Open Media Content

Content roadmap

The workshops that have fed into this document investigated a series of content areas which seemed to combine the values identified by OFCOM's PSB review and some degree of non-broadcaster Public Service Content: Arts and Culture, Drama and Narrative, Political and Social Action, Factual Content and Gaming.

These workshops have informed the authors of five Personal Visions of how the PSP might transform the digital landscape: Inspire, Story, Act, Investigate and Play respectively. These aren't the 'departments' of any future PSP but a starting point to discuss where the PSP might concentrate its efforts.

During the process we found some recurrent themes which we have illustrated with hypothetical commissioning scenarios to allow people to get to grips with the many different ways PSP projects might operate and be delivered.

Commissioning scenarios

The huge potential of Augmented Reality Games (a.k.a. Mixed Reality, Alternate Reality) as a hybrid experience was identified in the context of drama, gaming, factual and even environmental content. City Confidential is a hypothetical PSP ARG, but there are many examples of this emerging genre combining performance theatre and networked content. More on this can be found in the Personal Visions for Story and Play.

The concept of co-created and co-designed services like ActivMobs from the RED Unit of the Design Council is another widely applicable approach that clearly moves beyond and is distinct from the successful social action campaigns run by Broadcasters. DB2 shows how this approach to empowering citizens to make better use of existing public organisations and public content might be used by the PSP in the arena of health.

The potential for projects which combine professionally produced and user generated content in a deliberative process or structured dialogue also arose in several contexts from minority sports to science policy. Genie explores this.

Some 'content' areas that we considered now seem to us better viewed as common approaches. Despite (or perhaps because of) the achievements in richly interactive educational content we do not think the PSP would ever have a 'Learning Department', rather that some level of active learning will be present in any project or service the PSP would fund. Also our attempts to address directly how the PSP should enable online communities now seems the wrong approach: in the world we imagine everything the PSP does will involve supporting, connecting and empowering communities of interest and/or geography.

Drawing together both the themes and examples from the Forum process there seems to us three distinct types of content for the PSP, each of which overlaps with the other two:

Content Led Services are designed to empower individuals or groups and to get the best out of existing public investment in content or organisations. This may be creative empowerment - mashing and modding content that the taxpayer has already invested in. Or it might be personal empowerment - using new services built around health content that have been co-designed with users.

Narrative Experiences are the areas where the new forms of 'professional' content will be created: participatory dramas and factual experiences which will engage new audiences and make full creative use of networked media. This is an area where the UK can excel requiring a combinination as it does of creative writing, theatre and performance, interactive and game design and televisual skills.

Community Generated Content is where the PSP connects people; supporting 'new' organisations in the form of content creating communities. These communities will create and deliver their own services for their uses and will be both specialist and diverse. It may be that birdwatchers will finally be able to create content *for* twitchers rather than *about* them as television does.

Of course the most interesting areas, and potentially the most fruitful, are at the intersections. Co-created Health services, described further by Jennie Winhall in Act, are similar to those advocated by Cottam and Leadbeater as a necessary direction for public services. As such they sit between Content Led Services and Community Generated Content. And whilst City Confidential appears firmly within narrative experiences, large parts of the experience will be community generated.

A simple venn diagram cannot possibly represent a content or commissioning strategy for the PSP, but it does provide some initial thoughts as to the different types of commissioning and partnering relationships the PSP will have to establish and sustain, and the different kinds of commercial and public entities with which the PSP will interact.

It is most likely that Content Led Services will require the PSP to work with existing organisations. No doubt this would present challenges in terms of contractual and funding arrangements but also opportunities for partnership and long-term sustainability.

Enabling Community Generated Content and services will mean identifying and supporting People and Networks. But how will these be identified and on what grounds would existing communities be selected? How would the PSP deliver innovation where existing community networks are weak or absent?

Delivering Narrative Experiences would seem to be the most familiar territory, being a case of working on a project-by-project basis with producers and production companies. The challenge for the PSP will be to establish and support a supplier base with the right skills and capacity whilst continuing to provide equal access for new entrants.

To deliver the variety of innovative content and services that we have mapped out for the PSP will require new ways of working. It will be hard to achieve this by grafting these new working practices onto an existing organisation. Perhaps it is necessary to create a new organisation to shake up the landscape and find new ways of doing things. That is what Channel 4 did in the early 80s, and one of the by-products of the establishment of the channel and the legislative framework around it is a thriving UK independent production sector with mature companies, diversity of supply and business models increasingly based on the creation of intellectual property. The PSP could have the same galvanising impact on the interactive media sector - turning acknowledged creative excellence into real economic value.

• Previous
• Next