ia play

Lows

• the MWB time, our horrible office above Holborn station. Broken windows that were never fixed, no meeting rooms, the place just oozed depression. But mostly for the sense that we’d become the BBC department that time forgot. And our project getting cancelled.
• Daveys. For the prices, but also for the wine. If I’m honest I dislike the place mainly for the memory of Sandra, Anoushka & myself drinking far too much one night – courtesy of Tony Ageh’s generosity. Luckily no Pudsey’s were stolen on this occasion, just a certain amount of pride damaged.
• Reorganisations. One every two years. You can set your watch by it.

Highs

• Bush House bar: My first job where there was a bar on site, with tiger print sofas and an aquarium no less. I met most of the BBC developers here but also my future husband.
• The search project, in Mortimer Street. Working in the attic about the BBC films office, Tom gave us all Starbucks vouchers to ease the pain of being kicked out of Bush House. We had the web-dev dream team of Martin, Gaynor, Lee, Tim, Mark, Matt, Murray, and Iain. I’ve been to four of their weddings, although I’m kind of cheating as I had to be at Iain’s…being the bride and all that. There was even a toaster. We launched on time and happily too.
• Mags & the beginnings of BBC IA. Margaret Hanley started my IA career off, giving me a job and packing me off to IA summits. She still pushes me to do more and I kind of treat her as my real boss even all these years after she left the BBC. She also kicked off the runaway success that was to be the BBC IA team. I inherited her creation.
• The IA team cAug 2008. I’m stupid to be leaving this lovely, talented bunch. Bound to cry.

Whilst I can’t be said to have planned this, it appears I only work for organisations that aren’t really about making money.

I started my career with the Guardian newspaper. We were told at the time that the Guardian was “profit making but not profit driven” although this really refers to the Guardian Media Group as I believe the Guardian itself is ‘loss-making’. The Group is owned by the Scott Trust, a non-profit organisation.

I moved onto the BBC. A public corporation, it is funded by a combination of TV licence fee, commerical activities (BBC Worldwide) and a grant-in-aid from the Foreign Office (for the World Service). It has a Royal Charter and is governed by the BBC Trust. When people join the BBC they are often excited to be working for the public rather than shareholders. They are right that this is lovely. However working out whether you are doing well or not is a lot harder to work out. Hence my struggles with defining a metric for the information architecture of bbc.co.uk.

My latest move is to the RNIB. This much more straight forwardly a charity, the patron is the Queen.

It appears that mostly I work for the Queen.

This is my last week at the BBC. Next week I’ll start my new job at the RNIB in Kings Cross.

I’ve seen lots of people quit the BBC for the wrong reasons. Or at least they don’t resolve those problems with their first new job (the spring board job). The only things you are guaranteed to get when you leave a job are the tangible things, the kind of stuff that is written in your contracts.  So I will definitely be getting:

• a much, much shorter commute
• less money, although pretty much the same benefits otherwise
• no working in the office over the weekends or late nights (they shut the place up)
• a greater variety of places to eat at lunchtime
• to be working for a charity, working for a goal worth getting out of bed for
• proximity to the British Library
• an office with purple floors

This really distills down to “closer to home, for a charity”.

Tangible sacrifices:

• I won’t have a community of IAs immediately around me (although I have high hopes for regular coffees with the lovely folks at the Wellcome Trust in Euston)
• I won’t be managing people (one of my favourite things about my BBC job)
• My projects will be lower profile
• I may end up less well-read (because of the shorter commute)

My intangible but realistic hopes:

• get some energy back. A shot in the arm
• to work with a lovely team of people
• re-apply stuff learnt at the BBC
• learn new things
• to unravel a new organisation and the way it works

I won’t be expecting to get unambiguous and stable strategy, respect that doesn’t have to be earned, and to get away from decision making I disagree with. But I think lots of people fall into that trap.

“The School of Life is a new cultural enterprise based in central London offering intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life.

We offer evening and weekend courses, holidays to unexpected locations, stigma-free psychotherapy, secular sermons, conversation meals, a floating faculty of experts and a new kind of literary consultancy service called bibliotherapy.

Our faculty is made up of some of the brightest thinkers and artists at work today. They include Alain de Botton, Geoff Dyer, Susan Elderkin, Tom Hodgkinson, Brett Khar, Robert Macfarlane and Martin Parr.

We are based in a small but spectacular shop on Marchmont Street, a thriving and bohemian part of central London. We’ve organised the shop as a chemist for the mind, a place where you can try out a variety of cultural solutions to everyday ailments. We sell books, artworks, courses, holidays and therapeutic services.”

‘A floating faculty of experts’ generates lovely images. More from The School Of Life.

We’ve got in the habit of buying whole pigs direct from the farm but I’m more comfortable buying supermarket lamb (they don’t tend to be intensively farmed either way). Mutton, however, is still a rarity in the supermarket so we’ve shelled out on a whole sheep, which comes as:

Also known as:

• 4 Leg Joints
• 4 Shoulder Joints
• 10 – 14 Loin Chops
• 12 Cutlets
• 4 Chump Chops
• 4 Pieces Scrag End
• 2 Breasts Rolled
• 2 Kidneys
• 1 Liver

All in all, about 20kg of the stuff. That should see us through to pig-time.

I’ve been unsubscribing from loads of RSS feeds. I felt very guilty/disrespectful/sacrilegious unsubcribing from some big names but I guess they’ll never know.

I’ve been getting rid of blogs that are:

• talking about other things these days, compared to when I first subscribed
• drowning in Delicious posts. Interesting stuff in their links but I can’t skim read the post headlines so never read them.
• specifically for old job (I realised there are some people I felt compelled to keep up with)
• in my reader for non-discernable reason at all

Reading every that is left still isn’t manageable (even utilising Martin’s tips) but I feel less stressed by it.

Steward Brand has posted the six part BBC series of How Buildings Learn on Google Video.

(The BBC’s White City building features. Brand says of it that “basic daylight is an unattainable luxury”. It isn’t greatly beloved by staff but I’ve never had to work in it much. My current base, the Broadcast Centre, is a bit bland and boxy but mostly comfortable and functional. Television Centre and Bush House were both more inspirational buildings but quite flawed as places to work. The shape of TVC is distinctive but also enables you to literally go in circles when lost. )

The RNIB is hiring a number of accessibility roles:
Web Access Centre Blog :: We’re recruiting

And a senior web developer:
Temporary Senior Web Developer