As you may imagine, it is complicated in this period to attend conferences and meetup. You can imagine it because I didn’t write anything in the last 2 weeks. But maybe you don’t know the reasons. Those are some of them:

  • I didn’t take days off since December, I am a bit tired
  • I had friends coming last Wednesday, the 12th, and leaving today
  • I am studying for a personal project
  • I am planning vacations for the end of August

Anyway, today I want to speak about BBC Upfront, that is the induction of BBC, the 2 days (for me July 3rd and 4th) that BBC ask you to spend when you are hired to learn values and principles of the company. I can spoiler that IT WAS AMAZING!!! But I would start with the following video…

Those 2 days were full of talks, but there were also some activities that I found really nice and amazing. Since the first morning, we had to spend 10 minutes in interviewing each other (we were more than 60 people) to create connections. Than we were split in two groups to keep things faster and better and we visited Salford (ah, yes, Upfront is based in Manchester) and the studios. Here we did some activities like showing the weather forecast (I was chosen as presenter… and I was not even able to pronounce the different cities of UK) and telling the daily news.

The second activity was to visit the blue room, the room (we have a bigger blue room in London) in which BBC keeps all the last technologies (like VR, video, Amazon Echo, cameras and so on…) available for anyone who wants to try them. The second day we did a radio drama (I was the studio manager, one of the guys who makes realistic noises related to the facts happening in the drama, like moving boots on stones to make the noise of a walk) and some less funny exercises.

There are 2 aspects to talk about. The first is what did they try to teach. All the talks were centred on the values of BBC. And this was important: we understood why BBC has the trust of its audience, why it should stay self organised without any influence of politics (only the king, or in this case the queen, can change the way in which BBC works), why one of its values is the respect of diversity, why audience is at the heart of everything we do and lot of other important information.
The second aspect was related to the connections. Upfront is not only for engineers. I had a chance to meet people from different sectors working in BBC. A Syrian journalist, some producers, presenters… So, normal people that wanted to speak and enjoy life. We had two lovely days together, we have a dinner the night with some of us, we drank together, we spoke all 2 days… I didn’t know any of them, and I found this the most valuable thing I got from the upfront (also because everyone was nice).

I can honestly say that this was the funniest and most interesting induction I ever had.
This ended the post. Let me say that in the next weeks I will write much less, but in September I will be available again. Stay tuned!

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