backstage.bbc.co.uk

» see backstage.bbc.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Backstage ran from 2005 to 2010, which lines up almost exactly with my university years and with getting ttnet broadband at home. The overlap is real and so is the distance, because everything it published was british. Traffic delay data for british roads and listings for british television, useful to somebody in Manchester and decorative to anybody else.

It went live on 11 may 2005 after an internal pilot, then launched properly at an OpenTech event on 23 july. Tom Loosemore started it with Ben Metcalfe and James Boardwell, partly as an answer to the Graf review of bbc.co.uk, which had told the corporation to stop competing with the rest of the web and start feeding it. The motto was written down and stayed on the site the whole time: use our stuff to build your stuff.

What sat behind it was unglamorous and, for 2005, close to unheard of. Around five hundred unique news pieces a day went out as xml, alongside television schedules published in the TV-Anytime format. Travel delay data came out as a feed rather than as a page you had to scrape. A public broadcaster, funded by a fee on british households, decided the correct thing to do with its data was hand it over.

No turkish broadcaster was doing anything remotely like this, and there was no local feed to point at. So this was something you read about on aggregator sites and filed under things other countries have, next to the rest of the open data argument that took another decade to arrive here.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it gave away ~

The feeds were the boring half and the license was the interesting half. Everything came under a non-commercial reuse grant, which in 2005 read as generous rather than restrictive. Public money had made the content, so nobody should be able to resell it. In exchange, anybody at all could build on it without asking permission or signing anything.

That bargain produced a lot of small strange software. Schedules mashed against maps, prototypes aimed at television sets, most of it made by people who would never have gotten a meeting inside the building. It won the New Statesman New Media Innovation award in july 2006, which is the sort of prize that tends to land on projects nobody has yet worked out how to shut down.

~ hack day ~

The event people still bring up is Hack Day at Alexandra Palace in june 2007, run jointly with Yahoo. Hundreds of developers turned up for two days of building things out of BBC feeds, and it ended when the palace was struck by lightning. Even the closing ceremony would have been hard to write.

There was more of it than the one legendary weekend. Over the Air ran at Imperial College in april 2008 for mobile developers, and Mashed came back to Alexandra Palace that june. This was several years before every large company kept a developer relations team, and Backstage was quietly inventing the shape those teams later copied.

~ why it closed ~

Ian Forrester, who ran it and made the call to end it, wrote the explanation up in 2013. The non-commercial license had gone from being the enabling condition to being the wall. Once the app stores existed, a developer who built something good on BBC data wanted to charge two pounds for it, and the terms said no. He had to shut prototypes down. The people building them went to platforms where the answer was different.

The other half was ordinary institutional weather. Backstage sat inside BBC R&D through a cost-cutting period in which multi-year budgets had to be justified against audience impact. A developer network is difficult to defend on that measure. So it wound up in december 2010, five and a half years after opening.

~ what replaced it ~

What replaced it was less open and more managed. Connected Studio ran structured events with selected partners instead of publishing a feed and seeing who turned up. The BBC still ships developer material and the open data argument was won everywhere else in british government within a few years, which is roughly what Backstage had been arguing for.

The thing that did not survive is the specific posture: a large broadcaster putting its output on the open web with no gate and no application form, on the theory that strangers would do something interesting with it. Every equivalent since has an api key attached to it.

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