On Friday we had an internal workshop here at Jiva HQ around the subjects of collaborative filtering and customer choice. The session was led by Gavin Potter, who has a small measure of fame thanks to an article in Wired magazine about his involvement in the Netflix prize as ‘Just a Guy in a Garage’.
Gavin has a quote he uses to underpin his work which i think is pretty central to an awful lot of the thinking we do at Jiva (even if its not immediately obvious from our output up til now)
“If the 20th century was about sorting out supply, the 21st is going to be about sorting out demand”
It was a very different day than I was expecting as it involved very little melting of my brain as the hard mathematics that inevitably underpin this kind of work was left to one side and instead we focused on much more practical questions of how we could improve our websites, particularly how we could use the data we captured to improve recommendations and search results.
We identified all manner of things we could do to improve our current (and upcoming) products from simple copy improvements to quite advanced filtering systems and I am now working on pulling them together in a meaningful way to see how they can be integrated into our existing development roadmap.
All in all it was a very useful session but once again demonstrated we are very good at generating more ideas than we’ll ever have the resources to actually implement :)
We had one of those get together and bond sessions here at Planet Jiva the other day. Except, rather than shoot each other with paint in a rainy wood, we sat in a nice, dry office whilst each of us talked about things that we were interested in. With topics ranging from graffiti to musical theatre (and even some live music), I was pretty surprised at just how creative my fellow Jivaites are when they are not looking to put tutors and parents in touch with each other.
Which made me think. Creativity comes from a willingness to take a few risks, amongst other things. So with our modern obsession with avoiding danger and keeping our kids in a risk-free environment, are we in danger of producing the least creative generation ever? Just at a time when the world will be most in need of free thinking and creative problem solvers. If it takes a washing powder company to tell us that ‘dirt is good’, what hope do we have?
The folks over at EduFire wrote an interesting post yesterday that pointed me to the Union Square Ventures blog for an especially enlightening insight into the sort of areas they, as early stage venture capitalists, are interested in getting in to.
Union Square have invested in an impressive portfolio of web companies in recent years and count Twitter as one of their investments (this was bound to impress me as I love Twitter despite all its teething problems!) and they have quite clearly set their stall out to look into how education can be transformed by web technologies in a way that so many other things have been.
I particularly enjoyed the following;
“With access to course materials, ability to watch lectures and even tutor at a distance, we believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.”
Not surprisingly this chimed with us here at Jiva Towers as we have an avowed interest in using the (social) web to enhance education – and while we fall more into the use technology to enhance the current system camp rather than the throw it away and start again team we firmly believe that there are alot of opportunities in this space and it is gratifying to see that we are not alone in thinking that.
Over at the EduFire blog again they talk about Teacherpreneurs and I love this idea of a combination of education and entrepreneurism – something rarely seen but increasingly sought after!
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.