4IP is a really interesting new initiative from Channel 4 that is setting out to look at how Channel 4 can fulfill its public service broadcasting requirements in a digital age where television is not necessarily the be all and end all.
It is of particular interest to a start-up like us here at Jiva as it is particularly looking to work with people with interesting digital projects and particularly those that are looking to provide some public benefit – which with our focus on education and our development of a new very cool top-secret service sums us up nicely (IMHO!).
All told the initiative has a budget of £50million (not all of it Channel 4 money – much of it is from partnerships with Regional Development Agencies etc) and will launch officially in October and I think it will immediately become a hugely important player in the digital social entrepreneur space currently best represented by Social Innovation Camp.
Channel 4 are also the major investor in School of Everything and while that predates 4IP I think it shows 4s commitment to this space and the sort of thing they are likely to be interested in; new solutions for old problems.
Tom Loosemore, most recently based at Ofcom but probably still best known for his work at the BBC leading much of the innovative work on the BBC website, is leading the project and Ewan McIntosh, a prominent edublogger and conference speaker on social web and education, is the first digital commissioner to be announced. Ewan gives an interesting interview on this weeks Guardian Tech Weekly podcast about 4IP and the sort of thing they will be looking for.
My only slight early gripe is that the South West, West and Wales seem a little poorly served by the geographical locations of the commissioners but hopefully that is something that can easily be overcome.
by Jon Ellis
At Jiva we pride ourselves on producing great web-based solutions — this is only possible because we work effectively as a team and our focus is entirely on the needs of our customers.
As a start-up we have been able to develop our own unique culture. We have learned from our years in large and small organisations — being great is not achieved by high degrees of bureaucracy and empire-building. We have each seen great cultures and know that these create a fantastic place to work and great business results.
So how would I describe the way that we work?
Commitment — everyone understands our objectives and their role in delivering them. We are all committed to making Jiva a success — this goes beyond our personal goals. We don’t set much store by job titles, as we are a low ego and not a status-orientated business; we don’t need big job titles to know that we are great at what we do and know that we make a difference.
Trust — we are honest and have faith in each other to honour our commitments, we are supportive, and behave with complete openness and honesty.
Communication — is at the centre of all that we do. Our Scrum development techniques involve us communicating daily with each other — checking progress, committing to delivery and supporting each other. We are not proud, we are all able to take and receive feedback and handle disagreements
Involvement — we all have a role. Despite this we have a sense of partnership with each other. Contributions are respected and expected.
Engineering — we have a number of processes that we use to solve problems, plan, commit and deal with problems. We are not bureaucratic however, it’s about doing things right first time.
Continuous Improvement — we are focused on improving our own skills and knowledge. As a company we dedicate 10% of our time to focus on our personal development and come up with great ideas for developing our business in new directions.
Improving performance is something that we are always focusing on. We are developing a 360 degree review process along with extending our mentoring programme.
Jiva is a great place to work — we are looking to recruit top quality developers, call us for a chat if you like what you read.
As a part of my job I find myself being introduced to all sorts of new ideas and the latest of these is using the Scrum methodology for running projects.
http://flickr.com/photos/jessflickr/163006527/
Scrum is an agile methodology that aims to empower the developers and also be flexible enough to realise that specifications change over time and creates a framework that can evolve with that but also regularly deliver solid outcomes. At Jiva I am going to take the role of Product Owner for Beanbag, which after some background reading seems to suit me fine. As far as I can tell the role of the Product Owner is to act as the voice of the user/customer and set priorities for each “sprint” (a short, in our case 3 week, period of work with deliverables at the end), then to get out of the way and let the developers do their work. To maintain the rugby theme its kind of a scrum half role, pointing the guys who do the hard graft in the right direction but leaving them to do the nitty gritty then grab the glory at the end!
Pete is going to take the role of Scrum Master – the main feature of this role as far as I can tell is to keep the Product Owner and any other stakeholders off the backs of the developers during the ‘sprint’. The role has many more features but that was the one that struck me the most as I know how hard it can be trying to act as a firewall to protect a team from pressures from above and give them the space to get on and do what they were hired for.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out and getting more directly involved in the evolution of Beanbag.
[this post was recycled and remixed from my personal blog if there is any deja vu occuring!]
Now for me and people of my generation when you start talking about Hobo the first thing we think of is a TV show from the late 70s, early 80s that featured a dog that was kind of a working class Lassie, wandering Canada saving the day.
Hobo means something a bit different in the Jiva office as it is at the core of Beanbag and the upcoming Advisr.
To quote HoboCentral.net
“Hobo is a plugin for Ruby on Rails that brings a number of extensions, some small some large, to Rails application development. The common theme to these extensions is rapid development.”
The Jiva team have been lucky enough to work with Tom Locke who is responsible for Hobo on much of the development of Beanbag and it really does enable a rapid development cycle that allows us to iterate quickly and keep improving the Beanbag site.
If Ruby on Rails is your thing or you are just interested in rapid development its well worth popping over to HoboCentral.net for a nose around.