If you happen to be in Milan, it could be a nice chance to visit us (our company is right behind the Department of Informatics) and talk with us. If you’d also like to see a preview demo of our prototype contact us to arrange one (or simply drop a comment to this post).

After a friday evening spent sightseeing that wonderful city, on saturday morning we reached the ULB Campus and joined the party with hundred of techies. It’s been hard to choose which talks to follow among the huge schedule, composed by 200+ lectures spread in dozen of rooms, and in the end we attended many talks more or less related to the Itsme universe: some of us preferred Drupal, some others Mozilla, we dropped for a bit in the Embedded-related and KDE-related spaces, and we couldn’t miss the inevitable talk by Andrew Tanenbaum.

However, the main reason of the trip was the invitation by Rob Taylor (CEO at CodeThink) and Philip Van Hoof (developer of the Tracker project) to get involved in the talk about SPARQL and the semantic desktop. In this occasion I had to speak about the FSter filesystem and its internal architecture: how SPARQL queries are generated and how data and metadata from the Tracker store are retrieved and mixed to map a hierarchy of files and folders. It seems our recently opened project is gaining momentum in the community, and we are happy our work is useful somewhere else.

Outside the FOSDEM rooms I can share with Rob and Philip our plans to integrate e-mail management with Tracker, and it appears our current implementation produced both positive and negative feedback: we hope to continue talking in near future, in order to collect more suggestions and improvements from those highly skilled guys.

With the backpack filled by nerdy t-shirts, many missing sleeping hours and some funny anecdotes to share with friends, we end our adventure and start another cycle of heavy development.

• How we plan to integrate with Google services, and GMail in particular. This issue is particularly hot in these days: we are designing, and implementing, generic integration between Guglielmo, the itsme fornt-end and some standard email client (probably Mozilla Thunderbird). Actually Gmail presents some interesting features from which we could take some inspiration. For example, the way tags are handled, being applied to a single copy of a message, but, as a consequence, the same message is replicated when accessed via IMAP. We want to let users be able to use whatever tool they like to work with their inbox, e.g., when a lot of mail must be read and replied to in a short time, being aware that the operating system is taking care of soting things out, so that venues can be then accesses and everything will still be in the right place.
• What’s the difference between documents and media? Actually this is something our designers are trying to make clearer with the advancement of the design process. We reasoned on different interpratations so far, ranging from more philosophical to technical ones. The one I like most (but here I must say that I am only expressing a personal idea and interpretation) is that documents are what the user is creating and manipulating for the specific purpose (or aim) of the story he is referring to (in the venue), while media are inspirational stuff, things the user is not really manipulating during work – e.g., online videos and presentations from which data are taken, or items that are referenced in documents.

I hope a couple of detailed posts on these questions will come soon, now we are glad we have met people that said they have been amazed by our progress (some of them had already seen some previous demo).

Itsme was invited to the conference in order to show the work done by the interaction design team.
The presentation started contextualizing the innovation potential of Itsme and the “stories and venues” metaphor with reference to the traditional OS, up to the description of the basic conceptual aspects of Itsme.
Then, moving from the visual model that represents Itsme, it described the structure and articulation of the interface as well as the nature and behaviour of the interactive elements, how items are manipulated by user at interface level and the overall look and feel. It ended with the description of the design process, an highly iterative process, based on a participatory design methodology, that alternates activities dedicated to research and investigation, sedimentation, assessment trough participatory process.

Image taken by “Ruth Ellison“

View more documents from “itsmesrl“.

After the conference we collected  positive feedback form the audience. Vicky Teinaki, from Johnny Holland Magazine, was very enthusiastic about our project, as you can read on her post on the magazine blog. Rook in the Garret gave on her blog a very exhaustive description of our presentation. As first instance we were a bit taken a-back by looking at sketchnotes from Matt Balara (find it on his UX Australia sketchnotes), but we understand that it is another point of view, coming from a guy who made a presentation focused on Agile methodology at the conference. In response, I would like to say that an OS based on a completely new metaphor requires a strong conceptual framework, hence starting from scratch, not to forget that the aim was to present and explain the design process of this on-going project. We are in parallel developing the OS and putting our efforts in super structuring the actual linux back-end. So in response to his notes, the beef is coming. In the meanwhile, I would like to invite him to have a deeper look into the project.

If you want to find out more on what was presented during the conference, have a look at the conference program and at the UX Australia’s slideshare group.

Here are the slides presented at SIG

We presented to quite a large number of people (we had three one-hour demo sessions) and –remember we are at an academic conference with people from the CSCW research area – we collected some interesting questions as usual, such as:

• What are we doing for collaboration, i.e., can venues be shared and used by different people? We have ideas about this aspect, and our architecture already allows that in principle, but we are now focusing on individual users, to better understand the best way to support them. Moreover, we would need many itsme systems around to really have to support collaboration, don’t you think?
• How we plan to get revenues from what we do, and I have already briefly answered to this question on this website, just read here.
• Can designers customise the user interface at a general and at venue level? Yes, we are working on a plugin mechanism that will enable adding customized channels to venues, and widgets or generic resources as well… of course it isn’t ready yet.

People got very interested to what we had to show, and stopped us to know more about the project and how it could be possible to contribute or collaborate. We received some interesting recommendations and suggestions (that we are already circulating in the tech team) and we really hope that the conversation with these people will go on in the next weeks, once we all will be back home.

Here are the slides… even if I admit shuffling them a little bit during the speech to follow the prominent interests of the different audences.

P.S. Take a look at Flickr and see if you can spot us or someone else you know

Some notes by Matteo penzo ,where Giorgio has been quoted twice.
Twitter feed by emilabirascid and innodinner
Photostream of Marco Massarotto

enjoy

The tutorial was splitted in two parts:

• During the firs part, Giorgio presented the itsme vision grounding on CSCW ideas. This was an essential part to make the tutorial alike to a teaching experience, so that participants could learn something or at least have some references to ‘old-school’ research literature – which is often unknown to who has approached to the discipline in recent years.
• During the second part, I went into the research details: interaction design and development issues. The audience was quite heterogeneous, with people interested in CSCW and cooperation in general, ubiquitous and context-aware computing, Semantic Web and (most of all) social computing. Actually, very few of the participant seemed to be into system design and engineering, and I had to go pretty slow on some parts (unfortunately we had a limited amount of time ) and I realized that we’re probably ready to start delivering a new kind of talks and seminars, more robust on a technical side.

Here are the slides:

1. consolidate our relations with Sugarlabs: we met the director of the initiative and discovered an ongoing convergence between our two projects. It really seems we can get together to develop some pieces of software together. Probably a first official step in this direction might be the organization of a joint worksop durin an open source conference soon (so stay tuned for more details)
2. get feedback on our project from researchers at MIT media lab: we had the chance to give a short talk to the members of the design lab – we also participated to the reviews of some students’ project on sustainability (what a honor!) Basically, some of the questions asked by the design lab guys are those who always come (e.g., why develop a new workstation and sell a machine, that we’ve answered here before) while some others were quite puzzling. Let me mention just one:
   

   You say you are developing a brand new workstation, so what are you going to do with the caps lock key? It’s really useless and it makes me go crazy, moreover, writing caps is like shouting so you shouldn’t have it… do you plan to replace it with something more useful?

   I really had no answer to that