This is pretty remarkable… the entire organization seems to be shifting. First a reboot of their website by offering users the chance to redesign, reorganize, restructure the content.

Welcome to reboot
Help us discover what bbc.co.uk 2.0 looks like.
We don’t just want you to redesign the bbc.co.uk homepage, we want you take it all the way back to the drawing board…
Throw out the existing content, throw out the existing focus, throw out the existing expectations, limitations and assumptions – and help reboot:bbc.co.uk
So, what does your bbc.co.uk look like?
What should its focus be? What kinds of ideas, concepts and services do you want represented?
This is your opportunity to help reshape bbc.co.uk for the future, get noticed and win some great prizes too…
Read the brief, look at the small print and submit your entry. Good Luck.

Some of the message board entires are kind interesting, for instance:

Turning something as important as a redesign into a contest certainly will likely illicit a wide variety of entries. However, do consider the source of your responses and the dire precedent that you may set for other companies to turn the redesign of an online presence into a “contest” for “prizes” and not a fully fledged project. It betrays your brand, it betrays the importance of the creative process and it betrays the very design community that you seek in this endeavor with “prizes” rather than honest budgets.

The better use of an exercise such as this would be to ask for honest feedback about your current site and pass that along to a design firm or freelancer that does this sort of thing for a living with a fair budget in place.

This message is should not be considered “sour grapes.” This is a call for the design community to openly discuss what is really being accomplished with this “Reboot: for fun and prizes” nonsense.

But the BBC staff confronts the claims of cheapness, ripping users off, etc… in their blog.

It’s only been a matter of hours since the launch of the project, and already the comments are coming in thick and fast.

However there appears to be some concern from certain quarters around a perception of us “ripping the community off”.

I think there has been some confusion around the purpose of the project, and so I’d like to take an opportunity to explain why we’ve set this competition up and hopefully address some of the confusion that may have occurred.

… Later …

I think it’s worth pointing out from the very beginning that we are not asking people to provide million £ rebranding for us. Indeed we are NOT going to use or commission any designs for the final front page. Yes, we will turn the winning design into the homepage for a day – but that’s as a prize and as recognition for the winning producer’s efforts (and if they really don’t want us to, then we won’t).

I would completely agree with jay that we would be ripping people off if we were going to turn entries submitted into the final homepage design. But that’s not the objective of this competition.

This should be interesting to watch.

Mindy McAdams also notes some big changes coming at the BBC from Mark Thompson (of the BBC):

“Martini Media”: Media that’s “available when and where you want it with content moving freely between different devices and platforms…. it means we have to adopt a completely new approach to development, commissioning and production by the BBC: From now on, wherever possible, we need to think cross-platform, across TV, radio and web for audiences at home and on the move.”

Entertainment: Think about mobile applications and other ways of using new media “from the very start of the creative process”; “nurturing and support of outstanding writers”; relaunch the BBC comedy Web site; “use 360-degree commissioning, interactivity, user-generated content to reengage audiences in primetime TV entertainment.”

Young audiences: “… the drift away from the BBC by some younger audiences, which we picked up on more than five years ago, is not just continuing but accelerating.”

… we’ll also launch a new teen brand aimed at 12 to 16 year olds which will be delivered via existing broadband, TV and radio services as well as mobile and other new devices … We’re going to take diversity, onscreen and off-screen, far more seriously than we have — it’s critical in convincing younger audiences that we’re in touch with them.

Findability: “… if we don’t coordinate our content, make it easy to find and brand it clearly, it may just disappear.” Yes! That’s a brilliant observation, and one far too few news organizations have taken seriously until now.

The active audience: “The final theme may turn out to be one of the most important. … the audience … doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”

Read more from Thompson. (registration required, use BugMeNot.com)

Very interesting stuff.