Potential memorandum of understanding and collaboration with BBC

On 13 December 2013 Stevie Benton met with Bill Thompson and Jake Berger of the BBC to discuss the possibility of developing some opportunities for collaboration. The meeting was a result of finding that the BBC had recently signed memoranda of understanding with Mozilla, Europeana, Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Wikimedia UK wasn't aware of the initial conversations.

Bill and Jake are a part of the BBC's Archive Development Group and are keen to share their content as widely as possible – although in many cases the BBC doesn't actually own the rights.

They explored how we may be able to work together and the opportunities that there may be. It seems that projects related to data sets are of particular interest.

Some of the ideas discussed:

• To support a Wikimedian in Residence at the BBC
• The release of internal data sets relating to people and events from the BBC's toolkit
• To encourage the release of news broadcasts (radio, TV) of significant historical interest such as the Apollo 11 moon landings, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the outbreak of the Second World War
• The live recording of music performances specifically for release under an open licence – and potentially the BBC Proms
• 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death so there's potential for professional actors to record important speeches and scenes from his plays and the sonnets – all to be released openly

Please do share any ideas for collaboration that you might have. What results would you like to see from a collaboration with the BBC?

It's important to note that it can be easier to release new content than historical content due to existing licences and rights.

There are a few next steps that we can take but firstly I want to get an idea of how the community feels about any working relationship with the BBC so please do leave your thoughts on the talk page.

We will be looking to follow this up in January. Ed Saperia also had a useful conversation with them related to Wikimania, and Andy Mabbett is working with them already, on the Commons' voice project

Meeting on 14 February 2014

John Cummings and Stevie Benton went along to this meeting, which was a follow-up to the initial discussion which began in December 2013. The focus of the meeting was to discuss a potential MOU between Wikimedia UK and the BBC and with a view to future collaborations between the two organisations.

These notes are in a rough form and are not intended to be viewed as minutes of the meeting. They do not cover all of the areas discussed as some are at a very early stage of development and would require working with other organisations who have not yet been fully consulted.

MOU

Developing the text of the MOU is a standard process and will lead to a document that is not legally binding but legitimises ongoing contact between the organisations. The MOU essentially means that people from the BBC and Wikimedia UK can be more confident in working together.

There is potential for there to be two separate MOUs, one between the BBC and Wikimedia UK and another between the BBC and the Wikimedia Foundation. The MOU between the BBC and Wikimedia UK would be the more practical of the two. The language of the MOUs would be based on the one the BBC has in place with the Open Data Institute. It would establish a framework for future collaboration - it would not be a commitment of any kind.

Collaboration

A Wikimedian in Residence would help the BBC to be “good members of the community”. Both sides are keen on this idea. A Wikimedian in Residence would also be able to facilitate good levels of skill-sharing between Wikimedians and the BBC. They could provide training on Wikipedia and advise about things like open licences. They would also be able to co-ordinate any skills offers from the BBC, such as production skills that may help people make better quality contributions to Wikimedia Commons. There could also be workshops for researchers on Wikipedia, as well as other workshops for active Wikimedians to learn about BBC processes.

The BBC is keen to explore the idea of Wikidata collaboration and how the mediawiki platform can work in support of these potential projects. We would need to source mediawiki developers but this wouldn't be difficult.

John outlined how Wikimedia UK can provide metrics to the BBC to demonstrate the value and reach of the resources such as file views and article hits. These metrics would be important for both BBC and Wikimedia UK to be able to demonstrate the worth of the project and the increased reach. The tools for collecting the metrics are publicly available and Wikimedia UK can offer training to the BBC on how to use these free tools.

Any working relationship between the BBC and Wikimedia UK should include scope for technical developments – i.e. engineers talking to engineers to help develop useful tools.

Projects

The Speakerthon event at Broadcasting House was a pilot to see how content releases such as these can work. The event was seen as successful and may lead to further projects which could entail a larger scale release of media where the copyright is wholly owned by the BBC, and which they have legal and moral rights to release.

BBC Research & Development is looking at building appropriate tools to support any potential release and Archive Development are looking at ways that these kind of releases could be made.

As an example of a data set to consider, the BBC have around 9m images, of which half a million are digitised, many of the images are at a decent resolution and come with good amounts of descriptive metadata. For a subset of these images, the BBC is the sole rights owner. There is an international photographic metadata standard to which the BBC materials could be mapped.

There was a question about what happens to an image or media file that has been released if it comes to light that the release was made in error. There is a file deletion process on Wikimedia Commons that addresses this and it can be found here - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_policy