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.

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…

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

The story presented in Digitoday discusses this from the viewpoint of hobby filmmakers, which should according to strict interpretation pay the supervision fee, 800 euros per film in 2010. The more interesting thing is, what happens to videos I film and publish e.g. Youtube.

Youtube is a public media, meaning that publishing content there is bound with the legal framework we Finns have. My video could be something that is not excluded as a special case, meaning that I must — according to law — pay the feed. And 800 euros is a big sum for a random video in Youtube, at least for me.

Let’s jump to the next topic, from social to ubiquitous media, but let’s keep the same focus, namely videos, here. What does ubiquitous media mean in practice? Let’s start from the assumption, that cameras will be everywhere — most mobile terminals nowadays have them — and they may be connected to the Internet. Forget the Google Street view, that is tiny compared to this — we can change the world!

But, there are also some problems here. Some problems are created by social norms, things such as privacy. Google Street view caused a mess, and they do an extra effort to anonymize the pictures¹. I remember a few new year’s ago, I walked in the city of Helsinki and streamed video directly to Internet². What happens when pictures of use are pushed to the Web instantly, from the spot? Am I ready to show the whole world that I walked somewhere with someone — the recording is easy now and may become popular later.

These two cases presented above mean, that two key technological changes, the Internet and mobile technology, will change how we think of certain things³. At the same time there is both legal and social frames, that bound what is accepted, but these frames must adapt⁴ to the changes information- and communication technology have brought and will bring.

How do you feel about related topics, such as the copyright, privacy and publicity? Are those ready for 2010 and the networked society of tomorrows?

Notes: Author does not hold any degree in law and thus this discussion may not be legally solid.

1. Well, most of the issues are related to the fact that Google creates an easy to search index, not separate sources of data that need to me mashed up by the user
2. I did do an extra effort not to shoot faces to the film, as I didn’t feel that would be fair.
3. Obvious cat is obvious here.
4. Or do they? Can the frames behave in same way even when context has changed? I shall argue no, as we can see from the copyright laws, which seem to be more and more hilarious when I follow up news on those topics

What I felt nasty is lack of developer tools here. Of course I had both Firebug and Safari 4 developer tools available and they do a good job on desktop. And thus, the code worked fine on the desktop, then I tested it on N97 – still working. But on S60 3.1 – namely N95 and E90, it just crashed. If a read the document right, the Javascript core of these browsers is from early 2007, so in the age of Internet they are rather old.

Thus, I got a bit lost there and started the usual debugging strategies: removing and lines until it started to work. Firstly, I found out that the parser is rather strict on old Nokia devices – my objects had a last comma

o = {

a = ‘a’,

b = ‘b’,

}

which is invalid and thus makes the whole object invalid. So, no comma in the end. The problem for me was, that on desktop browsers it works even with that comma, which makes finding bugs a bit harder. A nice tool here is JSLint, which allows you to check the syntax validity of Javascript code. Otherwise, it’s like hide and seek.

In reality this means a wide range of activities, from cleaning the environment to supporting societies during crises. My contribution this summer was on youth education, giving a nice experience for kids in elementary school. Well, as I’m not so imaginative person, I choose a topic close to me: programming. I didn’t have the guts to show Java, Python or some web technologies, so the choice was Scratch.

Scratch seemed to be easy to learn (and teach) and what’s most important, kids loved it! Some of them even said they might continue learning it at their home… So, a successful event — that pushed me to think these things once again, maybe I should try to contribute more in this field.

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.

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…

I participated into a mobile journalism webinar this week. They asked my organization, which is not trivial. I got the invitation from my teacher and thus, my participation was more in the university side. At the same time, I might be interested of this in professional life also.

Well, I ended participating as Nokia-guy. Mainly because my name is easy to Google and I do state rather clearly that, I do work in Nokia. I think that stating clearly my relation to Nokia makes things look more transparent than stating I come from university and someone finding out I work for Nokia.

My colleague spoke of his experiences of start up event. Just because of we work in Nokia, it does not mean that we are business people and just looking for the killer concept. We just might want to hang with cool people, just like everyone else.

Maybe I should buy a Nokia-hat and wear it when I am thinking for Nokia?

One interesting aspect presented there was change in citizenship: unlike most political scientist discuss{{Usually when this discussion starts, people do mean the conventional participation. This doesn’t mean that the actual participation}}, there might be active and strong civic society coming up and engaging in discussion with politicians and administration. Actually, these new communication tools make taking contacts easier. Actually, some of the recent Finnish social movements like Porkkanamafia and the demonstration against Lex Nokia use these new media to get citizens involved.

Secondly, many representatives from administration agreed that data does exist in the system, but the problem is more what to do with it and how to use it. Actually, administration people said that they don’t want to ask abstract question as they tend to get tricky. The want to keep it simple for all of us to participate – and I fully see why.

Thirdly, they also think opening their data storages here. Not part of administration but still publicly owned, YLE, has been doing this kind of work previously. Some of the participants demonstrated how they already know use provide their data for public use. I of course spoke about open APIs and how important they are to broader the developer base. Let’s hope someone listened…