Science and Industry

One strange thing in Nokia is the spirit within the company. Most of my colleagues are willing to do some extra things to make it happen. We all check mails during strange times: I’m getting emails send in 11 pm and usually reply them around 12pm when I’m heading to sleep. I know that the last night before something big is usually well used — but the best of category still is friend of mine who joined our Assembly crew for some moments while having her maternity leave starting up next Monday.

My current manager promised not to keep working from home for a month. It took three days and I got an email from him and nailed  him down: he was doing work outside the office hours. Of course I was checking this outside office hours too. This is how he explained what had happen:

I left early today and I’m home alone and… and… Really disappointed in myself, I couldn’t resist

You may think we are odd — but I do this as I really like to do what I’m doing. And I think this is the case with those I work with: when one feels passionate enough, some extra work really doesn’t matter so much. The thing is that we do something we enjoy. Actually I should now be writing a paper, but sadly I have misconfigured my (currently at care to be fixed) laptop and Files on Ovi, so I don’t have the draft with me. It’s the next weekend then.

Now I do something I most likely should not be doing: speak of my ideas in the spirit of open innovation. So this is an idea that has been bubbling in my head for some time already. Let’s put the pink glasses on and start dreaming… What if…

I see the future being ubiquitous and extremely contextual. There will be smart devices around us to support our daily life. But what’s more important is that these smart devices will know something of their environment, they know where they are.

This feature will allow create potential in several services, not just the location based ones but wide variety like smart devices that sense what you need and offer it. But my idea actually is location based service that could be done with today’s technology.

There’s lot of research done to build political discussion forum to Internet. Actually even know I know it’s trialled in Finland at least. But let’s take this one step further: at this moment you need to be the active partner, looking for the information. And the information might be scattered to several places. But, actually – most political questions have some sort of locational meaning.

Yeap, I think we both see the same thing now: even mapping the current political debate into a map would be interesting. Just a plane old mashing up — nothing new to see here. But I take the next step: we have the contextual device that pushes these messages while you’re in the area. No need to look for the information just stay where you always are and the system will know what’s up with the community around you.

And of course, as I speak about deliberative things, there need to be discussion part also. Or it’s the most important thing. In deliberative framework it’s emphases: to get good decision you need to discuss of it. And now with discussion I mean real discussion, real arguments, and citizens & administration taking part to it. And finally there would be some sort of common understanding of the resolution and reasons why they ended up there.

I call this CODED. It’s just in (and only in) my head and evolving rapidly to different kind of concepts. What would you like to see? Why? Or do I just have an invalid hunch of the future and humans there — as usual?

Sorry for missing the last week posting: I was enjoying working hard in Nokia stand at Assembly Summer 2008. That’s an event for geeks in Finland; demos, presentations, computer games, hardware… Our place there was to present some devices and demos, one being JellyPop; free game that you can share with your friends.

But I also had good conversations, one of them being what is Web3.0, which was mentioned in the maemo-notifications. But to understand what web3.0 might be we really need to understand what web2.0 or social media means.

While browsing the web I found out Movial-corporation view of this: they speak out convergence but actually what I would want to highlight is that social media should be something where social interactions happens. As easy as this sounds, I have been hearing some presentations of social media with no aspects of social interaction there.

But what is also important to understand that the web has been social for a while: chat and irc are rather old technologies that enable social interaction. What is the difference is userbase, number of connected persons in the internet is totally different today than it was when I was really young (we had a modem connected to our home pc for some time in the mid-90s).

This is really important to understand: the social media or most of web2.0ness isn’t about technology nor site desing: it’s about the mindset. It’s about being open and more user generation and centric thing (at least as I saw the terms). And this is what I sometimes think people who speak about these things miss around; using wiki as a content management system is a good example — wiki is especially meant for the cases where the author wants everyone to contribute; and with this blog I want to express my toughs but I don’t want you to edit them…

One intresting thing is the amount of girls there. It was rather high, more than one would expect. This is just a side note so that I can link this feminism and geeks. Genders and information technology is something we need to tackle more; usual argument in gender studies is there is some inbuild “malethinking” — is the case also in itc world and how would things change if we consider both sexes? Have your say here!

Next time I hope to have actual work content, not just my toughts here.