Science and Industry

I will start soon my summer job at Helsinki institute of Information Technology (or, HIIT) in Networked Society research program. My area will be inside OtaSizzle-project, mostly doing something that could be called QA and developer QA — so, checking documentations and doing tests.

About the OtaSizzle (for those who didn’t click the above link): the idea is allow easy creation of context aware social media services, which means in reality building an infrastructure of some core enablers, like user management and context collection, and then building some lead services on top of that. The coolness is, that the core enablers are just easy to use rest-apis, meaning that you can use e.g. common web technologies to build new services around them — making the application writing more fun, hopefully.

I’m now planing to build my first tiny application, for demonstration purposes, using this core enablers, called cos. Still need to developed an idea for simple but nice application, but I’ll get back to this topic when the application is ready and out there for comments and more input.

Apps for Democracy-competition¹ will be held here in Finland during the Mindtrek Conference 2009. The rules etc. are still open, but the deadline is decided: 31 August. So, whole summer time for development.

The idea of this competition is to create same sort of buzz that the DC version and UK version created. It is cool, that goverment is pushing their data open and allowing creation of mashups based on their data. This is the right way to move on, using ICT to create a better place for some people.

My 2 cents on this topic are rather simple: remember mobility and context. Mobility allows you to use the application casually, on the way to work² . Contextuality will make the mobile application much smarter than what it would be usually. Let’s see if I manage to write some application to the competition my self.

1. I don’t think that is a good name for the competition, as apps usually crated are not related to political processes, like democracy, but just visualization of existing data in new ways [↩]
2. But, you should still have a desktop version of the application there… [↩]