Transferblog

… here my notes from the second day of the OPEN symposium at the Media Lab Helsinki.

In her keynote speach Saara Tallas (Notes on Fan Organisation) talked about new ways of looking at customer relationships. Her starting point are the classical ideas of markets: market is a balancing act between supply and demand and/or they are created by hierarchies and social classes, driven by price competetion. Tallas prefers a third model which suggests that markets are deeply embedded in human social exchange. Markets are one of the oldest froms of human organisation and so to speak in the human DNA. And these markets are only partially monetary and transactional. She sees production and trade as cultural practices motivated by constant unbalance in the markets. She further argues that many companies are still thinking in classical patterns of market in which audiences are seen as buyers or users (the latter word she thinks describes “a dumping ground for all sorts of stuff”). As an example of how complex markets can work beyond classical western models she mentioned the Dabbawalla system in Mumbai where every day millions of lunch packages are distributed from private houses to working family members all over town including the return of the empty dishes.

Tallas sugggests a change in attitude.  Trade and production should be seen as deeply engrained social processes that humans actually enjoy and to which they have a natural ability. Active audiences should be part of the production process. But how do you encourage this participation? In order to find out, Tallas suggests we should look at the most active of audiences. Accordingly she has done research on fan culture and how fans tick. Fans are actually organising information on a large scale, partly doing the industries’ job. On the far end of this process they are even taking part in the production process (co-design). An example is the science fiction author James Patterson who is writing his next thriller together with this fans. There is one caveat though, as hard-core fans often have to be treated very carefully because they often do not like to be embraced by big business.

further links:
Mass animation: a collaborative animation project
Cycle of the fan

The second keynote speaker Massimo Menichinelli (Metadesign and Strategic Design for Open Systems) talked about his project openp2pdesign.org, a framework for open peer-to-peer design. Openp2pdesign is a metadesign project in that it intends to develop tools for communities to develop complex projects and services together. The idea is that those design tools should be open source with the possibility for anyone to develop them further; another case, where the designer becomes an enabler or facilitator. As fascinating as the project sounds, unfortunately Menichinelli didn’t show a case study that would make clear how exactly this is going to work. Nevertheless Openp2pdesign is definitely one to watch! His presentation can be found here.

further links:
Literature
Open Source everywhere, Wired, 2003
Linux:  a bazaar at the edge of chaos“Web:
Designers sharing free templates for Web design: openwebdesign.org
Sharing programming sketches done with processing: openprocessing
Prototypical homes: openprototype.com
Open movie project: Big Buck Bunny
Open movie project: Blender
Collaborative movie project: The Cosmonaut
Collaborative musci video: Nine Inch Nail, This One Is on Us
Open Smartphone project: Openmoko
Opensource system for building devices: Buglabs.net
First openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet: Open Monday

Sesson 1: Life in the Open

Maarit Laihonen and Petteri Repo introduced the WWViews project. WWViews is an attempt to enable citizens from all over the world  to define and communicate their positions with regards to climate policy. Climate change affects everyone and so everyone should have a vote. On Sept the 26th 2009 WWViews hosted meetings with a total of 4400 local people at 44 sites in 38 nations  all over the world. They showed several movies about climate change and had people discuss the movies. They will present the resulting postions to the UN Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen in December. There was criticism from the audience as the videos that were shown were very clearly prejudiced towards mobilising people against climate change. In that sense the question is whether this was a true consultation process or just another political exercise.

Matti Nelimarkka from Nokia explained his project regarding a platform for deliberative democracy (ubiquituous open participaton platform). Computers are ubiquitous, meaning they are around us everywhere but also that we cary computing devices with us all the time. This means that communication is no longer bound to a specific location such as the desktop. While this is nothing new, Nelimarkka argues, that the fact that we can involve in communication processes all the time will change the way we involve in politics. While this is an interesting thought, it is highly questionable whether as a consequence there is a need for some sort of political participation tool for mobile devices which Nelimarkka is currently working on. Political issues are always very context related and it will be problematic to develop a general political participation tool. Whenever people are concerned about something, they will use whatever tools suit their purpose best. Anyone who wants to see how political activism works in the time of Web 2.0 should definitely look at the current student strike in Austria and Germany.

Sandra Viña’s (CANVA(S)S) showed a video of a design intervention she did in Helsinki. Her aim was to find out how one can motivate and activate people in the public realm and how public space can be turned into a cultural and social space. She set up three tents on a square in Helsinki with a few stools, some books, origami sets, playing cards, a thumb wrestling mat, etc… and tried to involve people in interactions such as discussion and game.

As I was myself part of the second session called “visions” I didn’t make any notes. However, the whole presentations of the OPEN2009 symposium will soon be posted on the OPEN2009 website.