8. April 2010 – 17:54 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
As with any interesting question this one can also only be answered: Yes and No. It is clear that any web based project can not ignore the elephant in the room that is Google and its vast amounts of tools and services. But the last months have shown that not all Google tools can be used for eParticipation or have gained any real traction among mainstream users.
Google services, which can be integrated into third party websites, like search, the single-sign-on mechanism friend connect, or Google Maps have shown to be very useful if integrated into eParticipation platforms, while consumer facing products like Google Buzz or Wave have flopped with the general audience. Read the rest of this entry »
3. November 2009 – 12:27 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Email has developed into a hub for all online communication and is not able to handle this task natively. Raindrop tries to tackle this problem and alongside has some potential implications for eParticipation.
The internet has developed into the most lively communication tool available to us today. But this sentence is not really true: There is no such thing as “the internet” (except on a protocol level). There are many different platforms and tools for communication which work together more or less well. Actually they often times do not work together at all. Right now users have to accept that they cannot send a message from Facebook to our Linked-In or Twitter contacts. So how do all of these services and tools tackle this problem right now? They send out email every time something happens and expect the user to then visit the site to interact with the event (e.g. answer the message, comment a photo). This leads to enormous amounts of messages pilling up in everyone’s inbox (so called bacn messages: not really spam but not exactly useful either) and makes it hard to quickly cope with them as they are not really email but just a notification that something happened on another site.
The team at Mozilla tries to tackle this problem with their Raindrop project. The general idea is that the email inbox should be smart about which messages are the most important ones and display them prominently. Furthermore users should be able to directly interact with messages and engage in conversations wherever the might happen. The video below describes the effort very clearly:
Even though this project is in a very early stage (Version 0.1 is available as source code) it has one really important advantage over other attempts to improve online messaging: There is no new protocol handling the messaging. Raindrop just uses email. This means that users and providers do not have to change their messaging architectures. Raindrop is just a different interface to the stream of messages. This is a very important distinction to Googles Wave effort which introduces a new protocol. Therefore Raindrop does not have to “win” the messaging battle. It can happily live alongside other email clients and interfaces. Wave however needs to be dominant to succeed. Theoretically speaking: Email already has a lot of network value while the Wave protocol will need time to build it.
Just 100 days before the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, Fondation Sophia Antipolis, a partner of the WAVE project, will be hosting a breakfast meeting entitled:
Reduction of Greenhouse Gases: How to Intensify the Efforts?
The meeting will take place on Friday 16th October 2009 at 9am at the Picasso room – Place Sophie Laffitte – Fondation Sophia Antipolis
The breakfast aims to:
Discuss the emergency of the climate change topic with involved actors such as politicians, NGO, scientists, civil servants etc.
Launch the French WAVE website (www.debatclimat.eu) and introduce the innovative argument visualisation tool – the DebateGraph – to the community
Reinforce the participation of citizens in the legislative and decisional process within the parliaments and governments
The WAVE project co-funded by the European Commission – aims to improve the inclusiveness and transparency of EU decision making at the national and European level by using highly integrated, state-of-the-art Argument Visualisation techniques to make the impact of complex EU environmental legislation on climate change more accessible and easy to understand for citizens, special interest groups and decision makers alike.
Email has developed into a hub for all online communication and is not able to handle this task natively. Raindrop tries to tackle this problem and alongside has some potential implications for eParticipation.
