserving enough to be displayed in any of it’s main channels (be that TV stations, radio stations or iPlayer) then what else are we to think?

What I would like to see is the BBC building up a library of Creative Commons material, stock footage if you will. They don’t need to release whole shows as creative commons, just the parts that they can. The building blocks if you will. If a news show records an interview with someone, then release that full raw and uncut interview into this library, not the finalised touched up version.

The reality is that people are using this footage already, putting themselves into legally precarious situations. Why don’t we put an end to all that. I appreciate that we’re a long way from there though, and so I wish this project good luck – and I look forward to future editions, remixed or not! If it manages to get people talking inside the BBC, as well as outside, then that is only a good thing.

Conclusion

It was a great Social Media Café this month, I’d say my favourite so far. It is still evolving though, and very young. I hope that we manage to find other speakers as interesting as Ian, and that this wasn’t a one off. I guess we’re in our own Catch 22… the more good speakers we have, the easier it will be to attract other good speakers.

While waiting for the latest Top Gear to be added to the BBC iPlayer I thought I’d trying sticking the URL from a previous episode into my RSS Reader (google.com/reader). I figured this might work, as I thought I’d read about this on some blog post somewhere-or-other.

I guess it’s something they’re working on.

Here’s the link mentioned in the image. Oh, and I think it’s just bizarre coincidence that the episode he mentions explicitly is exactly the episode I did this on. Freaky.