Blogit - open Yle

Yle to open up its content, stay tuned!

Sam Kallinen, Verkon ja mobiilin kehityspäällikkö, Yle — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:36:09 +0000

Sami Kallinen (@sakalli) is Head of Yle Internet Development

I have a lot to be proud of as an Yle employee today. We decided some weeks ago to start systematically and increasingly opening up our content and data over the next few years.

Our goal is to have an Yle-API open for our partners, developer communities, and other interested parties by 2015. When different people and organisations can develop services and applications on top of our content and data, we will truly offer value for the Finnish tax-payers who fund our company. This will also enable open innovation and improve the quality of the services we produce in-house.

The first concrete results can be expected as early as the end of this year.

We believe that APIs and open data are part and parcel of operating a modern public service media company. Commonly funded content is distributed in ways that will take the best possible route into the everyday reality of the Finnish people. Yle is expected and even facing demands to open up its content, since the company’s funding changed from license fee-based to tax-based at the beginning of this year.

We live in the midst of many upheavals, and things are changing with incredible speed. In the media industry, global competition is accelerating, impressively skilled players are already in Finland, and many more are surely still to come. Thus, in order to remain relevant, Yle needs to be able to produce content and services that are of the same high quality and with the same agility as the Netflixes, HBOs, Apples and Googles of the world. Devices and technology will continue to become even more fragmented. The rate of this change is hard to understand. In light of these changes, findability is critical and active curating of content for our users is imperative. Acting on the Web becomes increasingly difficult as the mass of content increases and diversity of devices multiply; media usage patterns change and differentiate constantly.

The rapid growth of different devices is one of the biggest challenges we are facing from the technology perspective at the moment. The trend is clearly visible. The usage of our Web services on tablet devices has grown in just four months – from October to January – a whopping 67%!

And plenty of growth potential still exists. The BBC's iPlayer exemplifies this new reality with great clarity. Its desktop usage has fallen well below half, which means that nearly 60% of iPlayer usage happens through smart phones, tablets, game consoles, and the like. It is important, though, to remember that according to figures published last autumn, iPlayer supports 650 different devices.

Tele-text, which is still a surprisingly popular service in Finland, is an interesting example of how opening content can be accomplished with good results and how that in turn can help in dealing with device fragmentation. Tele-text applications have been created in Finland for all major phone platforms and even some rather obscure ones. These are the applications that use our content and that the Finns have developed for the devices of their choice without an active contribution from Yle.

We are also hoping for other types of benefits. Imagine a start-up that develops a special tablet for the elderly and wants to bring Yle content to the device. We would not have the resources to implement such a solution, but when we make our content presentation-free and structure it for multipurpose use, and we create a clear and open API, then the start-ups themselves can bring the content to their products, as long as certain conditions are met. Partners can build products and services that make our content more available for more people.

This is one of the ways we want to take Yle to the next Web era. Plenty of work remains: copyright issues and technology challenges still need to be addressed and resolved. We are currently busy with reforming the way we produce content for the Web. At the moment, a lot is unclear, but a clear direction is something that we already have.

Links:

How to find Open Yle

Sami Kallinen — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 05:59:55 +0000

Sami Kallinen is Head of Internet Development (Yle Media unit).

The Open Knowledge Festival is an international event focusing on different open movements and practices. These movements have been growing over the past few decades, mostly fueled by the Internet. Some of these movements have been around for years, for example the open source movement. Some of them have gained momentum during the past few years; the open data, open design movement also comes to mind.

The way I see it, openness is a state of mind and mode of operations for sharing your work, ideas, and information and improving them in a network. So it is also a model for large-scale teamwork. There are some fascinating recent examples of phenomena that embrace open ideas; the crowdsourcing of the Islandic constitution employs this idea, and why not? Isn't the whole point of democracies to incorporate open ideas? Today we have the technologies to support old ideas in ways we could not have imagined previously.

Some of these subjects are covered at the OKFest, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The best ideas grow through collisions with other ideas and when people meet to share them. This is perhaps even more important than the subjects covered at the festival and the reason I am looking forward to attending.

The public sector has, from the perspective of organizations in Finland, been the most active in embracing various aspects of Open Knowledge thus far. This is only logical, since the public sector is already accountable to the communities they serve. More and more, however, commercial organizations here and internationally are also realizing that openness is essential to being able to innovate, attract talent, have sustainable organizational culture, and most of all convince the customer to trust them enough to choose your solutions and products.

While public service broadcasters have traditionally not been as active in the field of Open Knowledge as one might expect, the public service idea shares a lot of common ground and values with such movements. That is why I am happy that our organization, Yle, is participating - along with hundreds of enthusiasts and other organizations - in making this festival happen. We are sponsoring two guests to the festival − Farida Vis and Simon Rogers − both renowned for their work in using large amounts of data to help us understand the increasing complex world around us a little better.

Farida is a Research Fellow in the Social Sciences in the Information School at the University of Sheffield, UK, and is recognized for her research. She led the academic team that examined 2.6 million riot tweets, analysing the role Twitter played in the 2011 UK riots, as part of The Guardian newspaper’s Reading the Riots project. Through his work in The Guardian, Simon Rogers has become one of the leading data journalists in the world and recently received the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism.

Well aware that the listing of links below provides perhaps the best ways to present data, we have nonetheless collected some projects and content from The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, Yle, that we thought somehow presents a thematic connection to the festival; a mix of everything. If you are one of the festivals international attendees be prepared to read a some absurd English translated from Finnish by your local search engine, since much of the material below is in Finnish. We will continue to add more links here as we find them, and if you encounter any, please add them to the comments!

You can find the festival program here: http://okfestival.org/

Transparency & accountability

Open Yle blog (in Finnish): http://blogit.yle.fi/avoin-yle
Yle Uutiset Suora linja - journalistic process is totally open
Usage of Twitter − hashtag #suoralinja
Story ideas are available for comments before the story is published -> yle.fi/suoralinja
Svenska Yle development blog: http://utveckling.ylebloggen.fi/

Open data @ Yle:
(links to data sets)

Tele-Text API links and description here. 15.06.2011 (in Finnish): http://blogit.yle.fi/kehitys-kehittyy/ylen-avoin-data-rajapinta-ylen-tek...
Blog post with about open data @ Yle. 07.11.2011 (in Finnish) http://blogit.yle.fi/kehitys-kehittyy/yle-ja-avoin-data-tapahtunut-tahan...
Presidential candidate and user viewpoint comparison data and description here (in Finnish)
User data 13.01.2012: http://blogit.yle.fi/kehitys-kehittyy/presidentinvaalien-vaalikoneen-kay...
Candidate data 12.12.2011: http://blogit.yle.fi/kehitys-kehittyy/presidentinvaalien-vaalikoneen-tie...
Business subsidy data as open data from MOT (in Finnish): "MOT: Yritystukien kanta-asiakkaat": http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/mot/10_9
Yle Record library: http://www.fono.fi/ (not open data per se but interface to database)

Data journalism and visalisation @ Yle:

Blog posts about data journalism in the CMS, used by Svenska Yle (in Swedish): http://utveckling.ylebloggen.fi/tag/datajournalistik/
The Yle Investigative journalism program investigates companies that collect subsidies (in Finnish, MOT: Yritystukien kanta-asiakkaat) http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/mot/10_9
The mining industry in Finland (in Finnish, "MOT: Hullut päivät kaivoksilla") http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/mot/27_8
This is where the new citizens of the capital region come from! (in Finnish, "Täältä tulevat pääkaupunkiseudun junantuomat") http://yle.fi/uutiset/taalta_tulevat_paakaupunkiseudun_junantuomat/6255307
Where the Swedish-speaking Finns live in the Capital region (in Swedish, "Finlandssvenskarna bor på Brändö och i Östersundom") http://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2012/07/13/finlandssvenskarna-bor-pa-brand...
What should the new party leader focus on (In Swedish, "Hjälp Calle!")? http://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2012/07/06/hjalp-calle
Where alcohol is sold (In Swedish and Finnish, Här säljer alkoholdrycker bäst / Näin viina käy kaupaksi - katso oman kuntasi myynti) http://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2012/06/01/har-saljer-alkoholdrycker-bast
http://yle.fi/uutiset/nain_viina_kay_kaupaksi_-_katso_oman_kuntasi_myynt...
The social circle of the shooter (In Finnish, "Web-analyytikko: Ampujan Facebook-piiri varsin suppea") http://yle.fi/uutiset/web-analyytikko_ampujan_facebook-piiri_varsin_supp...
The Finns Party and islamofobia (in Finnish, "PerusS ja islamofobia") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p0itkrVfC0
How fast is your broadband (in Finnish, "Kuinka nopea laajakaista oikeasti on”)? http://blogit.yle.fi/rele/kuinka-nopea-laajakaista-oikeasti-on
The Nokia wonder (in Finnish, "Nokian ihme - takana loistava tulevaisuus") http://yle.fi/uutiset/nokian_ihme_-_takana_loistaa_tulevaisuus/6182773
A-studio: Stream and Twitter-wall (usage of TwitterFontana) http://areena.yle.fi/tv/1630215

Yle and personal blogs:

Tuija Aalto's Tuhat Sanaa blog http://tuhatsanaa.net/
Teemo Tebest's Datajournalism blog http://datajournalismi.blogspot.com
Antti Hirvonen's Storify collection - points about (live) tweeting, curation http://storify.com/anttihirvonen

Open source:

Drupal:

- Yle page at Drupal.org http://drupal.org/node/1296538
- Built on Drupal at Yle:
-    Swedish Yle web site: http://svenska.yle.fi
-    YleX: http://ylex.yle.fi/
-    Yle blogs: http://blogit.yle.fi
-    About Yle: http://yle.fi/yleisradio/
-    Musiikki: http://yle.fi/musiikki/
-    Olotila: http://olotila.yle.fi

Published Drupal modules:

- Onki-Module: http://drupal.org/node/1604784
- Organic Groups (originally comissioned by Yle): http://drupal.org/project/og

Yle employees on Twitter:

Tuija Aalto's list: https://twitter.com/tuija/ylelaisia/members
Tweets about Yle personnel & recruitment and in Finnish. https://twitter.com/Yle_Rekry
Tweeps at Swedish Yle https://twitter.com/RolfGranqvist/folk-p%C3%A5-svenska-yle

Pinterest

Stories about Yle personnel, where we work, and what we like. This is our story. http://pinterest.com/yleourstory/

Open slide decks (Slide share, Prezi etc):

Antti Hirvonen's slide decks: http://www.slideshare.net/anttijohanneshirvonen/
Tuija Aalto's decks: http://www.slideshare.net/Tuija
Teemo Tebest's presentations about data and journalism (In Finnish):
Verkkojournalismi ja data: http://www.slideshare.net/teelmo/verkkojournalismi-ja-data
Verkkojournalismi ja data (updated): http://www.slideshare.net/teelmo/verkkojournalismi-ja-data-11937349
Data ja journalismi: http://teelmo.info/teelmo/app/seminar-2012-hhhelsinki/hhhelsinki-metadat...

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