Democracy live progress reports

Dear Sir or Madam,

According to the first blog for the Democracy Live project:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/2...

"DL, as it's become known in the BBC, is the result of about 18
months of development work... Our search is powered by a
speech-to-text system built by two companies called Blinkx and
Autonomy which create transcriptions of the words spoken in the
video."

Under the Freedom of Information Act, please may I have copies of
all progress reports produced by the Democracy Live team (including
any that were filed by the contractors Autonomy and Blinkx) during
the 18 months they were building this project.

Yours faithfully,

Julian Todd

Dear Stephanie Harris,

Thank you for your reply to my request for progress reports
returned by the team who created the Democracy Live platform over
the last 18 months.

It is noted that this negative form-response that makes no
reference to my request other than to quote its words took
precisely four weeks to be returned.

There is unfortunately no guidance I can quote, but I do not
believe it is fair for the BBC to apply its Schedule 1 definition
of a public authority as a rubber stamp without providing any
specific justification -- particularly as the ICO's interpretation
of the Sugar appeal lays out a clear framework for determining what
comes under the categories "journalism, art or literature".

It is without doubt that the Democracy Live system is neither art
nor literature, so it can only be considered as journalism.

Decision notice FS50188859 provides the following list of
information that falls into the outside category determined by a
High Court decision:

Salaries of presenters / talent
Total staff costs of programmes
Programme budgets
Programme costs
Payments to other production companies for programmes
Payments to secure coverage of sporting events and other events
Content of programmes / coverage of issues within programmes

Obviously my request for progress reports during the technical
development of an entirely on-line internet system that carries no
BBC produced content does not match any of these.

Decision notice FS50088733 summarizes the Information Tribunal's
opinion of what three elements constitute "journalism":

The first is the collection or gathering, writing and verifying of
materials for publication.
The second is editorial.
The third is the maintenance and enhancement of the standards and
quality of journalism, particularly with respect to accuracy,
balance and completeness.

None of these categories impinge on technical progress reports that
would have been supplied by the team of software engineers building
the platform that delivers this service during the build phase of
this project.

It is unlikely that, given the lack of filtering of the video data
in the way it is gathered and processed for the web-page, that any
professional journalism was involved in the development.

There is also no evidence that the system has been incorporated
into standard journalistic operations throughout the rest of the
organization.

For all intents and purposes this project appears as an unartistic,
non-literary isolated technical internet solution for processing
and republishing raw video feeds.

As such, please provide me with more of a sign that at least some
consideration has occurred in fulfilling (or not) this request,
beyond the ticking of a box to auto-generate a message, and
queueing the response email to go out exactly 20 days later.

Yours faithfully,

Julian Todd