Despite the size of the BBC and its thousands of staff, we usually hear from the same voices at the corporation. Our BBC Builders series profiles some of the BBC's most talented developers - the engineers and technologists on the frontline, building the new BBC.
Simon Cross has been with the corporation for two years. After a degree in electronic engineering part sponsored by the BBC, Cross started work designing, building and running radio studios for what was then Chrysalis Radio. Drawn into the company's podcasting experiments, he moved into web development and helped build one of the industry's first professional podcast platforms before moving to the BBC's Audio & Music department in March 2007.
He has worked on the BBC's podcast directory, iPhone app for podcasts, radio player and elements of the sites for Glastonbury, Radio 1 and the Electric Proms, and is now based in the central Future Media & Technology team. He tells us how, through its behind the scenes work on the semantic web and the standard-setting iPlayer, the BBC is still pioneering for British technology.
• What are you working on?
"I work in the team which looks after the core of bbc.co.uk. The talented people alongside me build things like the homepage, iPlayer, search, /topics, along with some other core bits of technology used by the rest of the BBC - like the templating system we use to make all the pages look nearly alike.
"Currently I'm leading the team which is building some enhanced personalisation features into bbc.co.uk. As we work for a central BBC team, we spend a lot of our time working with the other departments, particularly the teams that make /programmes, /music, the news site and the TV channel sites. It's all about helping people to find more relevant content more quickly - and helping people find content they may not have know was there at all.
"My team's pretty multi-disciplinary. We've got top-stack PHP developers, dedicated front-end developers and a great user experience team - including our own visual designer, interaction designer and information architect. It's great having such talent at our disposal and means we can work things through really thoroughly.
"Outside that project I'm quite involved in the project to migrate the whole of bbc.co.uk from its existing static web infrastructure to a shiny new dynamic service-oriented architecture system. This means the way the BBC's web teams work is changing a lot with new skills and working practices needed. I'm trying to help with how we manage this change."
"What we're doing is very much expected to go live, and get widespread usage. But 'socialness' is, for the BBC, quite new stuff. It's also technically complex, especially when we're planning to be able to deal with over 2m user activities per day across millions of users with millions of relationships between those users. That means some serious work on the scaling side and means we're going to have to release slowly to make sure it all works.
"The team is eight people - four developers including myself - both back end and front end, a project manager and our talented user experience team comprising an interaction designer, visual designer and information architect. However, our organisation is setup to match our technical architecture - and that's 'service oriented'. My team build the user-facing proposition, but we rely on a whole range of web services which we specially commission internally.
"We work very closely with other BBC teams such as 'social networking services', 'programme information platform' who provide all our programme metadata, 'identity' who provide the BBC's federated login system, 'embedded media player' who build the Flash media player you see all over BBC Online including iPlayer, and a team called 'Forge' who provide and manage whole serving architecture on which we build. My team is 8 people, but its just the tip of the technical iceberg, and as well as technical we work closely with editorial support teams, legal, information security and privacy experts."
"I report to Anthony Rose, who works directly for Erik Huggers, the BBC's director of Future Media & Technology.
Anthony's been very successful launching and developing iPlayer into the massive product it is today and now I work with him, I can understand why.
"He treats my team like a small startup in which he's 'invested some capital', lets us be creative and innovate, while guiding us and fighting political battles on our behalf. In return, we have to work extremely hard and deliver releases of our products every two weeks. It's a clever way of having teams which can innovate and move quickly, while being part of a large, slower, more cautious organisation."
• How important was the public service principle in your decision to join the BBC?
"For me, it was quite important - mainly because of its attitude towards technical quality. Unlike some companies I've worked in where time and cost are the only considerations, at the BBC we're able to take a little more care and do things the right way.
"That doesn't mean we're not under pressure to deliver stuff - but it does mean we can focus on doing things right. Things like progressive enhancement, screen-reader testing, beautiful semantic front-end code. Apart from that, we've got the luxury of working with some of the best content in the world - and one of the most respected media brands too. Sometimes, that can add some serious pressure to perform though."
• How important is the BBC to the UK's tech industry?
"I think the BBC has always been very important to the UK tech industry, especially in emerging technologies. In the early days of TV and Radio, it was the BBC that standardised everything from the cables which linked the cameras to the studios, to the media formats themselves, and even manufactured its own equipment. As technologies mature, the BBC does less of the work itself, but I see us having a similar role in the web - which is still an environment hugely in flux.
"I think the BBC is leading in a few areas on the web: First, modern, standards-compliant, accessible, front-end code. Along with other awesome UK companies like ClearLeft, we hope the work we're doing influences more web companies to adopt more best practice, like following the principle of 'progressive enhancement'.
"Secondly, creation, adoption and promotion of open standards. The BBC uses open source software where ever we can (on the web side at least) - and the BBC's size and influence means the standards we use have increased weight behind them. For that reason, we really try and back open standards where possible, and engage in their creation where needed.
"Thirdly, the semantic web. The W3C's semantic web technologies are really promising and have the power to revolutionise the web and create applications we can't even imagine at the moment. The semantic web development community is currently quite academic and often based around university research projects, although there are now some really exciting start-ups coming through. But we've got some of the world's best experts working with us, people like Dan Brickley and Yves Raimond and the teams in the BBC working on projects like /music and /programmes.
"I hope that the combination of the BBC's awesome content and its high-profile work to bring semantic web technologies to a wider audience.
"Lastly, media delivery: The iPlayer is huge, and the technology which underpins it has been developed and refined over three years. Its now proven to work so well that anyone working on new large-scale media delivery projects is sure to at least investigate the way the iPlayer works. If the lessons learned in building iPlayer can be passed on for new media projects, then the BBC will have left another important legacy in the UK tech industry."
• What one thing would make the BBC better?
"The ability to react faster to new technologies, the confidence to try new things and to learn from failure when it happens. It's hard to be innovative in a big organisation - especially one which is so scrutinised. But it is the lifeblood of creativity.
"If we're scared of getting things wrong, or making mistakes, we'll never be the creative and technically advanced organisation the public deserves."
• Do you worry about the future of the organisation?
"Not all the time but occasionally, yes. To deliver the creativity people expect from the BBC, it must be able to innovate, take risks and make mistakes - both editorially and in terms of technology. If it's able to do this, it has the talent to do world-changing things, which improve the landscape of media and technology."
• Extra curricular activity: simoncross.com, sicross.blogspot.com, @sicross on Twitter and on LinkedIn. On the schedule is also Social Innovation Camp, dConstruct, @media 2009 and the International Semantic Web Conference which he says are essential for keeping up with techniques and debate. And he does a bit of drumming too, for The Poor Souls of Pompeii.
More BBC Builders:
• BBC builders: Tom Scott, and the team behind /programmes and /music
• BBC Builders: Tristan Ferne, and his 'startup' team at audio, music and mobile