photo by Hoong Wei Long on Flickr
We’re opening this blog as the main communication channel for the OPEN 2009 Symposium we’re organizing at Media Lab Helsinki during 5th and 6th of November.
We’ve co-written a Call for Papers in which we ask you to contribute to event. In this first post we try to briefly shed light into the nature of the event and theme of openness, and why it matters.
The OPEN 2009 Symposium is meant to be an academic forum for the doctoral students of the Media Lab to engage with students and researchers from other institutions around topical research subjects. This year’s topic, openness, originated from discussions among our doctoral students, in particular among people interested in the themes of social media, peer production, and new ways of organising activities. We’re witnessing a trend of increased demands on transparency on the public and private levels by individuals who are themselves interacting in open ways by using tools available for them through networked digital media. There has been a lot of buzz around all of this, but we feel that much of it has been on the societal level of laws, policies, values and ideologies. We want to bring the discussion closer to home, to discuss the phenomenom as it unfolds before us in our daily lives. Therefore, we’re asking from our keynotes and contributors to bring up concrete examples on how openness is affecting our lives and the opportunities or conflicts it creates. What do you think?
You can engage with us throughout this fall on the comments section of this blog, in Facebook through the Aalto Openness Interest Group or by sending us email at mlabsymp at taik dot fi. It would please us the most, however, if the discussion would encourage you to participate our call and attending the Symposium, face-2-face or virtually.
We’re looking forward to interesting discussions!
I would LOVE to come to Helsinki in November for this symposium, but unfortunately that won’t be possible. You mention attending virtually–please link to how your global audience can do that, so we can schedule and prepare accordingly.
Thank you! This looks like it will be an extremely interesting event!
Hi Mark,
In the organizing committee of the OPEN 2009 there are people who were last June involved in organized the Emerging Media Practices and Environments –conference (http://arkisampo.uiah.fi/emerging/). In it the possibilities for online participation were just great. I wrote about the experience on my blog:
http://flosse.blogging.fi/2009/06/11/the-day-when-an-online-conference-surpassed-the-one-in-a-real-life/
I know that with the OPEN 2009 we do not have that great resources (no TV-studio), but we may assume that the team will come-up with something. You may also post your ideas on the wiki of the event. It is here:
http://tutkimus.parvi.fi/index.php?title=Open-symposium
Hi Mark and Teemu,
Thanks so much for your comments.
Yes, we’re exploring the possibilities for documenting and live feed of the symposium. So far we haven’t made the final decisions on used technology, but the following are thought about (the scale of course depend on our resources)
- audiovisual documentation through multiple cameras
- back channel and live reporting through a micro-blogging service
- documentation storage in a video sharing site
- live feed through a web service
If you have ideas on new forms of documentation or suitable technology, let us know. You can do it in the wiki, here in the comments or through emailing us at opensymposium AT taik DOT fi .
It is amazing that this project is being shared online. I visited the museum for the first time last May, a wish I’d had for a long time- it was fantastic