Science and Industry

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… [↩]