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.
