The past 2 days I’ve been at the ITaaU Network Community Conference in Southampton University which is the network that supported the CloudMaker Project I worked on with Dr Mark Wright FACT Lecturer at LJMU. It’s been fascinating to put the project in context of the other supported projects and what’s struck me is that every project really seems to focus and impact on the social side of utility. Each take on utility engages directly with a form of social change and seems to be really about making academia and research connect to the real world.
###The problem with platforms is that it’s difficult to get off them
Why make Platforms as Service (PaaS) cloud services when we can use the internet? At scale it becomes useful and means you dont have to manage your own infrastructure.
###Blogjects
Like the idea of publishing addressable real-world objects that become programmable and act like objects in programming.
###Lightning Project Talks
Andy Stanford-Clarke took us on a tour of IoT services current cost, EasyRadio, Xively, IBMmBed, Current care
CurrentCare is Current Cost’s foray into home automation: it made me reflect on my use of Current Cost for my user testing of Matt Venn’s EnergyWristband project
ARM mbed IoT starter kit IBM Bluemix, Boilerplates
Radius of risk The more data gets away from us then the more risky it becomes… is all data meaningful to others.. What is the risk of a school air quality to a hacker or marketeer
What is the impact of data protection in Cloudmaker?
###Phil Godsiff
Can an Anonomous group be a community?
What is the blockchain? Can it sort out all the trust issues people are talking about?
###Open Data Institute
Overview of what the ODI do:
Useful links from OpenDataInstitute talks
Who is monitoring the financial impact/build around the data they use?
###Paul Watson
What is the cloud? Looking at the infrastructure of the cloud
Illusion of infinite computing resources on demand
Tracking the cloud, platforms and digital inclusion
Testing the cloud with minecraft
###Pat Langdon
Resilience of connectivity in geographically isolated Upland areas. Was pleased to tell Paul about Glenn Boulter’s Minecraft LAN partys at the Coniston Institute and thinking about game connectivity in isolated rural uplands. There’s a real connection here I think to our Public Investigations project.
###LED atmospheric haze measuring for Air Quality
Using peoples own devices to monitor haze levels
###Mapping Food Banks
Mapping food bank data to visualise social impact and alert issues Imagined mapping this data from Mapping For Change into minecraft like the Ordnance Survey Server.
###3d scanning Elgin
Interesting use of rurally isolated point cloud data. Good to talk about some of the issues around cleaning the noise of laser scanned data.
###With Great Power comes great responsibility
Trust issues in IoT seems to be a theme looming over us; the beauty of this network’s work is the connections to the social; utility impacts on people in a powerful way and as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben says this makes the ethics and ethos around the use of people’s data a big thing.
###The Pubchain
Can the Blockchain really help security and trust?
“Can you really trust the blockchain?” “I guess you can the cryptography means you don’t need to trust it” “Do you really trust it though?”
People talking about bitcoin and the blockchain in the pub. Mark Wright’s idea of a 2way ledger for exchange based on royalties for artists. How would that work and why did something like this not pop up at Bring & Byte
I like the idea or the itaau as a currency.
###We are the data
The crowd is not a utility? Is a totally open call the right approach to crowdsourcing? crowdsourcing needs to be curated Maybe a utility is sourcing the crowd in an enabling way.
Owners > Aggregators > Consumers
Village Leaders > Hunters > Gatherers >
Hunters > Gatherers > Gatherers >
Making Socio-technical systems to build a community. CrowdProjects & Directories Crowdsourcing.org Project Gutenberg StreetBump Implicit micro tasking. Interesting how they also set up a innovation competition. That’s more sourcing of the crowd to find the crowd yourself Fix My Street Distributed Proofreaders Mechanical Turk
In crowdsourcing, it’s easy to forget that People can do very complex tasks: much more complex than the microtasking model: Maybe in the crowdsourcing design space it’s important to make room for complexity.
Crowdsourcing with Minecraft and fear of the crowd.
###Clinical Coal Face: You’re Dead! Achievement Unlocked
Issues around the lack of end user resaerch and UX exploration in NHS IT services led to some interesting work in making patient focussed ‘Lifelines’ with meta-data so that a patient history was easy to see
This becomes a life ‘track’; or a LifeLine. Looking at a graph of raw NHS records: if you’re red you’re dead and your record is complete: if you’re green you’re alive and well: yellow you’re file is starting up but not complete: you are ‘just’ ill..
###Restful Rangers and the library bus
#####Havens for knowledge
Our working group came up with planning on finding Experimental spaces for exploring knowledge access, curation and producion between the models of makerspaces and libraries
Risks of libraries becoming aggregators. Trust issues Importance of quiet spaces
STEM crises
Technology is increasingly commoditised and ubiquitous; #itaau looking at the wider societal impacts of tech and innovation. Its about patterns; nothing new but new translation pipes
#####We didnt know what we needed to know
Places People and Processes are we getting too focused on these
Spaces are not smart people are; but smart spaces help them
Metcalfe’s law
###Data is a Bland Word What is significant data? What is a data scientist? People seem to use it as a shorthand for needing somebody with knowledge of how to deal with data in a useful or interesting way, which seems to go back to the need for Restful Rangers people who can help us structure data in a useful, searchable way.
Don Cruickshank - MUD player and PDF scraper and inventor of the SCIENCE button
