30. July 2010 – 10:31 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Clearly mobile platforms are quickly becoming an important way to use the internet and some are arguing phones and other mobile devices have already become our most important devices. In the wake of this development the idea of mobile apps, most importantly on iPhone and Android devices, has become the way to get additional functionality in the hands of users. App development however is not for the faint of heart and very specific skills are needed to get started in this field.
Google tries to improve the app situation for Android phones by introducing App Inventor, a tool that allows building Android apps simply by using a drag-and-drop interface. The video below shows how a very simple Android app is build and run on a phone using this web-based tool. As I am getting into App Inventor right now I can assure you it is much more capable than what you see in the video but it still illustrates the concepts.
15. January 2009 – 11:38 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Participation supported by electronic tools is not just limited to political topics – this has been stated in relation to eParticipation in many discussions. Keeping this in mind the Living Lab approach which aims at involving users and stakeholders into research and development processes by using innovative often time’s electronic ways of organising cooperation is a close cousin of eParticipation. Yesterday I visited the Living Labs Information Day held by the European Commission in Brussels. This event gave me an overview of the LL activity in Europe and the possibilities arising from this trend for player from the eParticipation field.
The projects presented at this event ranged from research in wearable computing involving test sites in the Aerospace, Construction and Automobile industry (wearIT@work) to projects working on environmental friendly lighting in urban areas and different developers of ICT tools sets to making working in a Living Lab context easier. Almost all research and innovation field were present at the event and could make a convincing case that the LL approach is significantly helping them to produce innovation in their field. Besides the variety of participants the number of ca. 250 also spoke to the importance of this approach. In the European Network of Living Labs alone more than 100 LL are involved. The EC also supports this community using different programmes but the representatives where clear that the EC´s job is to support the cross border aspects and not the local or regional development.
The complexity of LL project is very high as dozens and more stakeholders have to be involved in a multi-step development process. The deep experience of the eParticipation community to organise complex communication processes and to work out conflicts in these processes could be of great help to the many different Living Labs active in Europe. It therefore is useful to build contacts into the LL community and try to find possibilities to gain advantages from each other. On concrete step in this direction could be to look for potential partners for future project proposals to the European Commission in that community.
The annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers was held in Copenhagen last week. Under the title “Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place” 400 researchers visited the IT University of Copenhagen and presented their current work on Internet research on a broad range of topics.
Worth to mention – and probably the most successful key note at the IR 9.0 was Stephen Grahams speech on “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space”. He basically works on the relations between urban places and mobility, infrastructure and technology on the one hand, and war, surveillance and geopolitics on the other. In his recent work – and in his talk – he describes the implications of new media technologies for urban life and the proliferation of urban surveillance systems which are increasingly automated through computer software. His latest book on this topic will be out in March 2009 under the title “Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism”. It will be definitely worth reading it even if it will be a pretty frightening reading.
Interestingly most of the presented research on the conference followed a qualitative approach. Thus it was much more about giving a close description of areas like e-science, online games, religion online than providing statistical data on Internet usage, which I appreciate. Unfortunately the track on e-participation was a little bit disappointing.
But I was able to meet Thomas Hammer-Jakobsen, head of the Copenhagen Living Lab. Located close to the IT University the Copenhagen Living Lab tries to find answers how public administrations but also enterprises could meet the challenges of a changing society in terms of technological revolution and demographical changes through user driven innovations. I was very impressed how serious the Living Lab approach are taken by Thomas Hammer-Jakobsen and colleagues. They are really working on the concept of user driven innovations out of the daily users life by e.g. running a whole retirement community as a living lab. Currently they experiment with the development and the deployment of an online platform to support the process of user driven innovation on a variety of topics.
As mentioned earlier by Francesco here the combination of e-participation with the Living Lab approach might be a valuable idea. In particular, a potential benefit could be a careful preparation of the participatory trials by analysing the users needs to avoid – as Francesco stressed out – “the most common pitfalls of current eDemocracy experiences, such as: lack of active involvement from citizens and/or stakeholders, mistrust from the people, skepticism from the politicians, and ultimately a low reusability of upcoming results within the public decision making process.”
Lets hope that neither the promising area of e-participation nor the field of Living Lab research will suffering too badly from the current financial crisis.
Clearly mobile platforms are quickly becoming an important way to use the internet and some are arguing phones and other mobile devices have already become our most important devices. In the wake of this development the idea of mobile apps, most importantly on iPhone and Android devices, has become the way to get additional functionality in the hands of users. App development however is not for the faint of heart and very specific skills are needed to get started in this field.
