the London schedule board - image by Roo Reynolds

It is done. BeeBCamp 3 has come and gone, leaving a trail of tweets, photos and blog posts strewn in its wake.

With a total of 11 tables spread across 2 cities having simultaneous sessions, I can’t hope to give an authoritative summary of the whole day. An unconference like this tends to be a different experience for every person, as few people will attend all the same discussions throughout the day.

Roo Reynolds, Andrew Bowden, Charlie Beckett, and Paul Murphy of the BBC Internet Blog have already written up some of their impressions of the day. There are a lot of photos on Flickr already, and more will come.

One big new thing this time around was holding the conference in two places, with one table at each location  video-linked to the other instance.

Here’s what it looked like at the London end:

image by Roo Reynolds on Flickr

And, in Manchester:

image by cubicgarden on Flickr

We ran morning sessions from London, with Manchester attending, and afternoon sessions at the linked table were run from Manchester. It was the first time a lot of delegates, including myself, got to work with this kind of videoconferencing set-up, and it really worked surprisingly well. The image and sound quality is very high, with none of the lagginess and digital image artefacting you can get with something like Skype. As long as the session leaders remembered to make a point of including people on the other side of the screen, there was a real sense of presence. Definitely something to repeat.

What next?

It’s becoming normal at the end of a BeeBCamp to get people together and talk about what to do next with the energy and connections the day has mobilized. This time we had a joint discussion about this, across both instances.

One of the good ideas from this discussion was to keep the BeeBCamp vibe going by having more sessions spread throughout the UK – Glasgow, Cardiff, important regional centres. They could be smaller or shorter events, even just a lunchtime meetup. But they’d keep the open exchange of ideas and initiative flowing. It might even be an idea to hold a whole bunch of events simultaneously in various BBC locations across the country. They wouldn’t even need to be linked live; as long as the sessions had a way to report back – such as this blog – they’d all be part of the same general event. Annual or semi-annual BeeBCamps could then be the plenary session that brings it all together.

If you were at BeeBCamp 3 and want to take the day’s connections further, get in touch. If you couldn’t come, but think there’s something happening here you’d like to find out more about, get in touch! We want to do everything we can to find better ways of working together.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped make the day a success: to Ian Forrester and Simon Lumb for hosting the Manchester instance, to David Hayward for all his help, to Adrian Woolard, who was our captain and held all the threads together across the UK, to Angelique Halliburton for her help on the day, to Andy Wilson, Erik Huggers and Peter Salmon for supporting BeeBCamp.

And a really big thank you to everyone who came and everyone who pitched in. You’re the reason BeeBCamp works. I’ve noted down a few things about how we thought we could make BeeBCamp better. But hindsight is always 20/20, and good ideas can come with time. So if you’ve got any thoughts on how we could make BeeBCamp better – let’s hear ‘em! The comments field awaits.

image by jef safi on Flickr

Connections are important.

The computing power of a brain depends partly on the strength of the networks between its cells. It’s not just the number of brain cells you’ve got; it’s the connections between them, and the strength of those connections, that makes intelligence and creativity possible.

The metaphor applies to an organization like the BBC, with its thousands of employees in different fields. The BBC contains one of the world’s biggest concentrations of creative innovators in one company. There’s an enormous amount of expertise distributed through an organization this size. Each of us is an expert in our own field: programmers, journalists, filmmakers, engineers, writers, researchers, and many more. Ideas and solutions that may be obvious to one team might be revolutionary to another. The trick is to get people together to talk about those ideas.

It all starts with a conversation.

Every person who works here has great ideas about something. But in the course of business as usual, there isn’t much opportunity for people from different departments, or different divisions, to meet and understand each other, learn from each other, to share ideas, to get inspired.

That’s what BeeBCamp is all about. It’s an unconference about creativity and innovation at the BBC. Over the course of a day, BeeBCamp uses a simple format to bring people together and get them talking. The conference creates a critical mass of creative experimenters and technical innovators. When we get together, the creative potential of all that expertise concentrated in a couple of places is one of the highest in the world.

These connections are important. On Friday, you at BeeBCamp will continue building them. Welcome to the conversation.

This venue gives us more space, nicer views and better internet connections so we can stay in touch with the campers in Manchester.

Just four  days to go. Exciting!

UPDATE: The London instance is fully booked, but there’s still plenty of space in Manchester if you’re up for hanging out with the cool crew on Oxford Road. If you can’t come to Manchester, do put your name down for the waiting list. You never know!

UPDATE: As the event is over, registration is now closed.

• Register here if you’d like to go to BeeBCamp 3 in Manchester.

• Register here if you’d like to go to BeeBCamp 3 in London.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

NOTE: These links will only work if you’re using Internet Explorer from inside the BBC firewall. They take you through to our internal bookings system. We’ll be sending out invites to our external partners imminently!

Our Manchester home, BBC Oxford Road - from Coffee Lover on Flickr

• Manchester venue announced

• Registration opens Friday!

BeeBCamp is about bringing people together, and this fall we’re doing it on a big scale. BeeBCamp 3 is going to be live in London and Manchester; one linked conference, spread across two venues. The Manchester venue will be the conference suite on the 2nd floor of the Oxford Road headquarters. In London, we’ll be taking over the 6th floor conference suite at TVC. Both venues will be linked together through video-conferencing, and ambient WiFi. Everyone from the BBC is welcome and you can go to whichever location you prefer.

Registration Opens Friday

Get ready to click through: BeeBCamp registration will go live on Friday at noon.

We’ll post up the links for registration here.  Stay tuned!

Audience in Red by Felipe Trucco

BeeBCamp isn’t about coding. It’s not about hacking. It’s not about Flash or gaming or the Internet. It’s not even about ‘New Media’.

It’s about audiences,

as Simon Lumb from Television Platforms rightly underlined for me in Manchester today.

Ultimately, BeeBCamp is about reaching new audiences in new ways. It’s about connecting with people at the BBC and beyond it who have good ideas about stories we can tell the public. It’s about learning how we can tell stories better, or how we can use new technology to inform, educate and entertain. It’s about connecting with people who are working on new ways to reach people with impact.

In the end, no matter how good your story is, if no one hears it, it hasn’t attained its potential. And no matter how clever or useful a bit of tech, there’s no point unless it touches people’s lives. That’s what BeeBCamp is about: bringing together the elements of this equation.

Creative stories + Innovative tech = Impact

= WIN

So if you’re not a ‘techie,’ if you’re not a ‘new media’ type, we want to hear from you. Think you know a good story when you see one? News, Drama, Comedy or Childrens’ it doesn’t matter. Bring your creativity to BeeBCamp. Then we’ll see some sparks fly.

image courtesy Soapbeard on Flickr

One step closer to the big day; BeeBCamp’s London venue will be the very swish TVC Conference Centre, on the sixth floor of Television Centre in W12.  Delectables will be provided for lunch.

Manchester venue - coming soon.

Mark your calendars for Friday, November 27th – BeeBCamp 3 is coming to London and Manchester.

What would happen if you got every hacker, left-field creative, codebreaker and new-media storyteller in one of the world’s biggest media ecosystems into one room, and got them talking?

Awesomeness, that’s what.

BeeBCamp is back, and all of the BBC is invited. It’s an open unconference for everyone at the BBC who’s interested in new media. BeeBCamp helps build connections within and outside the company to catalyze creative development.

BeeBCamp 1 and BeeBCamp 2 saw BBCers from across the UK gather to share their stories, be inspired, and get excited about all the cool things we’re doing with new media in all its forms. We riffed and argued about gaming, animation, social media, and interactive explorations of every kind, in every genre and medium. This time, the event will run simultaneously in London and Manchester, linked through the magic of technology. It’ll be bigger and badder than ever – and we want you there.

If you’ve been to BeeBCamp before, you know what we’re talking about. If you haven’t, don’t take my word for it – see what Roo Reynolds, Dave Lee from the BBC Internet Blog, or Jason DaPonte had to say about it.

Or you can check out the official briefing below, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Attendance is free and open to anyone from the BBC. Stay tuned – ticket information coming soon!