society

Open Data : one step closer on data with infolab

Infolab kickoff. On the 11th of April, a workshop gathered 70 opendata enthusiasts in Paris. It was organized by La Fing, a french organization which creates, detects and shares novel and actionable ideas to anticipate digital transformations [1], in collaboration with Simon Chignard opendata activist and writer, Claire Gallon from LiberTIC association @LiberTIC promoting opendata, and Sarah Labelle @sl_lab, researcher on Communication and Information Science in Paris Université 13 [2]. The driver for such meeting was to initiate and support a two years program focusing on data, data in all its aspects : data quality, open data, data viz, data we love you. This ambitious program relies on the creation of an Infolab, a physical and digital place where anyone could find recipes to improve data quality, to make the importance of data understood by companies, to mediate the data to the citizen. Going beyond the dogma that open data is a super-exciting-major-topic, the workshop, lead by Amandine Brugière ‏ @abrugiere was really constructive. Representatives from different sectors were here to garantee that conversations hapening here were applicable to private and public sector. Attendees counted : delegations from regions and territories of Nantes, Bordeaux, Rennes, Paris, Poitiers, Lyon, Marseille, but also La Poste, Alcatel Lucent, Silicon Sentier (a startup enabling association), gemalto, caisse des dépôts, … All condidtions were met to make progress on the topic, as mentioned by Gael Musquet, supporting Open Street Map project [2].

Work and findings. Participants split into several workshops. One dedicated to surname data – and what to do with it, driven by Simon Chignard @schignard. A second related to data usage in corporation, driven by Charles Nepote @charlesnepote. A third one related to data visualization, driven by Vincent Mandinau @VincentMandinau and Hervé Paris from ANACT @Anact_, a national agency for improving working conditions. Some experimental findings from it :

–          Data representing companies today, accessible on the web thanks to google search are not efficiently controlled. Google algorithms are a science and companies should learn more about it. We all know that competitive advantage sometimes relies today on a good digital positioning. in addition, harmonization of data format, in a single organization or across several organizations is a nightmare. We all experienced that filling a database with MyCompañy or My Compañy or MYCOMPANY will induce fuzzy statistics. there are definitely rooms of improvement in the private sector to make data relevant.

–          Data usage has to be invented and the best way to do that is to play with sets of data, cross hints, explore intuition and find the queries you would expect t answer. Act before thinking in other words.

–          Data visualization is a good mean to practice *and* discuss the data. A demonstrator was made on unemployment data and attendees could reverse engineer the maps to build their own view. That practice was a wonderful pretext to discuss data and what they could reveal.

Some perspective. Finally an academic presentation was made by Sarah Labelle. Sarah explained the notion of “mediation to citizen” : the fact to encourage people to appropriate a specific topic or knowledge. She illustrated usages in different areas : culture, innovation, pedagogy. In each of those domains, it was demonstrated that recent trends were to mediate via tools. Teachers do integrate experiments in their lessons, museum do play with the visitors, allowing them to have audio guide, interacts with the art pieces. All findings around that kind of mediation could be tested in the area of data.

Infolab proposal. Infolab is offering to create the natural eco-system for progressing. It aims to inspect the possible tools and means to reach the people and make them having at least an opinion, at most an appropriate action plan on how to make data usable and how to exploit them in a smart way. The debate following the workshop raised some questions related to key questions such as what would a data museum look like, how to balance tool and democracy, what is the place of script and non-script in the data treatment, …Large questions that may find answers in the next Infolab meeting.

Super, when do we work again ? Participants were invited to meet again during the opendata european week which will be organized in Marseille, from the 25 to 28th of June, as announced by Stéphane Martayan @smartayan in collaboration with Provence region and La Fing. Save the date of the 27th of June and book your agenda [4] !

* translation of Gael tweet : all actors of french open data are here in the Infolab meeting, a nice familly picture in the house of association from Paris

[1] La Fing http://fing.org/?About-Fing&lang=fr

[2] Sarah Labelle research domain [fr] http://labsic.univ-paris13.fr/index.php/labelle-sarah

[3] Open Street Map project OSM http://www.openstreetmap.org/

[4] Collaborative day during the open data european week in Marseille, registration http://fr.amiando.com/DSXFDLF.html

Note : Link to a previous post ‘Opendata : a postcard from France’ https://poulpitablog.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/opendata-postcard-from-france/

Your unconnected tatoo will soon be sooo vintage…

 Imagine. Take all the buzz words you hear in the digital planet [social media, cloud, crowd sourcing, e-health, open data] and instead of claiming it is the future and cross-finger, you analyze the new usages and sociological impacts they trigger. This is what Netexplo team is running after, each year. How can that magic happen ? Netexplo is sponsored by (rich) members, and is funding a team which analyses, collects, segments each year 500 innovative digital projects. Worldwide. 100 projects are selected and 10 of them are pitched during the Netexplo Forum in front of hundreds of attendees. I was there last February and let me witness that attending Netexplo Forum was a real experience. Just like learning the best of digital in two days.

What made the digital world shaking in 2012 ? Julien Levy was the spokesman of Netexplo team this year and exposed the identified trends. Obviously the Netexplo Trends report 2013 can not be sum up in few lines, but some of the key concepts were shared during Julien talk [1]. Cloud, appearance, digital immanence. Each of the concept was illustrated by projects developed by start up or research labs. Lets review the main concepts.

Cloud Care. Thanks to the network built by the connected people, machines and devices, some amazing services can be invented.

Taking care of objects. By deploying sensors and processors everywhere, it is possible to monitor a grid of water pumps, or balance the humidity of a natural eco-system.

Taking care of people. By connecting patients, robots, doctors, application can ease the patient journey. This may be particularly valid for the elders, who can be helped in their day to day life. Care Square was one of the projects awarded, which principle resided in a very simplified tablet, offering basic graphic user interface.

Taking care of opinion. By collecting opinion, comments, views, people can fine-tune their own opinion, choosing to endorse or not others advices.

Crowd cops. Taking care all together, replacing cops. By connecting the people and calling on their vigilance, material incidents can be declared in cities, or rescue team can be supported by bringing more local information, family and relatives can monitor each other, consumers can also report bad usages of companies or politics. This can be a way to introduce again solidarity among people. But the dark side of the crowd cop also exists. Employers tracking employees. Shops tracking customers. The right balance may be in the mutual agreement of monitoring and being monitored (but who knows what are the condition for a real free agreement).

Beyond the appearance. The main question for citizen and consumers facing the digital ocean is : Will web 2.0 marketing fool me ? How can I detect the truth behind the messages ? New expertise is required here and the collective experience collected thanks to the crowd may be a great tool to balance the super marketing machines.

Fact checking. By measuring the reality, thanks to sensors, the reality can be augmented, and become an augmented reality for everyone. Reality can be transmitted to disabled, to countermeasure their disability. Additional information about item, food, goods, books, can be found just by taking picture, recording sound, using laser. An interesting example is the China Survival Manual, an anonymous application, which alerts consumers to health risks. Another application which has been intensively adverted those days is the french ‘Citoyens Capteurs‘ (citizen as sensors), selected in the 100 projects, which allows each citizen to measure the air pollution and participate to scientific experiment. A last example awarded in the top 10 was Zéro-Gâchis, a application allowing supermarket to declare their items close to their sell-by date in nearby supermarkets. Less wastage, better consumption, more respect for the earth and production cycle.

Body Checking. The same applies to body. Blood pressure can be detected on faces, leading to potential interpretation of emotions. Parkinson can be diagnosed by voice analysis from 20 minutes of sample conversation (see Parkinson Voice Initiative project). health care can become in that case hell scary.

Reality and digital merging. Where the reality is helping you in your day to day life, with no effort from you. the connection, the context, the integration of the machines or devices are a support for the citizen. example with the Google glasses, but also the shoes guiding your way, lightened on the right when you should turn right. The best illustration for that amazing integration was Windows Of Opportunity WOO. WOO makes the windows of car a new area to play, to learn, to share. While driving in Paris, you may see the window of another car driving in Tokyo. You could also share music from other drivers stuck in the same traffic jam… WOO is a technology providing an interactive and contextual screen, in which you can imagine any funny or educative application. The winner of the Netexplo report was the Electronic Tatoos, a technology allowing to lay some electronic circuit on the skin, flexible and resistant enough to look like a tatoo. While not being already deployed, the technological challenge was amazing enough to make everyone dreaming or being frightened by the large scale of possible applications. Imagine, you wear data and emit messages, anytime…

Digital immanence. The digital and the real do not have borders, they are the world. More then having physical or technological fusion, you have a personal involvement in digital, that may affect your emotion, soul, mental illness. SPARX is a game to help depressive teenagers understanding their illness and highlight progresses. Teenagers do recover easily playing in a virtual society… you just need to design the appropriate situations and dialogs.

To sum-up. Trends covered the connected device, machine, people, brains. And Julien Levy ended with an embarrassing question – while we were all tweeting and surfing. What about usages in case our world would be disconnected. Panic ? Alternatives ? This may be a good topic for 2014 Netexplo Forum.

Which of the 2012 innovations will shape 2013 ? Probably none of them. Those innovations may definitely need to mature before they become actual democratic usages, so we should better wait for them in two or three years. Netexplo Forum offered a really good picture of where the digital world may go and it is up to each of us to think about the kind of word we want to shape for the future….

[1] Netexplo trends by Julien Levy http://www.netexplo.org/replays/2013/trend-report-2013

Note : look at the Bluenod map to track who tweeted what during the event Day1 : http://bluenod.com/event/nexplo_2013_day1 Day2 : http://bluenod.com/event/nexplo_2013_day2 (Twitter account required)

I spent a game week-end : atmosphere and trends

La_Priere_by_Kia2What can gather people from 1 month to 99 years old in Cannes during 3 days ? The International Festival of Games [1]. Three days of free exhibition of games, with all major editors presenting their mainstream products but also prototypes.

Games ? Which ones ! Any type. Familly game, team game, card game, puzzle, dexterity game, kid games, mini billards, mega bar football, baby game, medieval game, game to loose your best friend, ace game… The impressive number of games is not the only amazing thing. The other one is that all editors and associations are here to make you play. You want to test the last version of the Werewolves game ? Come and seat with strangers and a kind presenter will organize a game with you. For free.

No pressure. What was also extraordinary during this event was that everyone entering the Palais des Festivals was ready to play. People on the booths are smiling, people around tables are having fun. When you bump someone in the crowd made of families, teenagers, grand parents, there is always a kind words, to transform the incident into a joke… You know, the special ambiance of ‘no pressure’…

All equal. Far from the usual game catalogs with blue for boys, pink for girls and maroon for the grand parents, here the mixing of population was incredible. Teenagers playing scrabble, father fighting with knight costume, grand parents yelling to win, the only stereotype that noone dared to hijack was the japanes-like school girl in the manga avenue.

Scrabble will never dye. Each of us has already played with the traditional family games (le jeu des milles bornes, monopoly, Uno, ..). Even on the side of the video game there were some conservatism. The association Replay [2], gathering activists of retrogaming, is  promoting the preservation of first video games and gave a chance to the youngest to play on commodore and enjoy pacman. I will not comment on the never dying traditional games. But I felt new things in the avenues of this exhibition.

Collaborative. Game is not anymore only about humiliating your friends during a game, late at night. This is now also about collaboration. A table may be a single team and all of us have to reach a common goal, all alive. An interesting game among them was Tokaïdo by FunForge [3].

Crowdfunding. While walking randomly I saw the ulule.com stand and its crowd funded games. Ulule is crowd funding platform that “make good thing happen” which has a section dedicated to game http://www.ulule.com/#!tags/games/ and the booth present in Cannes was really appealing (Coup d’un soir, Inside, cHTeMeLe the game to learn HTML5 coding).

Tablet and accessibility. Surprisingly, the trend was really to have real objects for game. It seems that the web games did not yet find a way to be represented in this kind of exhibition.Tray, cards, figurine, gamepad but few device-only based game. Nevertheless digital games were represented by the booth of some students, who demonstrated some family games fitting on an android tablet, the android tablet being the tray of the game. It was one of the scarce booth where disability (here sand blind) was taken into account.

Palmares. In the end. Some games were awarded by a jury. So called the As d’Or (Ace of Gold). It is available in french only under official press release and there might be at least one game tailored for you.

– ANDOR (Iello)
– CARDLINE ANIMAUX (Asmodee / Bombyx)
– CROC ! (Bombyx)
– INDIGO (Ravensburger)
– MERLIN ZINZIN (Fragames / Blackrock Editions)
– MITO (Gigamic)
– MYRMES (Ystari Games)
– SEASONS (Libellud)
– STRIKE (Ravensburger)
– TINO TOPINI (Ravensburger)
– STAR WARS : X-WINGS, le jeu de figurines (Edge)
– ZOMBICIDE (Edge / Guillotine Games)

I could also describe you the very special floor where challenges are happening, figurine warhammers confrontation, aside role playing games tournament closed to bridge tables. A special ambiance believe me. But the easiest for you to understand that special atmosphere would be to book now your tickets for next year festival. We may meet there !

[1] Festival International des Jeux – http://www.festivaldesjeux-cannes.com/2.aspx

[2] Association replay www.association–replay.fr/

[3] Tokaïdo http://www.funforge.fr/FR/news-des-jeux/tokaido-les-regles/

To go further for french people, several websites allowing to explore games : http://www.trictrac.fr/ or http://www.jeuxdenim.be/

Picture : La Prière by Ki² http://www.flickr.com/photos/ki-carre/

Enterprise 2.0 is looking for Super Heros !

super-hero-by-D-BoyarrinI am quite interested in social media, and grabbed for you during the Microsoft Tech Days how implementing such practice in large companies could be a challenge. Orange Business Services witnessed during a session about successful deployments of internal social media, this week, based on the Plaza project deployed in Orange and its digital consulting activity.

Context. OBS made a short reminder about social media in large companies, highlighting how hard it is to accommodate old management based on hierarchy, with the new spirit of open and collaborative 2.0 world. Daniel Gonçalves from OBS consulting reminded that most of the underlying principles required to establish a social media framework were already familiar to IT managers with people directory, document sharing, and collaboration enablers. Social media is just a mean to integrate all that experience in one tool, with turbo user experience, as users have a rich profile, can join community and follow and work on their reputation.

What is at stake ? It is demonstrated that all together people can be a smart as few experts. There are different reasons why a company would like to be smarter : to have more collaborators involved, to find new objective or new direction for the company, to boost innovation, to boost information exchange and learning. In Enterprise 2.0, to reach such goal, you develop communities of people. And for that, you need to have a good project team to roll out the plan.

Will the project leader fail ? Well maybe. From OBS experience, there are few things project managers should know to avoid committing suicide during the project :

– Social media learning takes time and takes your time;

– Do not under estimate the coincidence – hard to admit that 50% of campaigns success is viral, meaning coming from a propagation that you do not understand or predict;

– If naturally your company does not have the spirit of sharing and collaborate, you may have trouble to become a success stories in TechDays one day – it may happen but it will be seriously harder for you;

– Adoption of new tools requires that they are understood, and that their positioning is clear compared to others tools (I hate duplicating operations for my boss, right, so please if you give us two tools, convince me they do not overlap);

– There will be a hard battle happening between social media used for private circle (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest) and the great social media you plan to roll out. Great effort on the design and usability will be a must. Especially if your early adopters are already web 2.0 oriented;

–  90/9/1 is the contribution rate in communities, for 90 social media observer, there are 9 social media punctual contributor, and 1 social media regular contributor – one, yes, 1 on 100 people will post in information, so pray it will be relevant;

– The contributors are diva : they must know what is their interest to contribute, they must be confident using the tools, they wanna know the rules of the game, they must have fun, they must be sure their boss will appreciate it… You want them to give their best, you need to nurse them;

– The new technology adoption has very well known cycle : everyone speaks about it, people enrolls end contributes like hell, and 3 month after your dashboard indicates one comment per week. As such you need to inject your energy at the right moment and try to maintain engagement from the users.

Will you succeed ? Hum… maybe. The good news is that if you reach the end of your project according to the key success factors that you hardly negotiated at the beginning with your sponsors … Oups ! Nobody told you that you need sponsors in HR department *and* lT department *and* top management? Well, if you are able to reach the end of the project, you are a super hero. Actually you should be a super heros team. OBS Consulting shared also some interesting operational advices to increase your chance of success as a project team. Reporting here the one I preferred :

– Set up a good team with transverse skills, including developers – as you will have to customize the solution;

– Have an iterative approach and an open mind as your users will ask you the killing feature you did not think about;

– Have some relay or ambassador locally to explain and drive adoption (yeah, I know we said you need to be best friend with your CEO, but also best friend of your communities, but remember, you are a super hero).

Speaking product. Finally a demo was made by Huu-Phuc Tran from Alsy, an OBS affiliate. This could illustrate the features of what Microsoft considers as a good social media product, Share Point 2013. I must confess that the module demonstrated were impressive in term of user experience: Creating profile, joining community, winning badges to manage reputation, checking activities, interacting with others.  All the basics were available, but it was demonstrated that customization would be required to roll out a serious plan.

In the end. It was clear to the audience that the challenge of social media in companies was residing in the needed transverse and collaborative efforts. Good luck to the enterprise 2.0 world, I think you have a lots of energy to spend.  Between you and I, I wish you’ll succeed, because as a user, I already love what you promised me.

Note : Picture ‘Super Hero’ by D. Boyarrin under Creative Commons – http://www.flickr.com/photos/boyarrin/

Note : Other posts related to Microsoft Tech Days 2013 : Big Data, they unveiled the secret, Microsoft message to developers and A trip from a Digital Ocean to Orange’s Plaza [by Franck Martini].

Open Data – A postcard from France

Open Data – A postcard from France

Last week was held in Aix en Provence a public conference dealing with ‘Open Data and Citizen’ [ http://arsenicpaca.fr/]. The conference, organized by Arsenic PACA @arsenicpaca and lead by Philippe Méda @merkapt, was an opportunity to hear major french actors in the open data area. Here is what I could capture from that open day, mixing conference, panelist discussion and active brainstorms.

Open data – origin and today’s mood

While the 120 people gathered in the amphitheater of Aix En Provence Library, named La Méjane, were very educated about open data topic, Valérie Peugeot @valeriepeugeot, from Orange Labs and Vice President of French Digital Council (CNNum),  took some time to remind major aspects of the open data movement. She recalled open data origin based on citizen requiring from their government and politic representatives a better transparency. First laws in the US to allow citizen to access data were made in1966, but since, the topic has greatly evolved, with the arrival of the digital, which has pushed the citizen requirement from ‘let us watch the data’, to ‘let us make use and circulate the data’. On which a number of governments have answered positively, from left to right and from Americas to Europe, with first success stories in Africa. (more…)

How I became digital !

This will be a Friday confession. I have been entering the digital world two years ago. Yes only two years ago. I mean, I started working with internet in 1994 when studying at the university, sharing with other researchers, flirting with my boyfriend via talk and mails, but I have been exploiting the digital innovation and social media intensively since 2 years. And I must say it changed my life – and probably the one of my relatives.What is it that is so attractive to make me jumping and staying in this area ?

Data and tools

Why am I on the net ? Because I am trying to understand where our world is going, what are the evolutions the human being is currently living and how it is surviving to it. Great program, is not it ? And if you wanna get that information, you may have interest to be someone in the digital arena, be someone to join communities, have the information coming to you or be able to build a common understanding with others. And tools are there. I should say user friendly, free and easy to manage applications are available here and around. How to create your digital identity, how to understand the other one’s, how to record or track data, how to curate information. All is here, one click far from you. And even if I have a bias view due to the security environment I have the default to work for, I am able to have a digital life using those tools, taking care of my own privacy and security. I am concentrating myself on Twitter, blog with WordPress, LinkedIn, and playing with about.me and Klout – still trying to find what does those bring to me. But lets be frank, this is not tools that pushed me to stay digital. The others did. (more…)

ParisWeb 2012 : Tailor the web for the society you want

Yes ! A third contribution related to ParisWeb 2012 ! Because this event covered so much of the web that is deserves to spend pages on it. The web is not just a tool. It has an impact on the society. The way you use the web has an impact, the way you work for the web has an impact. I am gathering here some talks that touch some of the problems I find key for the “web society”.

Hacktivism. Origin : hack and activism. Fréderic Bardeau @fbardeau is working for Agence Limite, a web agency which serves non governmental organization to help them to build their digital strategy. Frédéric announced after few seconds of talk that he was not part of the cyber-enthousiast (like everything from the web is super cool), but rather a person with strong opinion, value, and positions [1]. He reminded us the definition and history of activist and hacking, to lead us to an approximate definition of what the hacktivist is, a.k.a someone who likes to crack things, perform, code and use digital communication, driven by art, politic or transgression. He admitted that this definition was flexible depending on regions, periods, aggressiveness, political commitment… But at least based on that we could start to discuss the new usage of hacktivist in the society today. (more…)

ParisWeb 2012 : Make an accessible web, make an accessible world

The web should be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities thanks to assistive technologies. Once you have claimed that, you should be on the right side of the good-thinking people, but it may happen that this would not change anything to your life. Not being neither deaf, sighted person or blind, I am part of the people who accepted this notion of accessibility as a must have, but kept it purely theoretical … until ParisWeb 2012. This was my first time I actually realized that accessibility was needed and possible. Let me share with you few concrete actions that Paris Web deployed to make everyone on the same page during the event.

Sign language all day long. The conference was held in different rooms and each of it has a team of 2 or 3 people providing all day long live translation with sign language.This support was completed by velotypie (meaning, a screen displayed on stage, where each and any words pronounced by the speaker, including jokes, was typed) and french live translation via headsets when speakers where expressing themselves in English. As you can guess, this is simple to organize : what you need is people with appropriate skills such as sign language, english translation (@porteneuve made the job), good typers… The best challenge here was to make the choice (and associated investment) to make the event accessible. (more…)

Power is contextual

(artbackwash.blogspot)

It happened few weeks ago that I had to attend a training related to safety. You know, this kind of training any employee should follow to have appropriate reflexes when facing  a situation where human lives could be saved or lost. You know, this kind of training  you have cancelled three times and feel guilty enough at the end to accept. This kind of training where, lets be honest, you get bored after one hour and which systematically ends with a psychotherapy style, each trainee telling his or her story about his uncle who had a terrible accident … well, you know.

Training begins, round table, attendees from different companies, different styles, different jobs. Trainer was great, managing smartly the group to keep us on track. But after 20 minutes, in spite of trainer efforts, it appeared that two people, while being in the room with us, were not with us. Guess who ? The big manager and the HR manager, both starring at their smartphone, fingers running, reading mails, chatting – smiles always trade you. The situation was so evident that the trainer had to lecture them – with humor, to make it acceptable.

On which two consequences : HR manager stopped typing but went on surfing ‘discreetly’ and the big manager answered ‘I am managing emergencies, you know’. He listened a bit before jumping again in his digital life. He raised his head some time to time to kindly participate, take the lead on the discussions, or influence the agenda. He is also the one who put pressure on the trainer at 11:58, reminding that there were two minutes left as indicated in the training program.

Few thoughts . Is that real that some people do not remember that professional power is only valid in certain situations ? Even if a manager has been conducted all his efforts to become a manager (e.g. sacrificing a lots of his private life) the potential power he handles is not universal. Specially in the current context where each of us has a chance developing multiple talents and expertise on professional and personal side. In addition, management is a skill for making right decisions for choosing appropriate strategy and people to make a company profitable, but this does not mean that those skills are applicable to any domain – specially in safety.

Smart managers are the ones who are able to listen, and learn in each situation, including in boring ones. The ones who are able to remember that their power is contextual, non transferable and temporary – so they should not get used too much to it.