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!