”You must be raving mad to even try to do such a thing”, she said. ”It is simply impossible to change so many things simultaneously.”

This was one reaction to what we are now attempting to do now. We are trying to rethink how we do web here at the Swedish-language division of the Finnish Public Broadcasting Company (Yle), or Svenska Yle, as we are generally known. And the list of things we want to reform isn’t short: the technical platform, the concept, the look, the organization of people who contribute, and the way we do our journalism. It is also true that we have small resources and huge ambitions, but hey, would it be worth it if it were easy?

So this is just an initial note of welcome to this blog. We will post here to try to open up and document these processes publicly, mostly because we are believers in not only the principles for open source software but also those in open design. This will be a record for us, but also for others who will attempt to do similar things in the future. One clear advantage of being open is that the quality of your documentation can increase dramatically.

SYND refers to one of the strands in this big re-think. It is the one where we are building a new content management system for Svenska Yle—one that will be based on the open source system Drupal.  This blog will mostly follow the process of building that platform, although we will perhaps do some occasional detours into other larger questions relating to the reform, as well as other matters that keep us busy here at svenska.yle.fi.

The planning of this web reform started already last spring and we now have a team of six developers who have, since last Monday, officially gotten their hands dirty on the project. The first phase lasts five sprints (ten weeks) and we have scheduled our first release for March 2012.

This blog will be used to showcase the work that developers and designers are doing, as well as to discuss business-related questions that we have been working on. Personally, I can pledge to post entries that try to shed a light on our main business goals and how we are thinking about our “roof concept.” Furthermore, you should expect some posts on how we are organizing the process and thoughts about why we chose open source and Drupal from both technical and business perspectives. Expect also to see lots of posts about Drupal in general and some about meta data, linked data and such things.

It is true: this is a huge thing for us and I think I can guarantee the ride will not be smooth, at least all the time. Please do join us!

P.S.
SYND stands for “Svenska Yles nya Drupal-plattform,” which translates to the new Drupal platform of Svenska Yle. The acronym “SYND” means “sin” in English.

We will of course also be reporting individually about the project. These are the people to follow on the dev team:

Mårten Seiplax, Project Owner & AD @mseiplax
Tomi Mikola [Mearra], Project Manager @tomi_mearra
Christian Wikström, Developer @cwiks
Alexander Granholm, Developer @granholm
Ben Goodyear [Exove], Developer (Themer) @bengoodyear @typekitlove
Lauri Kolehmainen [Exove], Developer @dotsi

Some other key people related to the project:
Mikael Hindsberg, Concept Designer @mickhinds
Kristoffer Söderlund, Technical Producer @soderkr
Jonas Jungar, Svenska Yle News organisation @jonasjungar
Sami Kallinen, Head of programmes, Svenska.yle.fi @sakalli