Today, we’ve made ventures more collaborative.

Resources

Previously, venture resources could only be created by and shared with the venture team. Now, resources can be created by and shared with everyone in the Open Ventures community. (All existing resources will still be visible only to the venture team.) As a venture team member, you can now share your plans with the community. As a community member, you can now share interesting media or relevant websites.

Discussions

Previously, you could not comment on ventures like you could on ideas. Now, each venture has their own discussion forum to which everyone can contribute. As a venture team member, you can use these forums to ask for opinions or advice. As a community member, you can leave comments and interact with the venture team.

Today marks the launch of the Open Ventures Challenge forums: a space to connect and chat with the Open Ventures community.

Win friends and influence people

When we’ve talked at OVC events, a lot of you have said you’d find it useful to have an area for general discussion that wasn’t tied to a particular idea or venture. In the forums, you can swap success stories, help others work through problems, organise local meetups, or just hang out with all the exciting people in our community.

The forums are also the place to go if you have questions about the Challenge process, or have a suggestion for how to improve the site. The mo.jo team will be posting on the forums too, and we can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

If you have any feedback on how the forums work, please post in the discussion thread.

Submit your venture proposals now!

Ventures now have a form where you can upload your venture proposal for consideration by the judging panel.  Only the person who started the venture can fill in the form, but anyone in the venture team can see what’s on it. We’ll post more information about the competition process very soon on this blog. All proposals have to be in by midday on Monday 20th April, so get working on those venture plans!

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.

We launched the Open Ventures Challenge in early October. In these past few months, the Open Ventures community has come up with 130 ideas (at the time of writing) for new ventures that could generate £10m to help beat cancer.

That’s a lot of ideas. So many, in fact, that our ideas page was beginning to feel unwieldy. There was no easy way to find highly rated ideas and it wasn’t clear where conversations were happening. So we’ve made some improvements to the ideas page:

• You can sort ideas by activity, rating and number of votes. You can also choose to see more than 10 ideas per page.
• When an idea receives a comment it moves to the top of the activity list.
• Your own ideas appear highlighted. If you want to see how your ideas are doing in relation to others, you can increase the number of ideas shown on the page and quickly find your own.

Separately, in order to help you keep track of our blog posts and site updates, we have added a list of the latest blog posts to the right hand side of the OVC website.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions please do get in touch.

As you’ll already know if you attended our Ideas Bazaar, we’ve entered Phase 2 of the Open Ventures Challenge.  This is when we hope you, the Open Ventures community, will take some of the great ideas you’ve posted and start making them a reality.

That’s an ambitious goal.  You’ll need to team up, to find people with all the skills a successful venture needs.  You’ll need to work closely together and coordinate your efforts.

That’s why, on Monday, we released the new version of the OVC website, with some new features that we think will really help with this phase of the Challenge.

• Avatars!  You can upload a photo of yourself, to help people put a face to your name.
• Create ventures and invite people to join your team.
• Share resources such as documents and bookmarks within a team.
• A team action list so you can keep track of your venture’s progress.
• More information on the home page about how the Challenge works and where we’re going from here, including face-to-face events we’re planning.

We’ve also made sure the site works much better for anyone unlucky enough to have to use Internet Explorer 6 as their browser.  If you can, though, please do upgrade to a modern browser, as there are some features we just can’t support for IE6.

We’re still working hard to bring you even more features and make the site even easier to use.  I’m going to provide fairly regular announcements on this blog when we add new stuff.

As ever, if you have any comments or suggestions we’d love to hear them!