Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

On leaving Channel 4

About 18 months ago I was made an offer I could not refuse: to help shape the startup of a £50m innovation fund, 4iP, with Europe's most creative public service broadcaster, Channel 4.

As 4iP's first recruit in the summer of 2008, I worked at opening the route to over £7.5m of that public co-investment funding, building on the initial legwork work of Director of Nations and Regions, Stuart Cosgrove, and colleague Claire McArdle. I've turned Letters of Intent into over £1m of real green money invested in digital media companies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the North East. I've helped stimulate everything from some of the finest Twitter-bashing to some of the most serious digital media debate I've ever seen, on the growing 38minutes community.

The model works. And now it has come for me to move on, and try something different.

4iP has been simultaneously a hoot and one of the most demanding gigs out there, but I'm happy with what I've helped achieve. Besides making the vision a reality, I'm most proud of the products I've shaped from their 20 word elevator pitches into working, clickable, running code. I'm currently in the middle of an announcement and product launch spree running right up to Christmas:

This week I was frankly delighted with the reaction from the political, journalistic and social media savvy echelons about our investment in Slugger O'Toole, one of the most 4-like means through which to open the political debate. In the same breath we've let MirrorMe out of the lab and into Facebook, showing what the broadcaster of Embarrassing Bodies and Ten Years Younger can do in the same space with a standalone web app.

The arts platform Central Station was a concept on which 4iP was explained and sold, and this month we published the code that makes it a real, living and vibrant community of both aspiring and Turner-prize-winning talent. When we started out in earnest looking at how this thing would actually function it was a far cry from the nascent but impressive collections and communities we see there now: not all two-week old projects can claim a Turner Prize winner as one of their first supporters and members.

FestBuzz was, by four days at least, the world's first Twitter crowdsourced review site, and I'm still convinced this technology from the leading School of Informatics in Edinburgh will be the focus of innovation throughout 2010. Sentiment detection went mainstream this summer thanks, partially, to FestBuzz.

I was not-so-secretly keen to engage its competitor's creators, Blonde, in helping build discussion around and use of the You Booze You Looze iPhone app which we hope to launch next week. Along with MirrorMe, both are designed to cajole, shock and laugh us into thinking seriously about what we're putting down our throats and up our noses this Christmas.

Nearly all the companies I've worked with share something in common. With the exception of Central Station's ISO, who are big enough and ugly enough to fight their corner in a London-based commissioner's office, none of them would have had an easy time getting under the nose of a traditional broadcaster. Having a commissioner "down the road" has led many more people through Channel 4's doors in the digital media space. A minority, of course, were actually commissioned, but most left with some feedback, encouragement or a contact elsewhere who would be interested. I know of at least one major investment in a product that was too young for us, but which was perfect for another broadcaster and is now in early stages of a major commission. Having the chance to have informal chats with a regional commissioner, passionate about independent commercial production of media with a public purpose, has been a boon.

Both represent what I think 4iP has achieved most in a recession-bound digital economy. Digital Goldfish, discovered in January in a Dundee office too titchy for their 7" CEO, has now quadrupled in size and in confidence, claiming one of their games as Apple's Top 30 all-time bestselling. Ideonic is a games company out of the unlikely setting of Middlesbrough (Channel 4's Phil and Kirsty declared this the worst place to live in Britain not so long ago). They still wanted to work with us, and we were delighted to make a significant investment in a firm where no member is older than the CEO - and he's only 25.

I am going to spend the next four weeks wrapping up one of my most exciting commissions to date, before going on to do something just as exciting, but with fewer 4.30am starts, fewer 400 mile commutes and, regrettably, fewer airmiles.

As someone once said, it's been emotional.

Can you help shape the future of informal learning? Apply within.

A group of folk who I believe are spearheading informal learning in the most unlikely of ways are looking for some help, and edu.blogs.com readers are almost certainly likely to be able to help.

Do you undertake some informal learning already?
Do you want to do more informal learning but find you can't: lack of time, motivation or space?

If you answer yes to either question and want to help out a gang of really tuned-in people, please leave a comment on this post, making sure to include an email address, and someone will be in touch shortly. And thanks - you'll be participating in one of the most exciting informal learning opportunities going.

Picture credit: What is the mass of a question mark?

Channel 4 signs worldwide-first YouTube deal: watch our telly on your interweb box

YouTube and Channel 4 (who pay my mortgage) have signed a pioneering content deal which will make the broadcaster’s original programmes available on demand, in full and free-of-charge via YouTube in the UK. By early 2010 all of our current programming and about 3000 hours of archive will be available to search and view at your leisure.

This is big news, as it marks the first time that a broadcaster anywhere in the world has made a comprehensive catch-up schedule available on YouTube, providing Channel 4 with additional advertising inventory and reach: YouTube last week announced it was serving over 1 billion video streams every day.

Under the terms of the deal, Channel 4 will make its 4oD video-on-demand ‘catch-up’ service of new programmes available via YouTube shortly after television transmission, including series that have already proved particularly popular with online audiences such as Skins, Hollyoaks, The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. YouTube users will also be able to access around 3,000 hours of full length programming from the Channel 4 archive at any given time, including shows like Brass Eye, Derren Brown, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Teachers and many others.

The partnership runs for an initial term of at least three years and the two parties will share advertising revenues on an agreed formula. The deal will create significant value for Channel 4 and its independent production partners, generating additional revenue to invest in creating high quality, original content.

Channel 4's will have a branded presence on YouTube and will be able to sell advertising around its content on the site. The agreement also allows Channel 4 to sell advertising around some non-Channel 4 content on YouTube for the first time, expanding the amount of inventory available to its sales team and bringing its considerable expertise in advertising around full length TV content to the YouTube platform. It will help Channel 4 develop its advertising sales proposition in digital, including the use of YouTube’s demographic targeting tools to target advertising against Channel 4 content on YouTube.

The deal builds significantly on Channel 4 and YouTube’s existing partnership; Channel 4 was the first broadcaster to sell pre-roll advertisements on YouTube clips, and the first UK broadcaster (before iPlayer) to put all its programmes online for viewing on demand with 4oD.

FestBuzz: Crowdsourcing reviews from Twitter

The 2009 Edinburgh Festivals are all about tweeting as newspapers cut back on their reviewer staff. Earlier this year in my work at 4iP I commissioned FestBuzz, a really clever piece of artificial-intelligence-sentiment-detection-twitter-search, to make sense of what people were tweeting about each show in all seven Festivals.

Go help a great Edinburgh startup by telling all your mates about it and, if you're at the Festival, tell us what you think of the shows you're at ;-)

FestBuzz analyses what Twitter users are saying about Festival shows and creates crowd-sourced reviews and "five star" ratings that are available on the site or through its API. As printed reviews in traditional media start to emerge, the site will help users identify the differences between the views of established reviewers compared to the Twitterer on the street using its combination of reviews and star ratings.

It allows users to get to the bottom of the ‘word on the tweet’ and get honest reviews of shows by the people who have forked out cash to see the show.

Fresh features are being tested and will be released in the remaining three weeks of the Festival, and provide a means for 4iP - and others - to test how this kind of technology is used by the public, and their demand for it. So far, #edfest tweeting is proving, in some cases at least, to be as entertaining as the shows our twitics are watching.

Why is 4iP investing in FestBuzz?

The site and API is being produced by Affect Labs Ltd, a small Edinburgh University-based startup led by founder Jennie Lees. It was funded after a call-to-action earlier this year around how the artistic spread of nearly 70,000 performances in August could be made easier to navigate. Thanks to its unique back-end technology, FestBuzz is able to accurately work out what shows Twitterers-turned-critics are talking about and how they feel about them with even the most sporadic, misspelt of Tweets.

In addition, users who join FestBuzz don’t need to use special hashtags or keywords to have their messages picked and turned into a star-rated review, making the site incredibly easy to use and picking up the maximum number of tweeted reviews automatically.

As well as the chance to make the Festivals more accessible, FestBuzz is amongst a couple sites putting the traditional notion of the "Expert Critic" under the spotlight. 4iP is also investing in a small, young startup getting its technology out into the public domain for the first time, and hopefully helping to stimulate some more action in the future from this and similar companies.

"FestBuzz was set up specifically to identify hidden gems, looking for hotbeds of emerging talent that are generating buzz on Twitter but slipping past professional critics," says Affect Labs' Jennie. "Our aim is to help people discover shows that they might otherwise overlook, and provide a true, honest opinion that reflects the thoughts of the masses, not just a few people. Having produced several Festival shows in the past, I'm all too aware how a published review can make or break a show; we're trying to level the playing field."

Crowdsourced reviews and revenue potential

FestBuzz is the first live application of Affect Labs’ core sentiment detection technology and, like all 4iP projects, we were keen that it have the potential to support itself into the future. The application can generate revenue through an analytical dashboard that shows performers, venues or show management how their performances were received each day. Affect Labs is also happy to make the API available to partners who want to use it in interesting ways on their own sites and services.

FestBuzz is one of several Twitter-related offerings that have sprung up in the days before the world’s largest arts Festival in the Scottish capital. Some only go as far as showing you pretty simple ‘thumbs up, thumbs down’ stuff around shows, or providing summarised reviews from the many tweets we’re expecting throughout the Festival. Any activity FestBuzz or these other sites stimulate around critiquing shows on Twitter only helps make the aggregated reviews better. Critically, though, the age of crowd-sourced reviews has arrived and is being lapped up by Festival-goers.

Follow FestBuzz on Twitter: http://twitter.com/festbuzz

Visit the site for crowdsourced reviews during the Festivals: http://festbuzz.com/

Why it's important to (want to) know Where Good Ideas Come From

This is the first of eight posts on the theme of Where Good Ideas Come From. Pic from Evil Erin, who was looking for some good ideas in her roommate's bed.

The creative industries in the UK alone are worth some £70bn each year, about 8% of GDP and growing at about double the rate of the rest of the economy, made up by everything as diverse as television production to game-making, book-writing to advertising, public relations to jewellery. For the past year I've been contributing to this industry, learning the art and science of commissioning new media ideas, turning internet, mobile and gaming ideas from paper dreams to running code realities.

In the workplace, we have a variety of processes, individual talents and skills to ensure that most of these dreams turn into good ideas in the real world, from designing efficient challenging structures through which people pitch their ideas, to the knack of producing a contract that not only makes sense but is fair to all parties. A fair dose of gut instinct and knowing the shifting sands of the vast new media landscape contribute to building, hopefully, more excellent ideas than fairly good ones. The processes hopefully eliminate the really dodgy ones altogether.

But given the aims of the initiative with which I'm working - Channel 4's Innovation for the Public - to change people's lives for the better, to have a lasting impact, to achieve technological and social firsts, and to do so with a trademark slug of trouble, finding and generating good ideas in the first place is something that, if we could define it, would make life a lot easier.

Knowing Where Good Ideas Come From in any walk of life leads not just to a more pleasant experience in life, but a better experience for others and a more profitable life for everyone.

Knowing what makes an idea good is one thing. 95% of ideas get rejected, a large number fairly swiftly and, say, 5-10% after having looked in more detail at the issues involved. Few, if any, seem to appear elsewhere suggesting that either the ideas are too costly to get off the ground, leaving a Government or private investor struggling to see their investment have the desired tangible result, or they are cheap to produce but aren't seen as Good Ideas by the intended users or participants.

Knowing what we could do to improve those conditions of creativity is another goal, perhaps more tangible. These conditions, these physiological, physical and mental places are Where Good Ideas Come From.

What's important to consider, though, is that "being creative" is not, as is often the assumed case, a result of some form of change management. All too often, change management and the overpriced consultancies that help you get from there to here are in the business of selling the change of a more creative company or self. If tapping into creativity is reduced to change management, then we are indeed in for a rocky journey. Only 30% of change management programmes achieve any change at all, let alone the intended one and not necessarily a change towards a more creative one. Creativity is something most of us can unearth in the right circumstances with enough time, effort and stamina to see us through the darker moments of our "crappy ideas" being mocked or left out to dry.

And, of course, some of us (most of us?) tend to come up with fairly crappy ideas most of the time, and that's alright, seeing if they work before moving onto the next one when we realise we were heading down the wrong path. Not just in the world of new media and technology, though, is the potential for heading down too many different paths and tangents at once so ripe. Never have the options opening up been so great, the tools at our creative disposal so varied. Creativity is attempting to go exponential when often our more analogue brains and bodies aren't really in a mood for catching up.

With this, change management, that sudden jolt of inspirational energy (or brush of quasi-guru-like consultant fluff), is even less appropriate a model on which to base an rebirth of creativity in our organisations. As George Church put it:

"In a changing world, inaction can be the radical 'action'" (cited by Tim O'Reilly)

Or, as Euan Semple cribbed it:

"Don't just do something: stand there."

It is no happenstance that our first main areas of investigation of Where Good Ideas Come From are nearly all about time (and the lack of it) and the need for us to stand still, do nothing and drink it in. Someone, I can't remember or Google who it was, once said that they were in the habit of taking a day return flight, at least but no more than four hours long (the time of the laptop battery) in order to get things done without interruptions. Sometimes it's just the practice of regularly, say, every Tuesday morning, of taking a flight at 35,000ft to see the world move by a little slower and take it all in, before joining the land at a seemingly faster speed later. Of course, that's not really how it works. We all fly faster when we're taking in the overall view of things at 35,000ft and that seems slower than when we're on the ground, 'only' going at 10mph at sealevel but things seeming too fast to take in, let alone control.

Nor is creativity some elusive black art available only to the few, while the rest of us trudge on with our lemming-like routine. As Colin Anderson, MD of Denki Games in Dundee, puts it:

Today we run the risk of thinking of creativity in the same way as we once thought of electro-magnetism – magical, unknowable, a black art. Poppycock, I say again! It’s a series of deliberate choices – some serial, some parallel, some conscious, some sub-conscious – made by assessing the values of many variables simultaneously through the filters of knowledge, experience and aesthetic appreciation. More variables than we can currently define and measure perhaps, but that doesn’t make it magic. I subscribe to the school of thought that says “art is a science with more than seven variables”, and from where I’m looking creativity is precisely that. (emphasis added)

There are indeed more than seven variables to creativity and therefore knowing Where Good Ideas Come From. I'm going to make an attempt to understand what some of those variables are and would ask for your help in the comments to fill in the inevitable chasm-like gaps.

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

If we all knew the idea we'd not be writing blog posts like this, reading them or doing workshops on the matter. We'd be busy pulling that limitless supply of creativity out of its hole to see the light of day and bring us riches, joy, learning and new friends.

However, given that we're not, over the next month or so (or however long it takes me to splurge out those thoughts) I'll be summarising on this here blog some of the best online and offline reading and viewing that has attempted to answer that question, throwing in my own unresearched but tried and tested notions (and a few that haven't even got that far). This post will change to reflect the updating posts that will take a peek at:

1. Why it's important to (want to) know Where Good Ideas Come From.
2. Stand There And Do Nothing: Designing beautiful solutions rather than solving ugly problems
3. Creative Genius. Man At Work: Arguments for not working as a team
4. Getting Creativity Done (GCD): How to get productive and clean down the mental decks
5. Nurturing creativity: Worrying about "Tanya's Bow" or the Dinosaurs: Some arguments for caring about the team, not pissing them off and really understanding what failure is
6. Finding your tribe
7. Creating visions, not missions

As they're posted, please leave comments, disagree, add your own links, videos and pictures. I hope that by the end of it we'll have a resource to which we might come back with the stories of how the works, thoughts and attitudes of others have changed the way we operate.

Bookmark this post and come back to it for updates, and subscribe to the blog to get a daily email or RSS feed in your reader every time there's a new post. Take a look at my instructions on how to subscribe.

Brill pic from Chris Metcalf

AllWrite: creative writing with award winning authors

In about two months I'll be unveiling my latest commission with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public Fund.

Broadcast reports that we are commissioning Dan and Adrian Hon’s Six to Start to develop a creative writing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, backed by national education agency Learning and Teaching Scotland. The game, currently under development, aims to help users tap deep into their imaginations and develop their creative writing skills by responding to writer challenges through their iPhone. They say we all have a novel in us, and ‘All Write’ will help users find it.

Six to Start is a highly successful developer specialising in digital storytelling with recent notable successes such as the We Tell Stories series for Penguin Books. Learning and Teaching Scotland have over the past three years developed a world-leading reputation for developing gaming for learning. The partnership will lead to both a mainstream game available in the iPhone App Store, and a teens' version for use in schools.

This is how Adrian puts it:

“All Write is the perfect tool for budding short story writers – it encourages people to get their ideas down wherever they are, and share them with the world. We’ve made storytelling into a fun and enthralling experience by posing imaginative writing challenges, and providing some great new pieces of original fiction from Naomi Alderman, a winner of the Orange Prize for New Writers.”

Alderman was also a lead writer on the Hons' previous success, alternate reality game Perplex City.

All Write is the latest in a series of projects developed in Scotland by Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public fund (4iP). Announced as part of the Channel’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint and endorsed by the Government’s Digital Britain Report, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms.

By helping young people and new audiences to discover the joy of reading and creative writing, All Write illustrates how digital media can serve a meaningful public purpose.

My former colleague Derek Robertson, now National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning at Learning and Teaching Scotland, was quoted:

“New and emerging technologies and their informed application in the teaching and learning setting is an area of particular focus for Learning and Teaching Scotland. We are very keen to explore the potential that handheld mobile learning tools can bring to schools and in that regard we are delighted to be partnering 4IP and Six to Start in the design and creation of a bespoke iPhone/iPod Touch learning app that will encourage and facilitate a community of ‘imaginative writers.’”

All Write will be launched worldwide this August on the iPhone App Store. Pic credit: New iPhone

Addictive beautiful touchpad animated art

I'm in the process of contracting, planning and soft-launching a beautiful web arts platform in my work with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public along with the talented guys at ISO, which will provide a really meaningful and inspiring space, we hope, to learn about and publish one's own art, digital media and films. More on that soon, although you can catch a sneaky peak at our session, The Digital Express, in the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

It means that my eye is increasingly heightened on all things design and artistic, and this has just distracted me, Morgane and Catriona for most of the latter's tea-time. It's one reason to let your two-year-old onto that MacBook Air touchpad. Go on. You know you want to.

Should we all be saying 'no' more often?

Educators have a reputation for generally saying 'yes' to doing things they are asked to carry out. The expectation is that if a peer or more senior member of staff asks or tells, the teacher does. It's not a healthy place to be. We need to say no more often.

To be honest, I hate saying no, most of the time. Yet, in my current job: of the 400 or so ideas I've seen in the last six months, only about 4% have resulted in a development of that idea.

Everyone else got a 'no'.

Most have had the heave-ho within minutes or days, some have had an instant yes, but there's a troublesome group in the middle, about 30% of ideas at a guess, that need looked at in more detail before being sure if they're worth taking forward. This group of ideas need at least a day's worth of thinking done by the company proposing the idea and a day or more of my time. It's only when we do the figures, work out the business case, see the approach action-by-action, explore the legal and compliance risks, that we realise the idea is a dodo. All that "for nothing".

What I wonder, sometimes, is whether it's worth just pushing back on anything that is not a clear 'yes' at the first sighting. Those "might work" ideas nearly always fail to get through the hurdle of being 'spec-ed' out, yet involve a disproportionate amount of thinking to get them to a point where we can ever know if they're likely to work.

However, there's always that grumble that maybe, just maybe, one might be saying 'no' to the best idea since sliced bread.

Seth Godin suggests we're indeed better off saying no more often to pick out the obvious gems the moment they appear:

You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can't bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

What do you think - are we right to say 'yes' to the "might work" ideas to see if we can discover a hidden gem, or are we better to concentrate only on those 4% we feel instantly happy with?

Pic: No Way Out

Twitter for learning in extremis: Surgery Live and, erm, Big Brother

Adam Gee, Channel 4's Cross-Platform Commissioner for Factual, last week helped bring together one of the most bizarre, insightful and exhilarating learning experiences I think I've ever taken part in on television: watch a surgeon perform his art/science live on television and ask him questions direct through Twitter.

Open heart surgery, awake brain surgery (i.e. patient awake as well as surgeon and us the trusty viewers), keyhole surgery, tumour removal – alive&direct thanks to Windfall Films in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust. Wild enough in itself I hear you say but that is not all, oh no, that is not all…

We will not hold up the cup and the milk and the cake and the fish on a rake, but as the Cat in the Hat said, we know some new tricks and your mother will not mind (unless she’s etherised upon a table, as that other cat-lover said). The plan is to tip our hat (red and white striped topper or whatever) to that increasingly common behaviour of Twittering whilst watching TV and encourage people to tweet away during the live operations, sharing their thoughts and asking questions. The big difference here is that this is live TV and you can make an impact with your tweet on the TV editorial. The best questions tweeted will be fed through to the presenter, arch-Twitterer Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, who will swiftly pose them to the surgeon at work. So a matter of seconds between tweet and the question being uttered on live TV.

There were, of course, thousands of questions put through to the programme, helping the Surgery Live hashtag #slive hit the 3rd, then 2nd then 1st position on Twitter's trending, but there was also a great deal of conversation about the live operation between complete strangers who had found each other through the commonality of the hashtag, and their shared experience of learning what goes on inside our hearts/brains/stomachs.

In more formal education circles there have been attempts this year to engage audiences across education districts in, for example, live dissections of animals, where students are encouraged to put forward their questions. I think the Channel 4 Twitter experiment reveals some different behaviours that can only be encouraged in these more formal learning situations:

1. Twitter offers a certain degree of anonymity, which can be incredibly helpful in illiciting honest, high value questions from an audience (think other Channel 4 examples like Sexperience and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and my forthcoming You Booze You Lose). Where people know who you are, it can be inhibiting ("is my question stupid?", "should I know the answer to this?", "oh, I'll just wikipedia it afterwards"...)

2. The restrictions in place around a 140 character question or message mean that people cut to the chase and avoid the redundant language that clutters thinking in classrooms (and blog posts, VLEs, bulletin boards...). This is something found by the UT Dallas experiment highlighted in Derek Wenmoth this week.

3. Twitter helps you bump into people outside your learning/social circle, which in turn helps you emphathise, and see an issue from someone else's (very different) perspective. The one challenge with any Virtual Learning Environment in a school or country is that you are, more or less, sharing like thought with like thought, shaped by the culture and curriculum around it. When you take the questioning and answering global, you have an almost infinite number of conflicting perspectives to challenge your thinking.

At 4iP my colleague Lucy Würstlin took Twitter to a more entertainment-based medium (Big Brother) with her new product, Hashdash. The Hashdash Big Brother 10 launch night might have seemed pure entertainment, but it indeed helped a number of new Twitterers find their voice by educating the masses in Twitter etiquette, how to use hashdashes to have your message seen by more people with the same passion (in this case, #BB10).

Of course, at 4iP we have bigger plans afoot for this baby to help more people learn how the anonymity of Twitter can improve their learning (and their entertainment) with each other.