BBC begins work on open source documentary series

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Source: Source: Photo by Silvio Tanaka (CC-BY-SA) The BBC has begun working on a series of four one-hour documentaries for its BBC Two channel about how the web has, and still is, changing our lives. The current working title for the open and collaborative documentary series is the "Digital Revolution". According to a post on the Digital Revolution Blog, the goal of the project is to open up the production process as much as possible by asking for advice and stories from online users and by sharing as many of the production teams thoughts and ideas as possible. The documentary will take a look at the World Wide Web, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee over twenty years ago, and focus on how it has changed our lives, including how we communicate, disseminate knowledge and share information.

So far, the BBC has gained support for the project from the Open University, from academic and journalist Aleks Krotoski and from Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself. The inventor of HTML and founder of the World Wide Web used his keynote speech at the The Web At 20 launch event for Digital Revolution as an opportunity to tell governments and companies that the web should remain open and available to everyone, saying that "the web is a basic human right; like clean water". He also compared the Internet to a blank sheet of paper, saying that just as businesses and governments cannot control what people write or draw, they can't completely censor the web and that it should remain open and uncensored.

The project and its site are a work in progress and are considered to be "an experiment in collaboration". Users interested in taking part in the documentary project are advised to leave comments and share their views on the Digital Revolution Blog and via Twitter. According to the BBC, the Digital Revolution documentary series is due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010.

(crve)