Forum Virium hosted their fourth annual seminar, called Open Up The City, this week. This very nicely organized seminar was all about opening up the data, especially data from the depths of municipalities of Helsinki.
One of the headliners was Dr Rufus Pollock, the Co-Founder of Open Knowledge Foundation and of University of Cambridge. His inspiring talk urged data owners to just open up, put the data online as quickly as possible and not worry too much about formats or anything like that. Things will iron out. I hope the people involved in opening data in Finland were listening, and spend their time actually opening data, instead of planning to do so. Municipal data would be really important for the urban screens stuff too that we’ve been talking about.
More info about Dr Pollock’s efforts can be found at The Open Knowledge Foundation and Open Data Commons.
On other fronts this week, Sami wrote about how We are in the business of change, Panu wrote about The space between and our designer recruitment process nudged to its final decision (more about that soon). It takes time to find A-class people! So with our new intern we’ll be about 10 in few weeks!
Something that sparked discussion this week was Petri’s chat with school kids. Apparently they feel that it’s impossible to skip classes anymore because the system nowadays automatically sends an email notice about this to the parents. This is pretty handy from parents’ point of view, but still the teacher needs to be involved. Maybe instead the kids could have RFID tags that would check them into classes, allow them to buy food, open the locker door, etc?
What’s still to be discussed is whether the kids would loose those tags, or lend them for friends to check into classes instead of them, or various other things these clever kids could do. This is a hairy thing with privacy implications and all, but at the same time we know of people who already use RFID with their own kids.
Anyways the weekend is nearing it’s end, others are asleep and so should I be. Until next week, fellow humans.
taking a couple of ideas from Open Up the City;
– instead of new RFID cards, re-use the bus passes for this purpose
– find a “carrot” idea for the kids to do this (instead of the stick of the parents finding out they missed something)! At the seminar the idea was given of auto sending an SMS *before* your car gets towed