An interview with Feargal O’Kane from BT48 : Work, Life and The beauty of open source software
Long-time Blick residents BT48 have been working on lots of exciting projects over the last few years. We caught up with BT48‘s Feargal O’Kane at our Malone Road studios to find out more about their company and some of the exciting new things they are working on. Here’s the interview!
- Tell us a bit about yourself!
My name is Feargal O’Kane. I’m a director of BT48. I do a bit of everything within the company – development and project management. There’s 3 of us, we’re distributed in 3 separate offices throughout Northern Ireland – we don’t really spend much time together! We’re split between Derry-LD and Belfast. The BT48 is because of Derry-LD! Being from Derry-LD it’s sometimes hard to say where you’re from so BT48 works well. It was actually one of our other directors – James – who came up with the name and has been BT48 for years – and we gradually took on the name on as we started working together on small projects about 10 years ago and became a co-operative and then a company (which we have been for around 6 years now).
- What are some of the current projects you are working on?
Linen Hall Library
We’re actually working on a really interesting project with Linen Hall Library called “Divided Society.” Essentially, it is an archive project. They’ve got the Northern Ireland political collection which is an archive collection from the mid-60s until now. Pretty much anything that’s happened in Northern Ireland – they’ve got it. They got funding from the heritage lottery fund to digitise and archive everything from 90-98 about the Peace process. It is an amazing project – about a quarter of a million archive documents are going to be scanned, recorded and put into a system for retrieval. It’s really very exciting. We’ve been involved in the infrastructure, branding, the technical build – just the whole way through it – which has just been great and really really exciting.
Department of Finance
We’ve just finished a project with the Department of Finance here on digital transformation services looking at changing how government interacts with citizens. That was a focus project and we were brought on for delivery which was interesting.
Queen’s University
I am working on a project for library services – another archival project where we are looking at building a better system to allow researchers to find content.
Other projects
Kevin in Derry-LD is building a Windows 10 app for a museum up in Portaferry to enhance their virtual tour. James is also working on a couple of other local design projects.
- What areas of design and development have you worked on?
This year we have been much more focused on web stuff – it’s just happened, it’s just what’s come through in terms of tenders. Last year we were doing 3D modelling – we were creating interactive touch screens for Ulster Museum and for the National Museum in Ireland we were also creating interactives. We also worked with school children in Bangor Grammar and North Down Museum. We applied for a tender to create a touch-screen application but they wanted the children and the young people to get involved because it was a history project and was going to tie in with ICT and history and across the curriculum. There was a broad mention that there might be a game and we thought it would be a very simple game. So we went in and they wanted Call of Duty – essentially! – on a boat, which we said we couldn’t do, but then we looked at it and they were so enthusiastic and wanted this so much that we ended up building a 3D first-person game where they got input into the graphics, the look and feel and the sound effects. We built up a lot of skills on that! There’s lots of things in the works – we’ve tenders out for projects including ones for UN Development.
- Why is open source software so important to you?
For me – my background is I’m a lawyer – my entire focus was to do intellectual property law. I spent a year in France. I studied EU property law and patent law and I was going down a totally different route. I came back from France and did a Masters at Queen’s University in Computers at the School of Law. The guy who took it was like nobody else in the School of Law – this was back in 2001. We had to use this weird system where there was no mouse and you had to type everything in and I was a lawyer and knew nothing about it! It was Linux and it was an open source operating system. He really taught the course from the basis of if you don’t understand the tools you’re using, then you can’t adapt them and you can’t adapt the law and you’re totally caught into the license terms and software terms and it totally clicked for me that open source was the right way to do software and there as potential to do good and change and that code had the potential to change things. So I started working for non-profits and they had no money and of course, open source was free. I initially intellectually went to it and then realistically went to it and then realised we could actually build a business on it. It was a struggle at the start – I have to say! – there were a lot of companies when we first started that wouldn’t go with us because they thought we would steal their code because we used free or open source software, but it’s really changed so much. There’s only been one tender over last year that they said they wouldn’t use open source. ‘Cos there are only 3 of us, we partner up with a lot of companies – all over the world actually – and they are using open source as are we so we know we can use what each other is doing which makes it much easier.
We’re very lucky that we picked Drupal as a technology back nearly 10 years ago and that it has been adopted by the European Commission and the UK Government as their de facto standard platform and that there’s not many people that do it or specialise in it. That’s why we got called in to the Department of Finance project and that’s why we get called into a lot of European Commission stuff – so we are very fortunate!
- What are some of your inspirations in work and life?
A big thing has been stepping away from work. I do a lot of running and keep time away from work. I have 2 children and they are 2 and 4. If my wife hadn’t pushed me to do this, I wouldn’t be doing this. I gave up a pretty secure well paid job to maybe build stuff with software that we don’t own and now I go to conferences and tell everybody how we do things and for free and my wife still can’t get her head around how this works but is still supportive! I couldn’t have done it without her support.
The other thing is, when we started our company, we all had full time jobs and this (BT48) was our part time job and whenever we went into it there were 3 of us going into it – so we weren’t on our own. I did freelancing before and it was really stressful because if you went on holiday, there was no one there to pick the work up. Now, we play off each other’s schedules and have complimentary skills. We’re very lucky.
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