As a Product Manager, Service Owner and Principal Web Developer at the BBC, I helped to create the BBC’s sign in system, and was a founder member of the team that wrote the BBC accessibility standards.
The full story, you say?
I joined the BBC in 2006, and worked as a frontend developer on the ancient signin system known as “SSO”. It was - I think - originally built for Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2), but grew to support bbc.co.uk/blogs and a (pretty small) number of other things.
In 2007, a small group of us started talking about how the BBC had ambitions to do projects that started with the word “My”, with no way to make them happen. In the language of the time, the BBC was very “Web 1.0”, and that it needed to be a bit more “Web 2.0”. There was actually a whole project run by Tom Loosemore called BBC 2.0, trying to change the way everyone thought.
I found an old presentation I did in 2008, and it contained the immortal words (that I probably stole from somewhere else, but maybe I coined it) “The BBC site today says ‘hello, it’s me…’ - we can make it a bit more ‘oh, it’s you!’”.
In those days, everything was hand-written HTML table-layouts, with a group of us fighting the good fight with a copy of Zeldman’s you were to stick SSO on the BBC homepage there would be a fire somewhere in a data centre, so that’s why it’s currently not anywhere other than buried a few layers deep inside games.”
