Science and Industry

One thing I’ve been interested for a while are the social networks we develop and document in the modern communication era. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are not just sharing content, it’s about the networks that are build in these services. Also, e-mails and phone calls would allow us to investigate human patterns in totally new way.

However, often the problem seems to be around getting this kind of data — and being allowed to share the results you make. Luckily, I go acceptance from Helsinki Insitute of Information Technology to develop and publish my, yet unfinished ideas in the project blog. The story there is in Finnish, but I’ll summarize the one main point below.

From the figure we note, that there are two distinct islands. What has caused this kind of behavior? Are there e.g. two different departments there, or some other reason. How to study this further? Luckily the OtaSizzle research project has also other details of users, such as sex, age, survey data, which can be overlaid to this data, and look what we get out. This is, what I (and others from HIIT) will be doing in 2010.

The University of Arts and Design Helsinki Media Lab held a two day conference called Open 2009. The discussion was around the concept of openness and what it actually means to our world and society. I did present one paper there, which I shall discuss in more detail later. So, in this post, I try to summarize the event in some way.

First, what we mean with open? Rather many presenters seemed to approach this from the open source-phenomena. This meant loaning some of the practices from open source world, which didn’t all the times work. Others high lighted openness as a feature of decision making system, such as participatory democracy and freedom of speech. Also, open was seen as an organizational behavior pattern. Thus, maybe the conclusion could be, that the meaning of openness is not trivial, and to quote Saara Taalas, one of the presenters, the definition of closeness is not trivial either: even mathematicians have a term to both open and close system at the same time.

Then, some of the good things I still remember. Yrjö Engeström discussed nicely of existing systems and how we break ourself free from the restrictions. His example was from exams and how he considered, that preparing to cheat is better learning than regular learning.

Secondly, there were some interesting views on how to engage citizens to participate more in the every day life. Peter Tattersall spoke about wikiplaning and Sandra Viña presented her work on creating new public spaces. Peter actually noted an important thing; administration should serve us, not the other way around. Thus, when doing a city plan, he used a method where citizens made the first drafts, that he then worked to a more formal presentation for review. Sandra’s work was to test, how people react to different kind of public spaces.

Lastly, Jarno Koponen discussed on data, streams, privacy and openness. Good idea, that instead of every system building their own data collection infrastructure, there would be some common way of sharing your data. For example, I want certain services to access my location, so instead of actually installing a new app handling this, I would just tell them that this is the URL that you should ping to get my data. One data source, where I then could easily choose, to what extend different services are allowed to access my data. Let’s see, maybe I should try to do a nasty demo on that…

I worked during the summer with OtaSizzle, which has a main component (Aalto Social Interface) that allows everyone to build new services ontop of it. Even thought my work effort is not especially well visible, it feels goof — finally got something out in the wild.

Now the system is go in the sense that there has been a huge marketing push of the two lead services, Kassi and Ossi.¹ There are even actual users of in these services.

Well, this is a research thing after all. The guys in HIIT are intressed in the groups and related stuff. I might be doing some social network analysis based on that data… And let’s see what else we can pull out from this.

1. Kassi is a service that facilitates exchange of favors and items and Ossi is a mobile, context aware social service [↩]