Over the weekend, Alexandra Loggie became the 500th member of the Open Ventures community! Alexandra will receive a free mo.jo stein.

Size matters.

mo.jo steins are unusually capacious: they have the ability to hold upwards of 3 cups of coffee. For the chance to get your own, keep an eye out for future announcements involving steins. In the meantime, check out the venture Alexandra is involved in: CR-UK “Check ‘em” underwear (you can also see the original idea).  Kylie, bras and boxers. Surely a good thing.

We held our first Idea Camp in Cambridge last Tuesday. The purpose was to generate some great ideas and to start building an Open Ventures community here in the mo.jo hometown. The camp was a great success, producing over 100 ideas and exciting lots of people. We had an awesome venue which was kindly provided by Ken Wood at Microsoft Research. Photos are up on flickr and Facebook.

Brainstorm: how do we allow people to give and get something back?

First through the door was Kirk Wilson, the man behind mySocialInvestment (here’s the original idea). He wants to put a ‘Social Investment Account’ on your online banking page, which would be linked to a web marketplace for one-click donations, social investment and volunteerism. I asked Kirk a few questions about his venture.

RV: Kirk, how did you come up with the idea for mySocialInvestment?

KW: The basic idea of managing charitable donations along with money management came as you might expect whilst I was using online banking. I thought how great it would be if I could just review online how my ‘investments’ into charities and social enterprises were doing in terms of social benefit right there on the site, whilst I’m already securely logged-in. All the other ideas around making the donation and volunteering experience more engaging and interesting come from personal experience of finding these activities to be less fulfilling than expected when there is no further interaction.

RV: How did you get involved with the Open Ventures Challenge?

KW: In January I took part in a NESTA event on intellectual property, and part of the presentation was about the OVC and the innovative IP agreement on which it is based. For me it was an easy decision to enter my idea into the competition, as I’m very interested in all things Open Source, and was looking for a way to develop the idea in collaboration.

RV: What are the next steps for mySocialInvestment?

KW: Although I have some ideas about how this will work with banking products, we will need a bank to help us work out exactly what a feasible technical model will look like; and we also need to develop a demonstration website that will showcase some of the innovative content ideas and website tools suggested by the OVC community. Receiving CR-UK help to network with the banks and financial support for web design would be a huge boost.

Once everybody had arrived, Stew explained what we were doing there. We were going to brainstorm business ideas which could generate millions of pounds to help beat cancer.

Are you a hippy or secret squirrel?

Brainstorm: how do we engage with professional men?

After brainstorming, we all awarded gold stars to our favourite ideas. The following ideas got 5 or more stars:

• Help them meet: people who donate virtual goods and people who want something for their donation
• Bank interest automatically goes to charity
• Investment competition. After X years, the bottom performers give their gains to CR-UK
• Internet treasure hunt. Companies taking part let clues be put on their websites. This drives traffic to their sites, so they pay to be part of the competition
• A social network for people who have passed away due to cancer. You donate and buy virtual goods from the profile page

The Open Ventures community hit a milestone today with the 150th idea for a new venture that could generate £10m to help beat cancer. The number of ventures is also growing steadily: at the time of writing there are 17 ventures taking part in the Challenge.

Today, we’ve got some more improvements for you:

• We’ve improved how ideas are sorted by popularity. Previously, an idea with just one 5 star vote would be ranked higher than an idea with very many 4 star votes. We now apply some statistics to ensure that ideas with many high ratings are ranked as the most popular. (For the geeks amongst us, we use the lower bound of a Wilson score confidence interval: Evan Miller provides a clear explanation of how this works.)
• You can now sort ideas by the date they were created.
• When you comment on an idea, you’ll automatically start watching the idea. This means that we’ll email you when there is another comment or the idea changes. Of course, this is optional — if you don’t want email updates then just uncheck the box when you post a comment.

We’d like to improve how ventures work and we’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What do you like about ventures? What do you hate about ventures? What do you think we should do next? Please do get in touch with your feedback and suggestions.