Hamburg.
The next speaker at the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 conference is me, speaking about produsage and appropriate approaches for business to cooperate with produsage communities. Here's the Powerpoint with audio soundtrack; audio to come as soon as possible:

Technorati : Alcatel-Lucent 2009, business, collaboration, community, pro-am, produsage, user-led
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Leuven.
The final paper at EuroITV 2009 is by Liesbeth Huybrechts and Niels Hendriks. He notes the growth in user-generated content and citizen reporting of news events; increasingly, this also involves photos and videos, of course. Such user-generated content is also being explored and exploited by commercial interests, of course - ranging from projects such as the lonelygirl15 hoax to Christopher Allbritton's independently user-funded "Back to Iraq" investigative journalism blog.

Overall, at any rate, this creates opportunities for dispersed creativity that questions existing media authority. There is also a need for 'strange' methods to move beyond the mainstream/new media dichotomy, to make the familiar unusual and treat media as ready-made materials available to use in new and unfamiliar contexts. For example, experience design now needs to be approached as participatory design, and must involve a range of disciplines as well as the users themselves.

Leuven.
I'm afraid I missed out on blogging part of Alessandro Basso's presentation at EuroITV 2009 as I had to reboot my machine again - something's not quite right here. His project is an interesting exercise in datamining folksonomies: his team examined usage patterns for the Italian online PVR system VCast Faucet, which enables users to set up recordings of Italian TV programmes.

The recording periods set up (including a user-selected name for the recording, and their channel and time choices) provide rich information on what discrete television events are of interest to users, and it is possible to evaluate these also to provide future recommendations for programmes of interest - a kind of user-generated electronic programme guide. Not least, the titles given by users to the broadcast sections they choose to record can be evaluated to identify what the content of these periods is.

Copenhagen.
The final speaker today at COST298 is Maria Bernschütz. She takes us back to the emergence of the digital individual - identity emerged with the emergence of ID photos in the mid-1800s, but it was determined by the photographer; today, users are able to edit their online identities, photoshop their images, and otherwise control their online presence. So, what practices are in use here, especially by youth? Maria examined this in the context of the Hungarian sites MyVIP and iWiW.

Copenhagen.
The next speaker at COST298 is Constantin-Bala Zamfirescu, whose interest is in developing Group Decision Support Systems. These have traditionally be implemented in physical infrastructure developments, such as 'situation rooms', bringing together decision makers and information in the same physical space, but can now also be turned into virtual spaces. Performance of GDSS is dependent on software configuration and instruction.

A GDSS is commonly used over a number of phases, for example from data gathering to situational awareness. Ideally it presents a solution space (possible solutions to a problem) within a larger search space (including all available information); this creates a great deal of cogitive complexity.

Copenhagen.
Finally for this COST298 session we move on to James Stewart; his interest is in how we create place and space, especially in the context of using personal ICTs (pICTs). This also ties into the question of user co-creation, of course, especially where it is looking forward towards future uses. The research project took place here particularly in the context of branded meeting places - locations which were clearly marked as governed by an established brand (e.g. Starbucks, McDonald's).

Some interesting activities here included linking online and physical spaces, and connecting with Twitter and Facebook in order to enable group interactions. The 'virtual' and the 'real' are increasingly blurred in the process; in practice, they are linked by electronic gateways. The idea of tagging emerged as a very important practice in this (tags understood here as anything from metadata tags to signs, logos, stamps, barcodes, and much more) - we appropriate the world by tagging, and we can see our and others' tagging activity for example in map-based representations.

Copenhagen.
The next speaker in this COST298 session is Simona Isabella. She notes how the mobile phone as a technology that crosses public and private spheres can be seen as an embodiment of contemporary society. Overall, the meaning technological artefacts assume depends on internal technical as well as external social factors; technologies are socially shaped, within the constraints imposed by technological possibilities, and may ultimately even be domesticated - but in different ways by different groups.

Mobile telephony history shows these developments: in Japan, for example, the humble pager evolved into a medium for interactive text communication, while the landline picture phone in the US failed because of concerns over privacy. Today, the emerging broadband society can be described as a society of perpetual contact; the mobile phone embodies and enacts this. By adding Internet access features, it transforms telephony from one-to-one to one-to-many; additionally, the use of social networking sites through mobile devices heightens the always-in-touch nature of contemporary society.

Copenhagen.
Eva Törnqvist is the next speaker at COST298, who highlights a specific form of user-led, bottom-up innovation in the use of mobile phones: by birdwatchers in Sweden. Traditionally, this community has used other tools to disseminate information about where to see rare birds: for example sticking paper signs on the back of a road sign, later on using answering machine and pager messages (to the point where they clogged the phone lines in small Swedish towns to breaking point).

Today, a community called Club 300 (as in, at least 300 recorded sightings of rare birds) uses mobile phones to share their knowledge. The switch to mobile phones also allows for the transmission of substantially more information (bird pictures and sounds), and connection with other services (such as road directions). Similarly, the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management now also share their wildlife and hunting pictures and videos on the Web, as well as through mobile phone services.

Copenhagen.
The next COST298 speaker is Serge Proulx, whose interest is in forms of user contribution in Web 2.0. Here, users are voluntary contributing en masse to create large amounts of content, and this is increasingly harnessed by corporations as value added to their services. Why are users so ready to contribute in this way - are they voluntary participating in a new form of information capitalism, and expropriating the social link put in the service of the economic sphere of production, and/or are they participating in the emergence of a new form of individualised mass media, a form of symmetric media which may empower users through the social capital they construct, potentially leading to the creation of a more participative democracy?