BeebCamp2: what value does UGC add?
BeeB Camp is a one day conference for BBC geeks where a few outsiders are thrown in as intellectual red meat to sate their voracious digital appetites.I led a session asking ‘what value does user generated content add?’ The answers were complex and thoughtful and reveal a whole set of dilemmas at the heart of public participation in the media.
The BBC famously got 60 000 people sending in pictures and video during last month’s snowstorms but, as I asked, why not just stick it all on Flickr? Why bother with all this stuff?
The answer from the technologists was various. Firstly, it must add value. There is enough content on the Internet already, the BBC shouldn’t add to it just for the sake of it.
But who gets the value? Is it the participating public (they are still a small minority)? Is it the BBC? Or is it the non-contributing public who end up enjoying it all?
What about journalists? Should they be creating public communities of 20,000 or 20? Is there more value in small networks of participation than mass involvement?
And should the flow be one-way? What value does the BBC offer to those people who do contribute? Why does the BBC still insist on stopping people using its material? Why shouldn’t people make their own Dr Who knitting patterns?
There seemed to be two approaches at BeebCamp. The Publisher approach which saw the process very much as part of content creation, adding value to the end product, such as a news story.
Then there is the Enabling approach which sees the very process of participation as an educational end in itself.
In the end it is a dialogue and it has costs.
February 18th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
[...] POLIS, journalism and society think tank, is a joint initiative from LSE and The London College of Communication. « Beeb Camp: what value does UGC add? [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
[...] This time our unconference gathered about 80 people from across the BBC at the corporation’s White City conference centre in London. It was a bigger event than last time, with more people and more sessions, including a few people from outside the BBC to leaven the mix. (Or, in Charlie Beckett’s words, outsiders “thrown in as intellectual red meat to sate their voracious digital appetites.“) [...]
February 20th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
[...] This week I ‘led’ a session at the excellent BeebCamp on UGC. It means User Generated Content. But as fellow camper Suw Charman-Anderson has pointed out: collaboration is now almost a given, “We ought to collaborate”, but that it’s not entirely clear what it is or how to do it. [...]
February 20th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
[...] Ran by Charlie Beckett, this session asked questions about why the BBC asks for UGC, what they do with it, what are the transaction costs and what is it worth. The session specifically focused on content that is SENT TO the BBC, often current affairs/news related, through the website or after on-air requests. From the discussion, the BBC thinks it obviously does add value, both for the participants (happy to submit things) and for content that is used. But they only use a small handful, with the recent Snow Day resulting in over 60k images being sent in and only a few displayed. [...]