Spanner the company will be ten years old in 2007, which means that spanner people have been building websites for thirteen years. That’s a bit of a shock.
The first thing we – I, then – ever did was a simple site and discussion forum for Scope. It was written in Perl 4 and almost everything you could do wrong with a web application it did wrong, but it was 1994 and who knew? Soon there were several hundred people using it every week, and so began an accidental career in building meeting places online.
Soon after that, thanks to a rather optimistic description of my accomplishments, there followed a spell on the editorial staff at oneworld and a lot of work on mcspotlight (and if you want to see how big the screens were in those days, the front page layout hasn’t changed since we overdid it in 1996).
Spanner the company was born about a year later and spent the following years designing and building sites for charitable grand dames like Amnesty (four times), Oxfam (twice) and Oneworld (three and a half, maybe four altogether). The sites were quite ambitious for the day, and we’d built several content management systems before we even knew that’s what they were called. We wrote them in perl and cold fusion, then mod_perl, then php. On one memorable occasion we wrote a shopping cart in netscape 3 javascript. They were all a bit overengineered, underdocumented and usually almost impossible to read, but they worked pretty well and they let people do a lot with a little.
Over the years the code got cleaner and the projects larger, but Spanner deliberately stayed small, even through the madness of the late nineties and early 00s. We never believed in the bubble, and anyway it takes social skills and long-range vision to build up a company. Lacking either, we sat on interview panels and wrote tender invitations and gradually helped the big charities to replace us with in-house teams or larger companies with smoother account managers. Amnesty was the last and best of those clients: we managed the site for eight years and then spent over a year pushing to get them to the point where they could appoint the right people to replace us and give them enough resources to do it properly.
Relieved of institutional responsibility, we skipped off to conduct grandiose experiments in communal narrative and hyperlinked video. We called them organic and emergent and toured them round the tech/art festivals of Europe while other, sharper people created myspace and youtube.
Rich people are always unhappy, don’t you find? Deep down they feel vulnerable and separate from the herd. That’s why they drive those fortified cars. We were lucky to avoid that trap.
Over the last few years the experiments in audio and video and crowd-management have converged – largely in work with spark – to leave us strangely expert in equipping a group of people to manage a body of audio or video material. We’ve done it for first-hand climate change evidence and the oral histories of the Islamic Development Bank. We’ve used the same tricks to collate the views of 4000 BBC employees into a single summary recommendation and to turn the firsthand experiences of Defra’s futures projects into a machine for guiding projects and preventing wheel-reinvention.
These days we’re mostly retired or rural or both, but we are occasionally roused from pastoral slumber to carry out one last job. Most of those are for audio or video processing, but we do still build sites for friends and old clients. If you’ve got something interesting that needs doing, do get in touch. We might be old now but we still got some moves.
Will
December 2006