China Stories

Let's have a heated debate!

26th August 2008, Flora

One of the things we have planned for the China Stories site is a debating area. There are lots of different aspects to China and, like all countries in the world today, China faces many issues, sometimes very tricky ones with no easy answer.

There's another team in BBC Scotland Learning just now who are building a website about Scottish History. Like the China team, the history team are interested in having a debating tool, and they need it soon - in time to launch with some TV programmes in October.

The history team - led by Paul - have already been working with an external company to build the debating tool. Paul and I have worked together for some of the debating project - because Paul knows the China site will be able to use the finished application too. Although the China version will probably work in a very similar way to the History one, our designer, Del, is going to reskin it, so it fits in well to the rest of the China Stories site. This is a good example of teams working together, to pool ideas and resources.

Today there was a big meeting, between the history team, the China team, a guy from the external company (Holland Risley) and the project in-house designer (Kevin) and TPM (Sean). We talked about how the technology would work, what the BBC could already provide and what the externals should concentrate on. We then looked at how we'd like the application to be used, and by whom. We also talked about providing background information to kick-start each debate, and we talked about how to give feedback while the debate was going on. It was a good meeting with a few important decisions taken which means everybody can go off and start really getting down to work on the project.

I'm looking forward to asking some thought provoking questions in the debating section - and getting back lots of your opinions. Then we're going to collect up all the feedback and present it back - so you can see what YOU have told US.