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Intranets Live Feb 09 - BBC Moo beta [part 3]

MOO - the BBC's creative network
Until now I've been unable to blog about Shane's great work at the BBC which I first saw as an attendee of the Intranets Live Feb 09 event.

During Intranets Live Feb 09 Shane Samarawikrema, Experience Designer at the BBC, delivered a great presentation on MOO the BBC's new creative network. Boy have these guys get done some cool stuff.

"MOO - ideas you can milk" is the BBC's creative network - the vision was to increase innovation, creativity and collaboration across the organisation. An intranet based training initative for sharing creative techniques and informal education horizontally across the BBC. Vision was from the top, goal was to engage bottom up. Overall the project was commissioned by the Creative Audiences Training team - a "big up" to them for having the vision and desire to see MOO through to what is becoming - a great resource for the BBC.

Andy Tedd (consultant) identified that the audience was primarily creative, therefore social networking was likely to work.

MOO beta is currently intended to add to rather than replace any existing infrastructure within the BBC so it didn't get much budget, 20,000 GBP or 30,000 GBP from what I can recall (damn I wish I kept better notes). But what they've done with it . . . wow!

Imagine some of the cool things the internet has to offer : blogging, bookmark sharing, video, audio multimedia sharing and tagging all bundled up so that you could use them with the other creative types in your organisation ? Not just cool in theory - the very thing Shane and the team at BBC have delivered via MOO.

[Unfortunately the following screen shots lost quite a lot of fidelity due to the web conferencing between myself and the presenter - they still provide a good idea of how slick it looks]





Platform is Ruby on rails - but development is bespoke. "We couldn't use CMS / intranet technologies off the shelf as they didn't do the job. Because Ruby was used the it was comparatively cheap to implement.





Unfortunately Shane suffered the only technical difficulties experienced this month so we didn't get to see or hear quite as much as I'd have liked to of MOO. Suffice to say if I had a large staff of creative types to provide services too Shane's number would be 1 or 2 on my speed dial.

Comments

Andy Tedd said…
Of course as a loyal BBC employee Shane couldn't possibly return the call, whereas I on the other hand as a shameless elearning, social media and intranet pimp, could :)

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