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.

 

This week I announced my latest 4iP investment in the Northern Ireland-based political blog Slugger O’Toole, in the fund’s first co-investment with Northern Ireland Screen. The investment adds to a range of web products running along the theme of “keeping an eye on money and power”, providing a means of exploring localised political debate at scale.

Working with Belfast-based developer and instigator of beautiful things Andy McMillan (@GoodOnPaper), we're helping to revamp the Slugger site for existing readers, with a relaunch of the site planned for the New Year. The goal is to make what is currently a crowded, busy and perhaps intimidatingly quick-posting blog more accessible for newbies and more enjoyable for current readers and commenters.

The next step is to take the most influential political blog in Northern Ireland and turn it into a sustainable collaborative public service media platform, moving the means of pluralistic political debate forward elsewhere in the UK. We're also keen to explore how we amplify the voices of those commenting: the debates under each post are just as vital as the posts themselves.

Slugger is unique among political blogs for its combination of public service levels of trust with the blogosphere’s forensic and adversarial demands. According to a recent poll, 96% of the Northern Irish Assembly’s politicians read it regularly, and it's demonstrably reaching deep into local political issues. With many major political news stories being broken by its readers before the mainstream media gets hold of them, it is also Northern Ireland’s journalistic watering-hole of choice.

The Obama social media effect: in Northern Ireland for nearly a decade.

For politicians and the public, the value of good political blogs has never been clearer. The last twelve months have shown what the power of social media can do to inspire and engage the public in the decision-making processes that affect them, from digging though expenses claims to helping claim electoral victory for the Obama administration.

But proximity to what 'real' people think and the provision of a forum to amplify those voices is what Slugger O'Toole has been doing for the best part of seven years.

Why did I want to pursue an investment in Slugger O'Toole, though, and not any one of the other political blogs out there? Slugger's readership is large, and arguably more varied than any other political blog, especially given its geographic focus: to have both your national Assembly and a critical mass of your local councillors coming to you for genuine breaking stories on a regular basis is something that any national newspaper would be content with.

Their support was particularly demonstrable on Tuesday night, as nearly 300 politicians, journalists and readers from across Northern Ireland packed into Belfast's Black Box for the Slugger Awards. For goodness sake: even Bob Geldof joined us.

I'm particularly fond of Slugger’s ethic of “play the ball not the man”. 'People want to debate the issues, not the politicians', believes its founder Mick Fealty. Many of his political blogger compadres would and do disagree. But when we've excluded the political hacks and scandal junkies, the vast majority of us want change on specific issues and we want a place to debate them where our politicians see our view. Slugger provides that. In spades.

At a time when politicians and citizens are subject to more noise than signal in a growing web of unmoderated “citizen-produced democracy”, and national news repeatedly fails to account for local political issues, 4iP’s investment is a timely one.

In the next four weeks we will finalise a refreshed design for the site, with new functionality in the New Year which should help spread Slugger's ethic further into the mainstream, further into its already highly localised audiences. We will uncover yet more voices that need amplified for the eyes and ears of the political classes in Stormont, Westminster, Brussels and Strasbourg; we will see Slugger pushing these representatives to get more done for their people, rather than just talking about it.

Towards Spring we will see Slugger trying to replicate the same, honest "play the ball" political coverage in Scotland, and perhaps further afield. We're building some business cases around the work Slugger's authors are arguably the most capable people in the world at carrying out, having lived through Western Europe's worst civil war and come out the other side with an online forum for genuine political discussion between all sides. Slugger will help fill a significant media gap of coverage and comment on politics at local levels while having a growing impact nationally in Westminster.

This is not a 4iP 'investment' on the same level as some of our six figure sums, but with the impact Slugger-the-blog is already having, Slugger-the-platform is a win for "amplifying voices" from the word go. It is exactly where Channel 4 at its most cantankerous should be.

Picture Credit: John Baucher, with permission. Blogger Alan In Belfast picks up his Martin Rowson portrait after winning Slugger Awards Blogger Of The Year for his "election monitoring" of the darker side of the EU election processes.

Becta, the UK education technology agency, has been looking into how schools communicate with parents and vice versa. Their initial research has discovered some home truths that, unfortunately, are all too recognisable:

• ‘Invisible’ parents: Of the parents who admitted they rarely made contact with their child’s teacher, nearly a quarter (22%) said they did not see the benefit for their child. The majority (67%) of school staff said that these parents simply do not realise how important their support is in their child’s development. And 60% said that these parents often feel their job stops at the school gates.

• Confidence issues: 42% of teachers said the reason so-called ‘invisible’ parents have so little contact with the school is that they lack the confidence to discuss their child with teachers - 43% of school staff admit parents might find them ’difficult to approach sometimes.’ One in five (19%) parents are worried about bothering teachers and more than a fifth (22%) say they don’t want to add to the teacher’s workload, resulting in many taking a back seat in their child’s education.

• Lack of information: More than one in ten (11%) of the parents who do initiate communication said they felt dismissed by teachers as an ‘overly demanding’ parent and a further 11% commented they often feel they are imposing on the teacher’s time. More than a third (36%) of school staff encounter parents who want ‘constant reassurance’ and others (19%) who try to ‘influence everything that goes on in the classroom.’

• Lack of effective communication channels: 89% of parents say technology could help them become better informed about their child’s education so that they can then have more focused face-to-face discussions with teachers. However, despite all schools having electronic communication tools, 46% of parents say their schools don’t communicate with them in this way.

So in the red corner we have some parents who can't get enough information and conversation about their children's learning, with teachers who resent having parents crossing some imaginary line of learning and teaching competence. In the blue corner we have other parents who the schools want to see more of and teachers who think that, actually, coming in to see a teacher must be too threatening for at least a quarter of parents.

If only more schools took a leaf out of the book that we know works. When Dave Gilmour and I set up eduBuzz.org over three years ago we had one simple aim: get people sharing what goes on inside classrooms and the learning will improve. We set up a simple-to-use blogging platform on the nascent WPMU and worked with clusters of enthusiastic teachers to get them sharing regularly - twice a week at least - on what was going on in their classrooms. We got them to get their students to take over that role. Parents loved it, with web traffic peaking just before parents left their offices to come home and then late at night when the kids were in bed (the red wine surfers, as I imagined them). I described how we did it in more detail back in 2007.

We ended up with 3m page views a month as the nodes of conversation between parents, teachers, students and managers lit up. Above all, I heard first hand how parents enjoyed being able to see in a light touch manner what their children were up to and, indeed, when they did meet the teacher face-to-face the interactions were deeper and more friendly.

In 2006, what we had achieved is effectively what users of Twitter enjoy so much - ambient intimacy. Stephen Heppell has often referred to the "nearly now" of our technologies, and I think it's the same thing.

By allowing parents to take out of their school what they want, on their own terms, at their own pace, we are almost certain to encourage more interaction from our least engaged parents. Those whom the research calls "overly demanding" will find a new quality to their face-to-face interactions; gone are the questions about what their son is having for lunch, what the next classroom project will be, and what the plans are for Red Nose Day. Instead, those "overly demanding" parents will start to engage in the whys and hows of learning, being demanding in a much more positive sense.

Is this utopic? I'd say not, because we did it. But we did it with some degree of top-down support that is not always visible in other organisations, and I'm not convinced bottom-up initiatives alone can achieve the impact required quickly enough to gain acceptance in the long-term.

Pic: Creative Commons from Sean Dreilinger

Via Euan I saw this lovely example of how we might think about changing behaviour, not always in the way we'd associate with those in positions of authority. Mind you, I wonder if only the Dutch Danish Police could get away with doing this...