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 :)

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?

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!

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.

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.

The aim is to hone my current geek skill set, but also develop the business side as well. This means I get to apply it all on my own website idea during 10% time. So far my quest to get down to the syrupy essence of it has seen me fighting with the five forces, and poking PEST, which is rather reminiscent of Uni. On the techie end I’m working on the presentation side of things by improving my CSS starting with the Blueprint project and then I shall investigate unobstrusive Javascript.

Apparently Jiva in Hinduism and Jainism is a ‘living being’. Now that makes us ‘Living Being Technology’ which given our focus on the concept of People Search with Beanbag and Advisr I think its a nice fit.  Kevin and or Jon are probably going to tell me this was always the plan but I’m going to take a bit of convincing!

Feel free to let us know what you think..