The Itsme expedition has just come back from Bruxelles, where I and three other developers from the Tech team had a great time at FOSDEM 2010.
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...
We've participated in the Collective Intelligence for Organizations workshop at CSCW2010: many different visions and approaches have been presented by the various speakers (you can read the selected papers here) and several interesting discussions have taken place. Besides presentations, the participants have been split in different groups in order to discuss the problems related to defining a research agenda for Collective Intelligence (here the summary of the discussion). We really noticed that our proposal of working on workstations to achive a higher level of contribution to Collective Intelligence implicitly applies to, and could improve, every other proposal or...
On January 12th we released FSter, Guglielmo's Virtual File System. Since then, besides carrying on the implementation, we have been fostering and monitoring online discussions about it. Moreover, we have taken the opportunity offered us by Tracker guys to give a very short presentation about FSter at FOSDEM 2010 in Bruxelles. If you happen to be there next weekend (February 6-7), why not stop and talk with one of the four members of the itsme team that will be there? Lorenzo, Bob, Michele, and Fabio will be extremely glad to answer all your questions about our projects.
Here's an extended verion...
Just a quick note to tel you know that Michele and I will attend Maemo Summit this weekend, in Amsterdam. We are particularly interested in this event because of our recent involvement with the Tracker project – a specific post will follow. Unfortunately, we will not be having a talk or some dedicated space, but we will be around and always willing to talk with anyone who might be interested in our project. We'll wear itsme pins, so it shouldn't be hard to spot us in the crowd...
Alessandro and I have been presenting itsme at Communities and Technologies 2009 in State College, Pennsylvania (USA). Our demo started with a very short description of the itsme idea (scenario and approach) and we went then into the details of the two things we have ready to be shown in these days: the emulator (try it out!) and our 0.3 technical prototype (still for internal use only, sorry).
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...
Our proposal for a Special Interest Group (SIG) at Interact 2009 has been accepted. We will then be organizing an event, similar to a workshop, in Uppsala (Sweden) next August (26-28). The title of the SIG is "Designing Interaction for Next Generation Personal Computing", so it's somehow more generic than the talks we ususally do at conferences. In fact, this will be a chance to organize a broader discussion on interaction and design (with respect to workstation and situatedness of actions in particular). Here's the abstract:
Over two decades of research in the field of Interaction Design and Computer Supported Cooperative...
It's not easy to gather people in a room to assist to a tutorial, especially in a place like Sanibel Island – where GROUP2009 is taking place. Rather than trying to force people to pay attention to our speech, we decided to meet the interested ones during the poster session, giving them a chance to freely and directly ask whatever questions they had in mind and to preview our Web emulator (coming in the next weeks!) and our 0.1 prototype. We spoke to 20-some professional researchers and graduate students in the fields of social computing and CSCW (and similar) and...
Yesterday we made our debut in germany at EUD'09, with Giorgio's talk. The talk illustrated the main features of itsme(from a design and technology viewpoint), explaining how the roots of itsme workstation are grounded in the CSCW research, and the many interaction and collaboration possibilities itsme offers to interested groups and users. The audience was mostly composed of computer scientists, academics who do their research paying great attention to users. The talk was followed by a series of questions, mostly the ones that follows us everywhere: why are we planning to have a specific hardware, and not only developing software,...
Yesterday, the tech team held a seminar to present the on-going activities at the development front, process so far and activities planned for the future(not so far away). The audience was challenging: experts in the area, professors from DISCo, and investors, who were there to know details about the software we are developing – in the end, that’s the core business of our company!
We explained to them the major problems we are facing at the moment (e.g., licensing policies), motivated our basic choices (e.g., development method, phylosophy, and strategies), and described the features of some of our main...
