I speak a little Swedish, so I can just about understand a little Norwegian. But only just. So please forgive me if I’ve misunderstood.

I’m not saying that the Times’ paywall system is necessarily the best answer. But I do think the idea that it will create a smaller, tighter, more intimate community is a compelling one. A good user community is certainly a goal worth striving for. And it’s something I hadn’t heard discussed with reference to paywalls until I heard Tom Whitwell talk about it at news:rewired.

Is it a goal worth sacrificing 90% of readership for?

I don’t know. There are other ways to build community, too.

Walling off the Times will undoubtedly change its community dynamics profoundly. It will excise the Times from the wider community debate on current issues around the internet. It will create a smaller, more selective community debate within the paywall, with asymmetric linking (people inside will be able to link out, but people outside won’t be able to link in).

This fact alone changes everything, because it’s all about the links.

But a good user community is something that can make a site a destination in its own right. Like I said, it’s worth striving for.

As for the people outside the paywall: the public value they receive from Times journalism is reduced to zero. Or is it? Any big stories and scoops the Times unearths will inevitably be followed up by free news sources like the BBC. There’s not much they can do to stop other companies from calling their sources. No exclusive they get will stay that way for long, with an interconnected community of journalists on the job.

Ironically, the bigger the scoop, the harder it will be to keep inside the paywall.  So I wonder where that puts the Times in the news ecosystem.

It’s time to wait and see. The paywall is supposed to go up today (though apparently for some people the gates are still open for now). The wall may make the Times a profitable hub of good value journalism with a vibrant, intimate user community. It may isolate the Times from the wider debate and turn its user community into an incestuous Murdochian backwater. Or, maybe, the Times will end up somewhere in between.

I don’t think it’s as simple a case as good vs. evil, paywalls vs. open internet. I think that paywalls are a special solution that already works for some sites and may work for others.

I’ll be following further developments with great interest.

Go on, say it. Let the word roll around your tongue.

Pay. Walls.

. . . They’re evil, right?

Keeping the public out, killing openness, dooming your general-interest online publication to irrelevance. Oh, the New York Times tried it in the 90′s, and they came grovelling back. Any generalist website that goes this way is doomed. Especially those organizations formerly known as newspapers.

There’s a lot of this sort of rhetoric around. Some of it comes from commentators that I know and respect very much. But the other camp – the pro-paywall people – they’re not so loud about their thoughts on the matter. (Maybe it’s because they’re too busy making money.) So yesterday at news:rewired, I jumped on the chance to hear about paywalls from people who believe in them, and run sites that use them.

Of the three presenters, I was specially interested in what Tom Whitwell, the assistant editor of the Times, had to say. The Times isn’t a specialist publication – it’s one of the grand old houses of English-language journalism, and they’re adapting to the 21st century with paywalls, a strategy that Tom himself has said will deter 90% of their readership. I have to admit, for a long time I couldn’t understand what they were thinking.

Now I know. And I have to admit, the vision makes sense, and it’s quite compelling.

I still don’t know if it will work. But I think that if it goes the way Tom described yesterday, the Times site will be a very compelling place.

Here are my notes from the session – I tried to capture all I could of Tom’s presentation. This isn’t an attempt at recording the whole presentation verbatim – it’s my best recollection based on live notes.

We’re in the middle of turning a free-to-air website into a paid-for website.

It’s an editorial and creative challenge – in addition to the technical challenge.

18 months ago, we came to a fork in the road – either continuing to grow as free site, or switch to paid.

We were getting 22 million uniques a month then.

How to expand? Financially, we needed 30-40 million per month.

How were other people doing it? There were a few strategies out there.

Piling on new versions of stories to stay on top of Google? Continually publishing more, slightly ‘improved’ versions of the same story to float up in the search results?

Or we could write a lot of stuff about celebrity and lowest-common-denominator news to get a lot of clicks – publish pictures of starlets getting out of taxi cabs and having underwear malfunctions.

Or we could try enormously intrusive advertising. Pop-unders, pop-overs, etc.

We were skeptical of all these, but the other path was terrifying. Charging the audience.

But paying makes for a real relationship with the audience – not just drive-by audience. We get lots of hits from ‘drive-bys’ – people who come in for one link and bounce off, from around the world.

For a pay site, it’s different. A pay site genuinely has the reader at its heart. We’re not interested in optimising the site for ads, we’re interested in optimising for reader experience.

Now, we can bring the journalists much closer to the readers.

This is the point that I really found interesting. It’s something that I had occasion to talk about with Tom previously, and the nature of the reader community in a paid site is something he highlighted then, too. I believe community is all-important – we are the medium, after all. If all the users have paid to access the community, then that has the potential to generate some really interesting community dynamics. Potentially quite good ones. No trolling or spamming, for instance. That’s quite interesting.

Our new site launched 3 weeks ago. Now if you want to read it you have to register, and soon the paywall will come down. Critical reaction to the design has been positive. The registration figures are very encouraging (expectant pause in the room) I will not go into detail.

The site feels very alive.  It’s a very exciting time.

(QUESTIONS)

Q: What about Times Select? It failed. Aren’t you worried the same will happen to you?

The idea that Times Select was a failure is ridiculous. They had 250,000 paying subscribers. They cancelled it at the peak of an advertising boom. Now, if you offered them the same 250k back, they’d bite your hand off for it.

We’re doing this to safeguard the future of our journalism. To keep the editorial team viable. I’m not sharing figures on how many subscribers they’d need to support current team.

The Guardian keeps publishing these reports: “95% of people won’t pay for content online.” A couple of months later, it’s 90% of people won’t pay for content online. Little later, it’s “85% won’t pay.” Eventually they’ll stop publishing those stories.

Stories are necessarily limited. A narrative has to use characters, locations, a clear plot. These are necessarily artificial – an abstraction of reality.

What about complex systems? Like climate change. Like the national budget. The arms trade. Or industrial/political graft networks. These stories are super important. But they’re difficult to tell stories about, because they’re so big and so complex.

The story is in the user.

There are other ways to do it. Civilisation is a great example. Lots of high school teachers in the USA are using it to teach world history. The game is randomly generated every time you start up – there’s no pre-set story, like in a lot of games. Users create the story, as they play. They explore their world, they discover new lands, they wage war, they discover technologies. They’re gaining understanding through interaction.

Global history is a really complicated system, but like any system it runs on principles and rules. You can’t build an ironclad navy if you don’t have access to iron and coal. You can’t build nukes unless you have access to uranium. By interacting with the system, you understand how it works.

It’s about encoding an understanding of the system in another abstraction – not a story, but a game. If the rules of the game accurately reflect the interactions that happen in the real world, the user’s learning is genuine.

I’ve blogged about lots of examples of this here, like Budget Hero, Six Days in Fallujah, MP for a Week, and Trafalgar: Origins. The last one is a history title, but it’s a really excellent game built on a genuine understanding of history, and conveys factual information just like journalism. (History is just old journalism, after all.)

There are a lot of issues about using games in journalism. (Six Days in Fallujah raised a furore with veterans’ groups when it was announced.)

This is where journalism should go.

It should come as no surprise that social media approaches to news are all over the winners’ list. Many of the projects aim to help people produce their own journalism together, through  social media approaches, without the need for a paid press corps. I found three of the winners particularly interesting:

PRX StoryMarket

One of the winning projects is actually based around a business model for local journalism. Journalism in general is hard to fund, and local journalism even more so – even though, arguably, local stories are often the ones with most immediate relevance to people’s lives. The idea behind PRX StoryMarket is that people in a town or area can flag up local stories that need to be investigated by a public radio station. Other site members can contribute funds if they agree the story is important enough. Once enough money has been gathered, the radio station hires a freelance reporter to actually investigate the story and create a radio report.

It’s an ingenious idea – like a way more focused version of Kickstarter, with Demand Media running in the background.

Project One Eight

This is one that I’ll be keen to see published. Teru Wakayama is a very well-travelled news photographer who has spent most of the past decade reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Pakistan. In Project One Eight, he’ll embed with a US military unit in Afghanistan to produce a journal of their time on deployment. But he won’t be the only one uploading pictures to the web:

this project will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines themselves. The troops and their families will be key audiences for the online journal steering, challenging and augmenting the coverage with their feedback.

So the soldiers themselves will contribute material, and their families will be able to see, comment and discuss. I can see how this would be great for their families, and I’d certainly find it fascinating to follow.

How will they deal with security, though? Posting personal details on Facebook can lead to a hundred people crashing your house party – but posting pictures of yourself in Afghanistan, about to patrol a particular valley?

The Cartoonist

This is one that really caught my attention. The people behind it are Ian Bogost and Michael Mateas. These are two guys that I’m thrilled to see working together. Bogost is a founder of Persuasive Games, one of the leading editorial games producers. Mateas is one of the geniuses behind Façade (if you haven’t played Façade, go play it now. It’s a game based on conversation, with a sophistcated AI playing the other characters).

Together, they’ve come up with The Cartoonist:

this project will create a free tool that produces cartoon-like current event games – the game equivalent of editorial cartoons. The simplified tools will be created with busy journalists and editors in mind, people who have the pulse of their community but don’t have a background in game development. By answering a series of questions about the major actors in a news event and making value judgments about their actions, The Cartoonist will automatically propose game rules and images. The games aim to help the sites draw readers and inspire them to explore the news.

“Cartoon-like current event games” means things like Raid Gaza and Faith Fighter. These games use game dynamics and humour to comment on a situation, as opposed to games like MP for a Week and Trafalgar: Origins, whose purpose is more explanatory (even if they’re fun to play).

Games like Raid Gaza and Faith Fighter can be really useful content editorially. By taking a point of view on a current issue, they start debate and discussion among their players, which has to be a good thing. A lot of people had strong words about Raid Gaza when it came out.

Of course, the bottleneck for games like these is that they take skill and time to program. Seems like the idea of The Cartoonist is a system that allows non-programmers to create editorial games in much the same way WordPress allows non-coders to create web sites like this one.

Game design is a subtle and complex challenge, and it will be interesting to see how Bogost and Mateas turn it into repeatable, customizable operations. If anyone can do it, they can. I’m intrigued to see how this will work, and I’ll be sure to get my hands on a copy of The Cartoonist when it becomes available.

Bogost has written up more about the project on his blog.

image by dirtysi on bungie.net

The Match

We got off to a rocky start when Edge didn’t show up at the agreed start time. We’d agreed to start playing at 18:30 GMT, but Edge didn’t come online until over an hour later. During the wait, we played amongst ourselves. We had the time to play five games, and teammates were starting to say that these should count as 5 wins for us. We were at the point of unilaterally declaring the match a win by default, when Edge finally did show up in the game lobby, after some encouraging phone calls from us to their captain. They had all 8 of their players with them. It was time to begin the match.

We’d agreed on a ten-game match, all straight 8-on-8 team slayer, loser picking next map. We started with games to 50, but those go really fast when you’ve got 16 players on the field, so we moved on to 100-kill matches after the first 4 rounds.

I won’t go into the details of every match here – if you really want to hear the full story, the full scores and game descriptions are after the jump. Suffice it to say that our opponents had the Edge (see what I did there?). One of their advantages was in the form of Knight640, a ridiculously skilled player who solidly anchored the Edge side.

Knight640′s precision and control are top notch. He’s the sort of FPS player who can trigger a Pavlovian choking response; after a while, when you turn a corner and see him there, your brain involuntarily tells you “Oh, shit, it’s him. Time to die.” This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, but being good enough to instill this sort of response is a mark of skill in its own right. Luckily for us, Knight640 had to leave after 8 games, leaving us to win games 9 and 10 – though only just.

It wasn’t just knight, though. Overall Edge played very well, and I applaud their preformance. The match was a clear win to Edge.

The Lessons

When all else fails, chalk it up to a learning experience.

Lag sucks.

Throughout the match we were plagued by awful, awful lag. People would often appear to die for no reason, and keep taking hits long after they’d gone behind cover. This was probably because we were playing 8 people on 2 internet connections, while the Edge guys had taken the wise step of each going home to their own Xbox, every player with his own broadband connection. That was a really good move on their part. I’m not sure if the lag really cost us points – in fact, we won a couple of the laggiest games – but it really detracted from the fun of the experience.

Next time, we need to split up and play from home, or at least from more internet connections in the building. It’s a shame to lose the togetherness feeling of playing shoulder to shoulder in the same room, but looks like if we want to be competitive that’s just how we’re going to have to do it.

Competition is a different kind of fun.

Though this was BBC Halo’s second competitive match, it was my first time competing with the team. I learned that playing competitively is a whole different kind of fun to the sort of social game we usually run. In fact, it was hard and stressful in a way our intra-team games aren’t.

I think the reason for this is something I touched on in an old post I wrote about Halo, prompted by this post by Dan Cook. It turns out that playing competitively and playing with friends are psychologically totally different experiences, which actually result in different physiological responses.

Dan’s full post is well worth a read, but the upshot is this: when you’re playing with strangers competitively, and win, your testosterone levels rise significantly, leading to a feeling of triumph and encouraging dominance behaviour. When you lose, your testosterone levels drop, causing a beaten feeling that makes you reluctant to face the same opponent again.

When you’re playing against friends, though, the experience is different. In fact, in games with friends, the testosterone responses are actually the opposite of those when you’re playing competitively with strangers: winner testosterone levels decrease, and losers increase. With friends, even being beaten is a validating experience. In Dan’s words:

Competitive game play with friends becomes less about winning and more about shared experiences. This is a very different emotion. [...] In some sense, the actual competition is secondary to the bonding that occurs around the activity. The ‘fun’ that comes from playing with friends is completely different than the ‘fun’ associated when playing with strangers.

I couldn’t agree more. This was made crystal clear to me when we kept playing with some of the Edge guys for a few games after our match. There we were, playing exactly the same game, against the same people, in the same room. But the guilty feeling of defeat and the bitter, hostile feelings of victory I’d felt just minutes before were gone. The team feelings were different, too. As our losses mounted up during the match, the BBC Halo team (including me) started getting frustrated, bickering, blaming the lag and generally complaining about the game. It was only natural for people who’d just suffered a string of solid defeats. But in the friendly games after the match, all this vanished. Instead, all of a sudden there we were just enjoying the game together. I would cackle maniacally as I threw grenades at someone, or laugh as my avatar’s body got blasted out of the map by a rocket. Just minutes ago, I would have cursed bitterly if the same thing had happened to me. Emotionally, it was like swimming in a pool after a desert marathon.

If you’re really into Halo or just really interested in this particular match for some inadequately explained reason, I’ve posted the full match rundown and stats after the jump.

Did you play in this match? What did you think? Let’s hear your battle stories in the comments.

Round 1 – Standoff

Edge opened really strong, dominating the vehicles on this map. We couldn’t get it together to work properly as a team, and they picked us off from the circling ‘Hogs. Our last-ditch attempt to hole up in the base and hold them off wasn’t enough, and left Edge with a solid win.

Final score: 50-35 to Edge

Round 2 – The Pit

We picked one of ‘our’ maps to follow up, thinking that we’d have a home-field advantage. We practise a lot on this one. Despite a valiant effort, major lag became a problem here. knight640, Edge’s star player, racked up 22 kills with a +16 ratio on this map. Check out his stats – he’s a machine.

Final score: 50-31 to Edge

Round 3 – Foundry

r0nstar‘s suggestion – this is one of his strongest maps. Unfortunately by this point our game was plagued by massive lag – people appeared to die randomly and continued to take damage long after they’d gone behind cover. Despite this, we played well as a team on this map and managed to give Edge a run for their money. We were actually in the lead for much of the middle of the game, until a late push by Edge got them the victory.

Final score: 50-46 to Edge

Round 4 – Longshore

Finally a victory! Despite continuing lag problems, we maintained good control of the power weapons and powerups, and split the Edge team while maintaining good group coherency. The feeling of a victory after three defeats was great. Much cheering and rejoicing.

Final score: 50-43 to BBC

Round 5 – Last Resort

Unfortunately round 4 was also our last with lovele55, one of our strongest players. Round 5 was a poor performance on our part. Edge had clearly logged a lot of hours on this map, and showed it by totally dominating the vehicles and putting in excellent sniper performance. On our side, we don’t play Last Resort so often and so were less familiar with it. Consequently we didn’t manage to maintain good team coherency here, and the end result was our poorest performance in terms of score ratio. That stung a bit harder here, since we’d just started playing to 100 instead of 50 kills.

Final score: 100-55 to Edge

Round 6 – Rat’s Nest

We had a strong start on this map, and I saw some awesome Grav hammer work from r0nstar – he blasted a passing enemy Warthog straight off the cliff near rocket spawn. Unfortunately, our bane on this map was Edge’s attack dog, Knight640 – this is where I realized that I was doing the auto-choke thing whenever I saw him. I tried to work against this, but his weapon control and precision of aim are superlative. Edge also managed to work together as a team very well, while our respawning split us up quite a bit. A solid win by Edge.

Final score: 100-66 to Edge

Round 7 – Sandbox

Another unfamiliar map for us. I spotted Edge running a good strategy here: running a ‘Hog in a circular pattern around the dunes on the map periphery, shooting inwards. I got a hog and imitated their move, driving around with theangryg00se manning the gun. The result was a spree for Goose – which was cut short when a Warthog re-spawned directly in our path, popping into existence about 10m straight in front of us as we barelled along at full speed. There was no time to react; we crashed right into it, and before we could build up speed again we quickly fell prey to grenades and BR fire from the base complex nearby. Later on, r0nstar and I managed to get into another hog and do the circling thing again, resulting in a spree for Ronnie. It ended when we made the mistake of stopping to change for a fresh ‘Hog, which again meant that we were attacked and killed with BRs and grenades. Schoolboy error. Lesson: don’t ever get off the ‘Hog, keep your speed up.

Final Score: 100-66 to Edge

Round 8 – High Ground

Still a lot of lag here. Though it was another of ‘our’ maps, we were pretty demoralized by this point and perhaps didn’t work as well together as we could have.

Final Score: 100-67 to Edge

Round 9 – Guardian

Knight 640 left after the match on High Ground, and his contribution to Edge’s performance is immediately apparent: we won all the remaining games without him. This match on Guardian was fast and furious. With so many players on such a small map, it was impossible not to maintain team coherency here – and it showed in our performance. Though Edge gained an early lead, several of us (notably DirtySi and BrutalBruiser, who really owns this map) had a really good game on this map. We managed to score a surprising last-minute rebound and clinched a close win. For my part I’ll never forget the feeling of victory this late in the game – from sour defeat into bitter, hard-won triumph.

Final score: 100-98 to BBC

Round 10 – Blackout

Lag on this map was unbelievable, resulting in plenty of random deaths and glitching. Again, though, because there were so many of us and such a small map, we managed to work together by calling enemy locations and concentrating our efforts. Good game all on this one.

Final score: 100-94 to BBC

This all started with a challenge a couple of weeks ago:

Sure enough, we found a willing partner. Edge has picked up the gauntlet:

The team is getting psyched, and Edge’s Twitter feed, normally a reliable source of news about upcoming developments in gaming, has started ringing with smacktalk.

Small Beginnings

The BBC Halo team has become something special here in W12. It started small and casual, around Si Lumb and Ron Bullen, software engineers from the Television Platforms (TVP) team. TVP are the guys who make the stuff behind the BBC’s red button interactive TV service work (among many other things) so they’ve all got big TVs on their desks and a couple of Xboxes lurking around.

It seemed a shame letting all that processing and display power go to waste during lunch hours. So a couple of us had some pick-up matches at lunchtime one week. Though we kept the TVs muted and our voices low, it was inevitable that others noticed the flashing screens at one end of the open-plan office and came down to check it out. The group started to grow. I joined them, the only journalist in the bunch. Lunchtime matches became more frequent and more serious.

That was two years ago. We play during lunch hours and occasionally over a couple of beers after work. Now we have 12 players, split across London and Manchester offices.

It’s the New Golf

Win or lose, I always find the mental effort of playing a first-person shooter game really invogorating.

It’s not really about killing and fighting. Many people are put off by the unfortunate macho atmosphere FPS players tend to construct, and by the occasionally gory visuals (though Halo is not so bad on that particular count). But if you look past that, you’ll see a mental challenge that demands great application and intelligence.

For me, FPS games are exercises in empathy and competitive geometry.

It’s about knowing a 3D environment inside out, as an active, real place. It’s being able to use this knowledge to predict where your opponents will move, where they’ll hide, where they’ll be at a disadvantage. Playing well means simultaneously holding in your mind your own actions, the actions of your teammates, and your intelligence about your opponents. It’s spinning a pattern, extremely quickly, out of tiny fragments of information: a muzzle flash here, a half-glimpsed blue armored figure there, grenades arcing through the air over there. It’s learning to take this pattern, analyze it very quickly, and use it to guide your movement and fire in a constant dance of position, vector and motion.

For the team members, it’s incredible for work morale. It gives us a chance to stay in touch with the guys in Manchester beyond work-related emails. (And anyone who’s spent a lot of time with guys knows that you don’t really need to talk about substantive issues to get to know each other better. The occasional shout of “lookout behind you!” or a friendly rocket to the face is plenty of communication.)

Edge Online

This will be our second match against an external challenger. We met our first just a couple of months after we started playing – a team of engineers from Panasonic.

It was an unmitigated disaster, with 18 losses and one draw over the course of the night. (It didn’t hurt Panasonic that many of their team members were also members of a pro gaming clan.)

But of course, we’ve been playing for over a year and a half since then. That’s a lot of lunch times.

Game will be on the evening of Tuesday, 8th June. I’m keen to see how the Edge guys play.

GameCamp 2 is done. What a rush. I’m really pleased with the way it went, and judging by the reactions I’m seeing, a lot of other people liked it, too.

The unconference format makes everyone’s experience of a day like this different. As an organizer, I spent most of my time running around and making sure that things were going well. Rain Ashford was doing much the same but also had the chance to assemble this video that will give you an idea of what the day felt like:

I did get a chance to attend one or two sessions in there. My favourite was a session run by the inimitable Minkette, titled “We need to get more BOYS into gaming.” The premiss of the session was a fascinating one. The biggest growth area in gaming right now is in the farmville-type casual games market – where the average player is a middle-aged woman. This means that the bulk of gamers now are actually female and into casual games on the net, rather than hard-core-stuff-explodes flashy console games. The games most people see as mainstream – first person shooters and the like – are fast becoming actually already a niche product. But the hard-core explodey sort of game is what most gaming education is targeted at, and it’s also the sort of thing that most people who take game design degrees want to make.

The discussion ranged widely through the state of education, and generally what it takes to make it in life. The session ended up for me with the thought that one of the defining features of adulthood is this: attaining the realization that reality is malleable. It’s the sort of conversational outcome that you just can’t plan or organize. That’s what the unconference format really brings out.

I’m really proud of our work on GameCamp and the way the day went. Everyone I talked to seemed to have a good time and reading the tweets after the day has really been humbling. For me making GameCamp 2 happen has got a special resonance, because the first GameCamp was the first unconference I ever went to. That experience was the direct inspiration for the BeeBCamp series of unconferences that I then founded and organized at the BBC. So making this day happen was a bit of a return to source. The circle is now complete.

Kieron Gillen gave a great write-up of the day on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The guys at Mudlark and Lewis Denby have also shared their impressions of the day. Rain has also uploaded her pics of the day on Flickr.

UPDATE: I’ve had a chance to upload my pics of the day. You can also read write-ups on their experiences from Jim Purbick, the guys at Just Race and Karl at Join The Company.

UPDATE: Wired UK was also at GameCamp. Here’s their write-up.

Huge thanks to our hosts at PayPal/eBay/Gumtree, who provided us with a splendid venue, and our sponsors at Unity and Pizza Express, who made sure we were well fed and watered. I’m really glad to have worked with the most awesome group organizing this: Rain Ashford, Desigan Chinniah, Rachel Clarke, Steve Green, Katy Lindemann, Mark Simpkins and James Wallis.

Loads of people have suggested that we do this again, next year. What do you think?

This week, I’ve been helping Watchdog, the BBC’s consumer affairs show, start a Twitter feed.

Last night was the first broadcast of the new series. We were tweeting in the lead-up to the show, and during the live broadcast. I even ended up on TV – sitting in the background with a studio laptop, working Twitter while my colleagues called people and monitored emails incoming from the public.

The show is broadcast live, and there’s a fair amount of audience interaction. Members of the public suggest many of the stories of rip-offs, dodgy dealing and unscrupulous business that feature in the show through their emails, texts and phone calls. So Twitter really seems a natural fit for Watchdog – especially given how common it is for people to complain about products and companies via their Twitter feeds. For a program that’s all about making sure that customers get fair treatment, it all fits.

I’d say our first night went well, especially considering that there’s an election campaign on in Britain, and we were up against the second leaders’ debate (#leadersdebate) – on Twitter as well as on TV. Most people who were watching TV and tweeting yesterday night were doing so about politics. Still, we got more comments about the show on Twitter than we did through direct texts – including a few who participated in a live experiment.

Mind the Gap

During the show, I had to work the Twitter feed through a frustratingly slow studio laptop, and via twitter.com to boot. (For security reasons, BBC studio laptops are closed up tighter than a clam at high tide, so I wasn’t able to install Tweetdeck.) Working through twitter.com instead of a higher-performance client, as well as the slow computer, made the whole experience feel a little sluggish and disconnected. Normally, working a Twitter feed on a popular hashtag feels something like surfing to me – you’re carried along on a wave that you can’t really control, so just ride it with style.

Working the Watchdog Twitter feed felt something like surfing on a wave of molasses, controlling the surfboard remotely via an overhead drone aircraft.

I wasn’t able to participate as much as I’d have liked to in the discussion; it was simply happening too fast. It’s a microcosm, in a way, of the BBC’s general interface with social media in general and Twitter in particular.

Aside from the equipment, there were a lot of rules to remember, too – who we could reply to, what we could say, and so on. There are very good organizational reasons that the BBC can’t participate in social media with the same flexibility as a person or even a commercial company. The BBC is built and organized to produce mass media, which it generally does exceptionally well. It’s also designed to do this for the public good, and not for profit. This means that it’s got a whole canon of editorial policy regulations, all designed to deliver value to the public and ensure the BBC’s objectivity, impartiality and so on.

These rules are all designed by smart people who are keenly aware that the power of the BBC as a broadcaster needs to be carefully controlled if it is to stand for the public good.

Therein lies the rub; Twitter is not broadcasting. It is social media, not mass media. Mass media is all about scale. Social media can have scale, but it is characterized above all by interactivity, flexibility and responsiveness. So sometimes, when the vastness of the BBC focuses on something like Twitter, it can be like watching an old bull elephant trying to mate with an attractive gazelle. (I briefly considered photoshopping an illustration of this, but I’ll spare you.)

For instance, at first when I was brought on board I was told that Watchdog definitely wanted to “be on Twitter”, but that the show couldn’t use hashtags, couldn’t follow anyone, and definitely couldn’t @reply or retweet anything. It would just broadcast lines from the script on Twitter as they came up live on air.

I resisted the urge to run screaming from the room, and explained that, while we could technically do that, it would result in a massive case of FAIL, which wouldn’t benefit the show, the public, or the BBC. In the week leading up to the broadcast I spent quite a bit of time (meetings, meetings, email, email, meetings, more email, off-email phone conversations, more meetings) convincing people that we really needed to do all those things, that they were essential to the medium of Twitter, and that they could help us deliver real value to the public.

Ultimately, people opened up. The feed as it is now does follow people, reply and retweet and so on. Overall there’s a feeling of curious excitement in the programme team when it comes to Twitter.

I think it’s going to take some time to work out a balance between the rules of a large organization and the rules of Twitter. I’ll be helping to run the Twitter feed for another week, until next Thursday’s live. After that the programme team will take over exclusively.

Lessons

The experience has taught me a few things.

Local is Best.

I was brought in from outside the programme team to help them set their feed up. I know a lot about how Twitter works, but I’m not an expert about the Watchdog show itself. I certainly don’t know the show as well as the people who wrote the script, researched the stories, filmed the pieces. Twitter is a conversation, and It’s essential that whoever runs the Twitter feed is an expert on the subject matter.

The technical and cultural knowledge of how to work Twitter is important, but not as important as the editorial content that goes into the conversation. So while it’s a good idea to bring in someone who knows Twitter to kick things off, ultimately it’s essential that someone who knows the show back to front takes it over. I’d say this would apply just as much to any brand or company trying to run a Twitter presence. The most important thing is that whoever is running it really knows the subject matter inside out.

Translation, not Conflict.

A lot of people put ‘old media’ and ‘new media’ in opposition, a conflict between the staid 20th-century dinosaurs of Old Media and the nimble young mammals of Social Media. I don’t think this is a productive attitude. Ultimately, both are trying to do the same thing. Both old and new media operate on the axiom that information is valuable, and that increasing its flow adds value to the public. Each simply goes about this in different ways, following different rules – because they’re built differently. A gazelle can leap about quickly and nimbly, but an elephant can uproot trees and break through walls. But they’re still going for the same goal, even though each can contribute something different to the voyage. It’s just a question of making sure they understand each other.

This bill may soon be passed into law here in the UK. Both as a professional and a citizen, I find its implications disturbing. It would allow people to be cut off from the internet merely on suspicion of copyright violation. I also doubt its chances of significantly reducing piracy, as it would most likely force people to take their now quite open file-sharing activities underground.

I sent Mr. Hands my email last Wednesday, the 17th. On Friday the 19th, I received his reply by post. I am pleased with what it contains. Mr. Hands writes:

We want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses. We recognise the need to tackle digital piracy and make it possible for people to buy and sell digital intellectual property online. However, it is vital that any anti-piracy measures promote new business models rather than holding innovation back. This must not be about propping up existing business models but creating and environment that allows new ones to develop.

The emphasis is mine – and I entirely, emphatically agree. I am not in favour of copyright violation. But the 20th century media publishing business model simply doesn’t apply any more. Widespread piracy is, in part, a response to that from demanding consumers. The onus is on the industry to respond to that demand with innovation and bold business thinking. Instead of doing this, since the 1990s they have stagnated, while leaning on government to preserve their golden goose. This Bill is part of the government’s response – but far from effectively reducing piracy, it will do damage to this country’s digital economy and undermine the principles of openness and fairness that have made the Internet such a resource for citizens and businesses alike.

This is no way to run a progressive digital economy.

I am very happy to read that Mr. Hands shares this view.

In addition, he has said that the “controversial measures” the Bill contains

should be debated in the House of Commons, and only if we are confident that they have been given the scrutiny that they deserve will we support them.

I wish you luck, Mr. Hands. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

I’ve posted the full text of Mr. Hands’ response, and a scan of the letter, after the jump.

Here’s what he said:

Dear Mr. Trippenbach,

Thank  you for contacting me about the Digital Economy Bill.

For nearly twelve years, the Government has neglected this crucial area of our economy. We believe a huge amount needs to be done to give the UK a modern regulatory environment for the digital and creative industries. Whilst we welcome aspects of the Bill, there are other areas of great concern to us.

We want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses. We recognise the need to tackle digital piracy and make it possible for people to buy and sell digital intellectual property online. However, it is vital that any anti-piracy measures promote new business models rather than holding innovation back. This must not be about propping up existing business models but creating and environment that allows new ones to develop. That is why we were opposed to the original Clause 17 and are still opposed to Clause 29, which props up ITV regional news with Licence-Fee-payer’s money.

The Government’s failure to introduce the Bill until the eleventh hour of this Parliament has given rise to considerable concern that we no longer have the time to scrutinise many of the controversial measures it contains. We believe they should be debated in the House of Commons, and only if we are confident that they have been given the scrutiny that they deserve will we support them.

My colleagues in the Shadow Culture, Media and Sport and Shadow Business, Innovation and Skills teams will do everything in their power to work towards legislation that strengthens our digital sector and provides the security that our businesses and consumers need.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write to me.

Yours sincerely,

Greg Hands MP

(I’ve included a scan of the whole letter here.)

As you do.

It was at the Rewired State hack day, held Friday and Saturday at the Guardian’s splash new offices in King’s Place. The idea of the Rewired State events is to bring together:

1. a bunch of government people with challenges
2. clever hackers who can solve them.

Over the course of two days, the hackers get a whole bunch of ideas and build working prototypes of the solutions the government needs.

There were a lot of clever people there, and they made a lot of cool stuff. Our project was The Bump Game – a board game about pregnancy.

It’s an educational tool for couples expecting their first child. When you’re pregnant for the first time, there’s an awful lot to know. There’s a lot of medical information you need – like what services you’re entitled to, appointments you’re supposed to organize, and so on. On top of this there’s a lot of health information, like the proper diet, what to expect – and choices to make, like do you want to deliver in a hospital, midwifery centre, or at home . . .

In short, there’s a lot you don’t even know that you don’t know. How to find this out?

The current answer is that you page through the NHS website, or read a stack of leaflets. The NHS website, while excellent and full of good information, isn’t exactly designed to be read like a novel.

The Bump Game gives expecting couples a guided introduction to all the things they’ll need to know before the baby comes. Through the form of the game, they’ll at least figure out all the things they need to learn themselves.

It has two incarnations: a physical board game, and a Facebook game.

How to Play

You can read the full rules here, but here’s a quick description.

Both the online and the paper versions of the game play exactly the same way. You play with a partner, taking turns answering questions about pregnancy. Every time you answer a question right, you advance a step along the board (picture on the way!). But there’s someone else on the board: the Bump, who advances a space along the board every time a question is asked, whether the answer is right or not.

In short, it’s a trivia race. Your baby is on the way, whether you’re ready or not – so you’d better get ready!

The questions are designed to be funny and informative rather than hard. For instance:

What is antenatal care?

1. It’s medical care you get to stop you from becoming pregnant.
2. It’s when your mother’s sister takes care of the baby.
3. It’s any medical care you get while you’re expecting a baby.
4. It’s medical care you get after you’ve had a baby.
   

The mother and her birth partner take turns asking each other questions, and together try to get to the end before their Bump does. In the physical version of the game, the questions come on printed cards, which you can just read through if you like (just like Trivial Pursuit cards).

It’s Built Out of Data!

The game board itself is a clever thing. Firstly, the board and question cards are laced with links to more information, in the form of QR code weblinks and short URLs. So just having the game in your hands means that you’ve got all the links you’ll need to find out anything you want about pregnancy, health, medical care and administration.

The other clever thing about this game board is that it’s personalized. Our idea was that you’d get the game from your GP, or download it as a PDF from the NHS Choices website and print it out at home. Every game board is unique to the people who download it. You put in your postcode and your due date, and the board you get is specific to you, with local information and tailored questions. The board itself has the locations and phone numbers to your closest maternity ward, GP and midwifery centre printed on it. This is all generated automatically from a few NHS APIs. Tim Davies has some more details on how this works in his post about our work.

Rewired State – Made of WIN

This was an awesome weekend of work, and big props to The Bump Game team -  Tim Davies, Ivo Gormley, Isabell, Josh Pickett, Daniel Soltis, and Chris Thorpe. Chris has written an excellent description and thoughts about building the game. As he’s the only one of us to actually be a parent, his input was absolutely fundamental to the concept’s success. Daniel has also written in depth about the game design process and how it joins the physical and digital.

The whole weekend was evidence of how effective the hackday way of working is. With only 2 days to work, you don’t fuss and fret and think so much – you just get on and make things. Since you’ve only got two days, no one really expects you to come up with something perfect and refined, anyhow. The net effect of this is that your ideas are actually better than they would be if you had more time. You’re liberated from the tyranny of having to get it just right the first time.

The Bump Game is just a rough prototype, and it would need a lot of playtesting and further design to get to a wide release. But it exists, it works, and you can play it, and get some value out of it (and get mentioned by the PM!) right now.

Many thanks to Emma Mulqueeny and everyone who helped organize this most excellent event.