One thing I was amazed at this year was the number of photography "Geeks", at the labs I attended with Onteca last year there was just me and Matt Lock who were photo geeks, this year it seems like every other person has some reasonably in depth knowledge of photography, and if I had a beer for every time I've seen a flash firing around the hotel I wouldn't be sobering up for the next couple of months.

There have been people covering an increadibly wide range of experience with photography from people who take the odd snapshot to one guy who is a photography teacher, plus pretty much everything in between, and there have been discussions at various points throuought the week covering many wide and varying aspects of photography including the perenial film vs. digital debate (whose conclusion many times surpised me, given the high-tech new-media background of the people here I was expecting everyone to say digital wins hands down, but alot of people seemed to believe as I do that digital is great for convenience and immediacy, but for more abstract things such as look & feel and the 'spirit' of an image film still rules the roost)

One great thing about the number of photography geeks is that there have been an impressive number of images added to the labs flickr pool anyone who hasn't checked it out already definitely should.

I am slightly scared of the picture below, generally it feels like 1981 (with added laptops) here, Maggie's picture hangs on the wall, the establishment look down with scorn from the walls, Lord Reith is available on an RSS feed to remind us of core values. It does occur to me that the BBC has missed a new media trick you have had desktop Mottie or Bill Oddie. But a desktop Lord Reith the remind staff of core values now that would work.

We are looking at Open Mapping Toolkit (OMT) being a tool which makes it easy for BBC web site producers to include mapped content and interfaces within their sites. The key challenge in this is to provide a clear interface which produces rich functional results for non-technical users.

For those about to attend Innovation Labs for I feel you are my audience, i hate to think it might be more general than that, i would become inhibited and cease to write.
Generally labs are fun but intrinsically challenging, you spend the first couple of days working up your idea with the support of Frank and the team. This follows traditional design practise and the mentors are supportive, it is however their role to find weaknesses and then entice you to resolve them. They are though second guessing the BBC's commisioning requirements and when the 'commisioners' (they hate that term arrive). You get to potentially start again if they find big holes in your idea. We luckily avoided that one this time.

We intend Open Map Toolkit (OMT) maps to be available to all content producers within the BBC, to enable this we need an easy setup system. The best model we can find for this is akin to 'Project Wizards' in Visual Studio. The content producer will choose from a list of options, including

• What Map


• Custom Layers


• User Generated Content


• Moderation


• Media either from internal sources or Flickr etc


• Aligning data sources, navigation and search options ..

We have spent Wednesday looking at the BBC's current use of maps, for an organisation which doesn't use maps they have an awful lot of them. All the way from simple maps on 'Where I Live' upto very complex and deep applications of Google Maps
Abolition of Slavery
and fun informative applications such as Springwatch
Springwatch Map

Matt from BBC Backstage also contributed some interesting ideas about how he is going to track and blog his overland journey to Russia
http://triptracker.net/

OMT provides BBC producers with a flexible tool for producing map based
multimedia content and visualisations. Uses extend from producer generated
content ('Blue Peter appeal stations') to user generated maps
(Springwatch). OMT provides a flexible platform portable between various
maps, e.g. google/yahoo/msn, and platforms from mobile phone to Linux pc.