Science and Industry

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 ended up discussing with Erika Reponen, researcher at Nokia Research Center Tampere, in Facebook around the topic of mandatory supervision fee, that the Finnish Board of Film Classification is charging from publicly available videos. Well, not from all — special cases such as research and education videos are excluded.

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 [↩]

Still on holiday, but time to do some minor things into the site itself. First about the full version: a new look and feel coming up. I’m not so good with images, but they give a certain feel into the blog. I had huge plans in my mind, but here’s the realization. Maybe again later with help of real experts.

The other, more technical thing is mobile (simple) view of the site. I know most of the cool devices, like iPhone, N95, N810 etc. should be able to handle this site well. But, the variety of internet enabled devices is bigger. I’ve used Opera Mini on top of Series 40 device and started to like the less is more approach of websites. And for some services, like textual view (Finnish newspaper) I use textual view also on regular desktop. It’s faster and cleaner, no extra flash-ads everywhere.

But to other things then. My brother asked if I could have a look at Movino-system: he plans if live streaming could be somehow used in his work. I promised to have a look with that. But, more generally, the tech persons are using services like Qik to share live video on the spot. I did my trials with ComVu and noticed one problem: I’m not ready to walk in the city and film everything I share to internet (I tried that during the New Year party 2008): the privacy issue is difficult.

I see the possibilities this would allow, but some things bother me. Maybe I’m too old for this Internet world, but let’s take the example of Google’s Street view — really interesting idea. But at the same time I feel that it might share my whereabouts into the world; but not only that but also details like who are with me. Plans like blurring faces might not be enough: those who know me well might notice my hat which makes me rather easy to spot.

Of course this is not the only thing: services that involve sharing may have same kind of problems: when everything is stored is there any way I can control what’s out of me? I’m waiting to here about Nokia Chat and it’s automatically presence updates and location sharing possibilities. As Conversations site asks: how open we want to be?

Dr. Wesch pointed out rather important thing in famous The Computer is Us/ing us: we need to rethink certain things, like privacy. Maybe I’ll blog more when I understand more of this tiny but important word.