Vivo

A new CMS for BBC News & Sport

Vivo is a light-weight CMS system developed for the BBC to support a number of different industry developments and internal initiatives. Specifically, Vivo marks a move towards more short-form journalism, towards the atomisation of content and towards a BBC that runs on tagging and Linked Data. Finally, Vivo is fully responsive, letting journalist choose where and on which device they choose to create their content.

At the core of Vivo is it's ability to pull in content from anywhere in the BBC through a centralised tag ontology. This allows editors to see what is being published at any given time around any given topic, and to republish or edit this content for their own needs. On top of this, Vivo has a simplified and lightning fast text-editor built to support multiple types of media including social. Finally, Vivo supports the editorial compliance structures specific to journalism, taking in to account multiple workflows; From the fast-paced Live reporting sports journalists do, to the rigorous subbing and editing needs of News.

Vivo was developed following a rigorous research programme, where I shadowed journalists in their day to day, prototyped, iterated and tested again. As the tool progressed, we simulated live reporting incidences, situations where editor and journalist work remotely from each other and a host of other scenarios to truly stress test if the tool could live up to the challenges of reporting real life situations.

Since then Vivo has gone to live trials and is being received positively by our journalists for it's ease of use (Vivo is so simple it requires very little training to use) and for making the lives of our journalists easier.