Tutkimus.parvi.fi

The final proposal text for the Somus project.

• 14.11.2008 Somus project was accepted into MOTIVE program (Ubiquitous Computing and Diversity of Communication) of the Academy of Finland. (List of all funded projects)
• 25.4.2008 The final project proposal of "Somus - Social Media for Citizens and Public Sector Collaboration" was submitted to MOTIVE program
• 31.1.2008 Somus research intention was submitted to MOTIVE program

Earlier versions and discussion can be found on following pages (in Finnish):

• • Somus meeting 27.03.2008
• SOMUS planning
• SOMUS draft version
• Other drafts (not utilized)
  • Research intention 2: Citizen's Open Innovation Swarm - Modeling, Designing and Piloting Innovation Process with Open Social Media (to be edited as a Tekes project?)
  • Research intention 3: Ubiquitous Social Media in People's Everyday Communication

SOMUS - Social Media for Citizens and Public Sector Collaboration

Sisällysluettelo 1 Abstract 2 Basic information 3 Background 3.1 Conceptualising socially embedded media use 3.2 Information, knowledge, action – and citizenship 4 Objectives 4.1 Vision 2015 4.2 Aims of the project 4.3 Connections to MOTIVE Research Programme 5 Case studies and sub-projects 5.1 Participatory media 5.2 Immigrant media 5.3 Instant media 5.4 Community-driven design 5.5 Mashup technologies 6 Implementation 6.1 Work packages 6.1.1 WP0: Management 6.1.2 WP1: Theoretical framework 6.1.3 WP2: Methodology 6.1.4 WP3: Technology development 6.1.5 WP4: Field studies 6.1.6 WP5: Dissemination 6.2 Schedule 6.3 Finance 6.4 Open research approach 6.5 Ethical issues 7 Research group 7.1 Consortium members and international collaboration 7.2 Collaboration network 7.3 Research environment 8 Expected results and impacts 9 References

Abstract

The SOMUS project will create new understanding of citizenship, publicity and participation in decision-making in the era of social media. Open, citizen-driven media must support the different phases of participation: public definition of common problems, collection and accumulation of knowledge and other competencies, development of socially grounded innovations, and actual decision-making.

The new forms of participation, citizen-driven media concepts and self-organizing networks will be studied by designing, testing and evaluating web and mobile services that collect, develop and re-distribute information drawn from public sector data resources, mass media outlets and the social networks of citizens. These mashup services will be developed within three case studies that are named Participatory media, Immigrant media and Instant media. Citizens and communities will be taken as active participators in the design process. Users will not only be provided new media services, but also a platform and tools for creating their own mashup services filling their needs.

The main objectives of the project are:

1. To produce basic knowledge about dynamics of information, knowledge and citizenship in the participative media environment
2. To develop new technical solutions for user-driven media service development
3. To demonstrate and evaluate new media concepts that are enabled through open interfaces between public sector, mass media and citizen groups
4. To create and validate a model for open Internet-based research in collaboration with The Open Research Swarm and collaboration network of different actors

The project will result in understanding the phenomenon of self-organizing ubiquitous media as well as theories, methods and demonstrations that will be evaluated in real life situations with users.

Basic information

Applicant:

Caj Södergård, Research Professor

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland

P.O.Box 1000, FI-02044 VTT

Phone: +358 20 722 5963

Email: caj . sodergard at vtt . fi

Project name:

Social Media for Citizens and Public Sector Collaboration (SOMUS)

Research sites:

The research will be carried out in four Finnish research organizations and in an online research network.

Research groups and their leaders:

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), Media and Internet, Espoo	Caj Södergård
Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), Department of Media Technology, Espoo	Petri Vuorimaa
University of Jyväskylä (JyU), Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Jyväskylä	Esa Konttinen
University of Tampere (UTA), The Journalism Research and Development Centre, Tampere	Risto Kunelius
The Open Research Swarm (ORSi), Online network, http://tutkimus.parvi.fi	self-organizing

Background

Much of what we know and assume about the interaction between public organisations, the media and the people is based on a vocabulary of the mass media age. The public sphere – its potentials and problems – have largely been theorized in terms of a relatively stable, modern, institutional division of labour. Many of the classics in this field (cf. Dewey 1927/2006, Habermas 1962/ 2004) draw much their intellectual energy from the discrepancy between a belief in the potential of citizens as participants in the public domain and the criticism of the structural conditions in which this participation has to take place. This same tension has also defined the lively literature of criticism (cf. Calhoun 1992, Crossley & Roberts 2004, Mouffe 1999).

The current changes in politics, culture and society in general and the media landscape in particular set new challenges to the mediated relationship between citizens and government. The conditions of public discussion, and the role of media in it – or to put it more radically, the very definition of media – is under constant change. Technological, economic, sociological and cultural trends partly redefine the roles played by people, politicians, experts and government officials and media professionals. (cf. Benkler 2006, Jenkins 2006, Deuze 2007). As the notion of life politics (Giddens 1991) suggests, citizens are involved in the societal issues not only from the viewpoints of their role as citizens, or a member of a class, or other relatively stable reference group, but increasingly they enter the public life from diverse positions in which their complex and changing identities and interests play a crucial role. In addition to the social and cultural diversity, ubiquitous media technology has added the factor of situational diversity in to the matrix: uses and needs of information and knowledge are also contextually changing. The informational needs of a citizen depend on not only who he or she is but also where and when he/she is.

This changing landscape offers an exceptionally fruitful chance to further develop our theoretical and conceptual understanding of how people enter the public domain as citizens, and as users and co-producers of knowledge. It also opens and redefines the interfaces between public or official information resources, mainstream (mass) media and the everyday life of people.

The SOMUS project adopts a multi-stakeholder approach where also civil society, organizations, the media etc. are considered to play their role in the governance. By developing concrete case studies focused around particular themes and problems we will look at how some of the burning problems of today, combined with some of the newest technological innovations of today can provide us new knowledge about how modes of public participation – and the roles played by various stakeholders in this interaction – can vary. Equally importantly, SOMUS looks at how the contextual interests, knowledge and needs of these participants can be used as a resource in technological development.

Conceptualising socially embedded media use

From the perspective of social sciences, the crucial theoretical questions of this project relate to conceptualizations of the interfaces between the various kinds of media, and the relationship (or interaction) between information, knowledge, and (civic) action.

In the traditional modern institutional division of labour, the information practices of the public sector, the mass media and life-world information flows are seen as distinct. For some time now, these boundaries have been moving. The rhetoric of citizen participation tends to hide the power taking place in local planning and decision-making processes, the concrete difficulties in the dialogue between the government and the citizens, and the questions of expertise: how information becomes knowledge and what kind of knowledge is legitimate and appreciated in decision-making. Earlier research and the experiences of local decision-making processes have shown that there are problems in the interaction between these different actors. (Bäcklund 2007, Bäcklund et al 2002, Harju 2002, Heikkilä & Lehtonen 2003, Häikiö 2005, Leino 2006, Rättilä 2001, Staffans 2004.)

However, what makes the focus on mashup concepts and demonstrations very fruitful and important is the fact they enable us to look how all these three sources of information (public sector, mass media, life-world information) merge and are actively merged by their users.

By studying how different institutional actors of the public sector and the mass media view these services, and how various civil society actors (both organisations and individual users) use and evaluate these services we will develop a sociologically embedded analysis of the usability of the mashup concepts.

Information, knowledge, action – and citizenship

Both in social sciences as well as in studies concerning technological development and design, a more detailed understanding is needed about how civic participation evolves in the new networked media environment. Our conceptual focus in this project is to empirically elaborate our understanding of how information, knowledge and participation are intertwined in a process which grows from the recognition of problems and stakeholders into building and sharing competences in interactive environments.

In terms of understanding participation, two sets of conceptual distinctions may be useful. First we can think of dimension information-knowledge-action. Information in the research refers to the mutually shared flows between in various stakeholders and participants of a site. Knowledge, however refers to information that has been set into or seen within an interpretative framework which in turn relates to the practical needs of the people using the service. Thus, knowledge is something always linked to particular users and their needs, values and goals. Action – for instance participation in an urban planning project – is thus in one sense the ‘final’ interpretation of information, informed by the cultural and social structures of knowledge.

A second dimension needed in order to make sense of the dynamics of how citizenship emerges is to look at the bottom up process where people become involved in a) public definition of common problems, b) collection and accumulation knowledge and other competencies, c) development of socially grounded innovations, as well as d) actual decision-making.

Social media solutions and innovations in general – and particularly new media applications embedded in a social media network – provide a concrete opportunities to link changing forms of citizenship, resources for civic participation and its connections to everyday life into a theoretical framework that both elaborates some traditional concepts of social sciences and media research (such as the formation of publics, participation, the boundary between the private and public etc) but also challenges us to re-think some of the older categories and their usability (such as the notion of the audience, the idea of fairly stable target groups, etc).

Objectives

Vision 2015

We share the vision of efficient web democracy as stated in the Finnish Government’s National knowledge society strategy for 2007–2015 (Valtioneuvosto 2006). In 2015 citizens may participate in the society easily as a part of their everyday life. Public decision-making starts from grass-root level actions and it should be transparent for all citizen groups. Citizens challenge public administration and media companies to better achievements via self-organizing networks that support public-citizen partnership and make communication and operation efficient in diverse situations. Wisdom of crowds is utilized in public sector by delegating some issues for citizens to solve, which leads to better and more efficient solutions. Realization of the vision requires collectively built competences and open sharing of basic knowledge, which we aim in the SOMUS project.

Aims of the project

The project has four main objectives:

1. To produce basic knowledge about dynamics of information, knowledge and citizenship in the participative media environment
2. To develop new technical solutions for user-driven media service development
3. To demonstrate and evaluate new media concepts that are enabled through open interfaces between public sector, mass media and citizen groups
4. To create and validate a model for open Internet-based research

These objectives will be achieved through the case studies decribed in the chapter 4, during which several demonstrations of new media service concepts will be produced and evaluated. Different aspects will be studied during the cases as follows:

• Community-driven design of media services, participatory design, user experience (VTT)
• Mashups services, connecting information sources, propagation of event information (TKK)
• Self-organizing networks, impact on civil society, activation of citizens / third sector (JyU)
• Interaction between government, citizens and media, social media in civic networks (UTA)

Connections to MOTIVE Research Programme

MOTIVE research programme aims at generating new knowledge, principles and technical solutions to promote human-centred ubiquitous society. The changes in media field must be studied from the citizens' and users' point of view. The SOMUS project will focus on civil society and the new possibilities ubiquitous media may provide citizens and among their self-organizing, spatial and ad-hoc networks. We will study both the new forms of communication between different actors: government officials, media companies, third sector, civil organizations and citizens, and the technical solutions that empower these channels via Internet, mobile and other devices.

We understand media broadly as a form of interaction, participation and influencing, providing both the information and the possibilities for citizens to take part in the society and decision-making. The media environment of citizens consists of channels and services provided by existing commercial and administrative institutions as well as by emerging new forms and solutions. When studying the impact of new media channels on democracy and publicity, developing new ways of opening up these interfaces is a crucial focal point. Issues like personalization of information, needs of different citizen groups, privacy and reliability of information need to be considered. Multidisciplinarity will be ensured by doing the research and sharing the results openly on the Web and stimulating there discussion between disciplines.

Case studies and sub-projects

The SOMUS project consists of three problem- and community based case studies that study different user groups, their information needs and ways of building shared knowledge. The project will develop, build and test mashup solutions in three particular cases. Solving the problems and challenges in different stages will provide material for the fourth sub-study: the usefulness of open environments in technological development. In this sub-study the project will involve both members of the communities in which mashups are developed as well as draw from a more general open community of technological developers at The Open Research Swarm. The fifth sub-study provides technical solutions for the purposes of the three cases.

In each case, the project aims at conceptually tracing the process by which recoginition of problems leads to needs and gathering of information which in turn transforms to knowledge by shared action in and outside the Internet. The information interests as well as the time frame of the processes vary a great deal depending on the issues, and the actor groups involved. This provides important diversity for the analyzed user experiences. In each case the mashup starts by combining (at minimum) official data sources (municipalities, parliament, and ministeries), mass media (local, national, international) and ngo-actors. In each case, we expect this to be a skeleton which will be greatly enriched and diversified by the links and interests of the users.

Also, in each case, the research works through a similar model of investigation, starting from mapping the needs and imagination of the community (of interest) in question, followed by a experimental concept of the mashup and a period of first trial, followed again by another round of iteration. The case studies of the research project are offering contexts where to study and evaluate the use of social media tools, both mobile and web based, in the use of different user groups who have their specific information interests, and in processes where the time frame and the pace of information are different.

The cases and sub-projects with their goals, results and responsibilities are shown in the Table 2.

Table 2. Sub-projects with their goals and responsibilities

Cases and sub-projects	Goals	Responsible group (other participants)	Results
Participatory media	Public services that support citizens' participation in local decision-making, mashups that combine and visualize public, commercial, and social media	UTA (VTT, TKK, JyU, ORSi)	Pilots, theories
Immigrant media	Personalized media service for public information in accessible form for all citizen groups from their viewpoints	VTT (UTA, TKK, JyU)	Pilots, theories
Instant media	Self-organizing media networks in extraordinary situations combining information from public sector, media companies, third sector, and citizens	JyU (TKK, VTT, UTA, ORSi)	Models, theories
Community-driven design	Open participatory design empowering communities	VTT (TKK, UTA, ORSi)	Model, methods
Mashup technologies	Development of innovative services and tools for users to create their own mashups	TKK (VTT, ORSi)	Technologies, prototypes

Participatory media

In the case study of participatory media the aim is to develop and evaluate web based tools that serve for citizens’ participation in local planning processes and decision-making. Two school classes in Espoo and Tampere will be chosen as user groups. The case study is linked to sustainable development but the idea is to obtain a grassroots perspective by letting the pupils themselves define the exact issues and questions they are interested in, in connection to their localities.

Starting with the information interests of pupils themselves and developing the mashups according to their needs will result in showing how social media technology enables networking with other local groups that pupils will consider important in their chosen issues, and how gathering, modifying and sharing the information in mashups is used in striving towards possible solutions in the problems in question. The case study also serves in mapping the critical points where web based information sharing and knowledge building may turn to local action which aims to influence in the local decision-making.

By focusing on (high) school students, the project searches for a link to the quickly emerging new media landscape of younger generations where communities of identity and interests are formed. The case study draws from ongoing research at the Journalism Research Centre (UTA) on the changing media landscape of children and youth. (Kupiainen et al 2006, Noppari et al 2008, Rättilä 2007.)

Immigrant media

The case study of immigrant media focuses on developing social media tools for immigrant groups in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The media environment and the information interests of immigrants often differ from the ones of other inhabitants in Finland. The case study aims to developing an information and knowledge platform for immigrant groups in accessible and understandable form based on their everyday life needs and issues. To begin with the main goals are (as in the case of students) to enable their participation in the processes of knowledge building and public discussion, and establish open interfaces and interaction between immigrants, public sector and the mass media.

Just as in the case of students, but in a different way, this case study looks at a community of interest which is situated at ‘border’ of citizenship. This case study draws from earlier and ongoing research at the Journalism Research Centre (UTA) where the media uses and needs of immigrant groups are being studied (Luostarinen et al 2007, Maasilta et al 2008, Raittila 2007).

Instant media

The participatory media as a whole is very appropriate to the longstanding processes, like communal planning and for participatory democracy. But in unusual situations citizens and mass media need information instantly. This process is iterative: the facts and needed actions are sharpening gradually. There are several messages to be broadcasted simultaneously, newer and older, truth and false, but the collective intelligence is very self-correcting and start soon repeat and broadcast the same, newest and true messages like an audience start to harmonizing its clapping with the same rhythm very soon after the end of a concert (Watts 2003).

For instant media, it is vital to create self-organizing networks of several communication channels and devices including citizens, administration and mass media. A single person might not follow television, internet or radio, and in special situations some media channels are also vulnerable. Thus no single media network is enough. We need open networks combined by traditional mass media, the Internet and mobile networks and several channels or platforms inside them for covering all the administration and citizens - including those abroad. As digital technology is more and more adapted by societies and citizens, the need for interlocal communication is also rising. This means that the people at one physical place need information from another location and vice versa.

The aim of this case study is to create a demonstration for instant media service that combines independent and open information sources and flows, like realtime RSS feeds and mashups, and where all actors can reuse and remix information as equally as legally possible. The solution will be tested at a rescue rehearsal, where information flows and actions between actors will be studied.

One of the strengths of the Internet is that it allows using several operating systems, devices, channels etc. This creates less vulnerable wholeness than single technologies like radio or television broadcasting. Internet-based mass media is also very powerful with large audiences, almost unlimited information storage and capacity to create realtime and updated information simultaneously.

Community-driven design

In the human-computer interaction research the focus is moving from designing products and services to designing users’ capabilities. That means giving the design power to users and providing them with tools that enable them to design their own products and services by themselves. This can be called meta-design (Fischer et al. 2006) or end-user development (Liebermann et al. 2006). Meta-design creates open systems that can be modified by their users and evolved at use time according to those needs that arise when people use the systems.

Social media brings us from information society to communication society where people create, upload and share content on the web using it as a medium for communication rather than purely information retrieval. More radically, in addition to content producers people may also become service designers and developers, when they are provided with tools that fit their needs and are easy enough to use. Different tools and open web environments that support community-driven design and development of media services will be explored and evaluated during the project also based on previous studies at VTT (Näkki 2006, Näkki et al. 2008).

The SOMUS project takes user communities and citizens as active participants in all the three case studies. Existing and evolving communities will take part in planning and partly also implementing services that they need. We concentrate on creating platforms and design environments that help those users to innovate services for participatory, immigrant, and instant media.

Mashup technologies

In the technology sub-project services, platforms and tools will be provided for citizens. At TKK declarative user interfaces and REST based mashups will be developed. The development will be done in close interaction with other more techonology oriented projects at TKK (funded by ICT SHOK Flexible services programme), which provides a lot of synergy benefits. In the SOMUS project especially tools and platforms for end-user-driven mashup development will be developed.

Mashups will also be developed by some members of the Open Research Swarm, as well as the participants of the case studies.

Implementation

The possibilities and challenges regarding to open public-citizen partnership via different media channels and technical solutions can be best studied in real life context. In the project several mashups will be developed and tested with users. In addition to the mashups developed by the project team, an open competition will be arranged to get more The three case studies are tied together by the fact that they use, test and develop similar technological solutions and apply a similar structure of inquiry (see above). In addition, the results and interpretations they produce can be drawn together and synthesized through the conceptual apparatus presented above. Both participatory media and immigrant media cases focus on on communities of interest which are situated in the borderline of traditional, formal citizenship. Thus, their results are drawn together by discussions and theories of citizenship and public participation. Instant media, on the other hand articulates the changing relations of time, space and interests in a different manner, but broadens the scope of discussing the relationship between information, interests knowledge and action. The sub study on open environment technological development offers yet another articulation on the questions of interests, community and participation.

Work packages

The work is divided in six work packages (WP0-WP5). The structure of work packages and case studies is illustrated in the Figure 1.

Figure 1. Workpackage and case structure.

WP0: Management

Management activities include reporting to the Academy of Finland and communication within the project group and publicly. The project team is geographically located in three cities, and therefore online collaboration tools, such as wiki, emails, instant messaging and video conferencing will be used for communication within the project team. The team will also meet in face-to-face meetings at least five times each year.

Since The Open Reseach Swarm is part of the project consortium, open online communication plays an important role in the project. A project blog with several authors and Jaiku or other online forum will provide a channel for open discussion on the Web.

Management activities include also arranging the workshops with the collaboration network (spring 2009, spring 2010), the end seminar of the project (autumn 2010) and a workshop in an international conference (autumn 2010).

WP1: Theoretical framework

Theoretical framework will be developed for civic participation (UTA), collective intelligence (JyU) and community-driven design (VTT). Theories will be developed within the case studies.

Each iteration cycle begins with theoretical examination and literature review and based on the results and experiences from the field studies, theoretical framework will be developed further.

WP2: Methodology

Qualitative methods such as interviews and group interviews are used in various phases of the research project:

• Recognizing and choosing the citizen groups for case studies
• Involving public sector and media organizations
• Creating encounters with different groups (citizens + administration + mass media)
• Qualitative interviews with all the actor groups involved: mapping the needs and interests.
• Using and developing the tools together with the participant groups
• Evaluations: qualitative interviews, discussions with all the participants (citizen groups, representatives of public sector and media organizations)

The Open Web Laboratory Owela (2008) will serve as a research environment providing methods for online user studies and participatory design.

WP3: Technology development

At TKK declarative user interfaces and REST based mashups will be developed:

• Development of declarative user interface language
• Mashup backplane based on XFormsDB (W3C 2007)
• Digital signatures and indentity management
• Web based user interface development tools
• REpresentational State Transfer (REST) based information system integration
• Event based dynamic update of user interfaces

At VTT three existing web and mobile tools will be tailored for the use in participatory design and field studies. Owela laboratory will be further developed and utilized as a platform for distributed participatory design during the case studies. Two social media prototypes will be customized for the case studies in this project. Tilkut is a web service for collecting, sharing and visualizing web information sources. It supports intelligent tagging and semantic categorizing of information, which makes it possible to utilize it in analysing and refining the content. Tilkut can be used as a tool for aggregating online discussions and redirecting them to the mashups. Somes is a mobile application for context-aware messaging that can be utilized as an instant media solution as well as a mobile diary for user studies.

WP4: Field studies

Field studies consist of testing the mashups services in real life context with different user communities (at least high school students and immigrants). The used research methods include interviews, focus groups, web and mobile diaries, and prototype testing.

Online field studies will be done in different online communities to study the citizens “there where they are” and compare the ways of participation and action between different communities. For harnessing collective intelligence, several open-ended and self-organised tasks are derived from theories of the research area and processed with selected social networks and online communities.

WP5: Dissemination

The research (WP4) of the collective intelligence and the collaboration of administration, citizens and media will both result in several articles, which will be published in international scientific periodicals and conferences. For the PhD students the articles are part of their dissertations. During the second year of the project a scientific workshop will be arranged in an international conference to discuss the results with other researchers at the field.

The project also leads to recommendations of good practices of administration communication strategies in Finland. The results will be published openly on the Web and additionally discussed the workshops with the collaboration network (including experts from municipalities, parliament, ministries, mass media and third sector). At the end of the project a seminar will be arranged to discuss the results for wider audience.

Schedule

The project will last two years: 1.1.2009-31.12.2010. The progress of the sub-projects and case studies is illustrated in the Figure 2.

Figure 2. Project structure and schedule

Finance

Funding is applied mainly for salaries and travel costs as shown in the Table 3.

Table 3. Funding to be applied from the Academy of Finland

Costs	VTT	TKK	JyU	UTA	Total
Salaries	120000	86000	86000	86000	378000
Materials			1000		1000
Services	18000	2000	4000	2000	28000
Equipment			2000	2000	4000
Travel costs	11000	8000	16000	15000	50000
Other costs	5000				5000
Overheads share	21991	13709	15565	15280	66545
Total	175991	109709	124565	122280	532545

VTT Services costs include the rewards (15 000 euro) that are paid for the members of the Open Research Swarm that participate the project. That work may consist of one half-year subcontract project or several shorter expert services. Travel costs include the intended researcher exchanges and attending conferences. Other costs at VTT (5000 euro) contain organizing the project workshops and the end seminar.

Open research approach

Open collaboration will be not only studied but also practiced within the project. The idea for the SOMUS project originates from online discussions on the microblogging service Jaiku. A group of researchers found common interests and formed The Open Research Swarm (ORSi) as a self-organizing researcher network to practice the idea of open research. The SOMUS research plan was further developed in an open wiki by several authors. The collaboration with the ORSi will continue throughout the projects, and research will be done as openly as possible.

For some project tasks researchers or other specialists will be acquired from the ORSi. In order to study and compare self-organizing collaboration processes, same research task and hypothesis will be given to solve to professional and academic ORSi and other Internet communities, which represent more common citizens with tens of thousands members.

Collective intelligence or swarming is often referred to large voluntary group and its collaboration for example to produce software code (open source), information (Wikipedia) or problem solving (like foresight panels). In such a group the participation, the methods and the results are open, shared and accessible to all, including to those who are not participating. Like open source production model, the openness refers here to the possibility to everyone to utilize the results independent of the level of their personal or organizational contributions. In open development there is for example no academic or copyright-based single-person or -organizational ownership.

Some characteristics of collective intelligence are, that a) all the participants and their contributions are equal b) the formal structure is as bottom-up as possible meaning very light control of hierarcical structures c) the results and final outputs emerge after collective editing, corrections, discussions, possible voting and other group work methods. Thus the process is often self-organizing, iterative and highly self-repairing. The possibilities and challenges of self-organizing, open research will be evaluated in the collaboration with the ORSi throughout the project.

Ethical issues

There seem not to be remarkable ethical problems in this study. If such are met in the course of study, ethical principles will be carefully honoured. In regard to field studies with citizens, special attention will be paid to protect their privacy.

Research group

Consortium members and international collaboration

The consortium has members from four research organisations and The Open Research Swarm. The introduction of each research group contains the plans for researcher education and international collaboration.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Media and Internet knowledge centre led by Res.Prof. Caj Södergård has long experience in studying and developing media services that combine Web, mobile, print and digital television. Research themes include e.g. social and semantic media and user-centred development of web and mobile services. PhD student Pirjo Näkki focuses in her research on participatory design of media services utilizing web-based research methods and tools like Owela (2008). Näkki is guided by professor Marko Nieminen (Usability, Helsinki University of Technology) and doctor Eija Kaasinen (VTT).

VTT group collaborates with Professor Nils Enlund (Media Technology and Graphic Arts, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) and Doctor Jasminko Novak (Collaboration and Media Technologies Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland). Additionally, PhD student Pirjo Näkki plans to work for 3 months as a visiting researcher in University of Siegen (Germany) with Professor Volkmar Pipek (Information Systems and New Media), and a researcher from there will have an opportunity for revisit.

Helsinki University of Technology

The Department of Media Technology is a totally new unit, which combines research groups from digital media and communications. Within the department, the multimedia research group headed by prof. Petri Vuorimaa focuses on digital media services and, especially, web technologies. Recently, the multimedia research group has studied, for example, mobile web services, mobile television, home automation and entertainment networks, and optimization of virtual machines. D.Sc. (Tech.) students Mikko Pohja and Alessandro Cogliati will complete their doctoral theses within the project.

TKK group will collaborate with Professor Jean Vanderdonckt (Belgian Laboratory of Computer-Human Interaction (BCHI), Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium) and with Doctor Pablo Cesar (The National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), The Netherlands).

University of Jyväskylä

Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä is the leading unit to research the Civil Society issues in Finland, including regional social networks, new social movements and social capital. It has Master's programme of the Expertise on Civil Society and national research portal of Civil Society, Kans (kans.jyu.fi). Professor Esa Konttinen is specialised to the research in Civil Society and Social Movements, including environmental movements. The university is also a member of the CINEFOGO Network of Excellence (Civil Society and New Forms of Governance - the Making of New European Citizenship), through which international cooperation will be done.

PhD student Kari A. Hintikka is making his dissertation about how common people self-organize and coordinate themselves via internet after extraordinary situations (like Asian tsunami or Katrina hurricane) and form new political entities in Civil Society, like internet parties (2008). The dissertation of Kari A. Hintikka is guided by professors Esa Konttinen and Martti Siisiäinen (professor of Citizen Action and Civil Society). During 2009 - 2010, Hintikka will make four 2-weeks studying trip to the leading research institutes of the field, including University of Amsterdam, University of London, Columbia University and Seoul National University.

University of Tampere

The Journalism Research and Development Centre is based at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Centre has rapidly gained a prominent place in the field of journalism, publicity and new media. The main concern in the projects of the Centre is with the relationship between newspapers and their readers, the challenges presented by new technology to journalism and the changing public sphere. The Centre draws on strong domestic and international academic expertise and know how combined with a practically-oriented approach to research problems. The research interests of Professor Risto Kunelius include civic participation in professional journalism, theories of citizenship and challenges of professionalism in media, and the formation of transnational public spaces and spheres. PhD student Auli Harju (finishing her dissertation in 2008, focusing on case studies of local civic action: how active citizens understand, define and experience their civic action and its media representations) starts her post doctoral work on the project.

Tampere group collaborates actively with professor Mark Deuze (of Journalism and New Media, Leiden University, NL & Telecommunications, Indiana University, USA) and with professor Lewis A. Friedland (School of Journalism and Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin at Madison, USA). As part of her post doc training Auli Harju will visit both of the cooperation institutions (Leiden and Madison). During the second project year (fall 2010), Auli Harju will work for 3 months as a visiting researcher in Madison, and a researcher from Madison will have an opportunity to work with the SOMUS group.

The Open Research Swarm

The Open Research Swarm (2008) is a self-organizing collaboration network on the Internet. It aims at organizing open multidisciplinary research in a new way utilizing social media tools, such as wiki and Jaiku. In 15.4.2008, ORSi has over 30 researchers and other professional participants from different Finnish research institutions, non-profit organizations and companies, including prof. Vuorimaa (HUT) and PhD students Hintikka (JyU) and Näkki (VTT).

Collaboration network

International cooperation will be done by each research group as mentioned in the previous chapter. In addition to that, the project will also organize a workshop in an international conference.

National cooperation will be done between the four consortium partners, the ORSi and a collaboration network of experts. The roles of the network members are to act as experts and subjects of research, to participate in the case studies, or to provide data for mashups. The network will communicate via online tools and meet in two workshops that will be arranged during the project.

Participation in the case studies has been discussed with the following parties and their representatives:

• The Parliament of Finland: Olli Mustajärvi (Head of ICT Development)
• Ministry of Justice, Democracy: Sari Aalto-Matturi (Special adviser)
• Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Web Communications: Raija Leppäjärvi (Editor-in-Chief)
• City of Espoo, Communications: Kristiina Andreasson (Communications manager)

Preliminary discussions are ongoing with some other public parties, as well, and the collaboration network will stay open for new interested participants. At least a couple of media companies (local media, online media) and citizen organizations will be invited to join the network.

Research environment

No special equipments are needed in the research. Participatory design will be partly done in on online environment at Owela (2008). Owela is an online community for participatory design and open innovation, containing tools for idea evaluation, discussion, chat and questionnaires.

Expected results and impacts

The project will result in understanding the phenomenon of social and participatory media as well as theories, models and demonstrations that will be evaluated in real-life context with users. It provides basic knowledge and practical tools for citizens and public sector collaboration in ubiquitous society.

Theories. The project offers a way to theoretically combine the expectations both the society and its citizens have for citizenship and participation, to explore in practice civic agency in today’s mediated society and understand the possibilities social media creates for social involvement. The project will create enhanced theoretical understanding of public spheres, publicity and public life in the era of social media. It will result in basic research and theoretisation about the interfaces between earlier institutionalised and at the moment rather well resourced networks and actors and their interface with the evolving and changing landscape of citizen-participation in various issues via the Web.

Models. The project creates models about how common people, associations and movements self-organize themselves using latest developments of internet communication technologies, and how informal social networks could be used more efficiently in critical communication situations.

Also a process model for user-driven service development will be developed. The model takes into account, how different roles of users and communities must be taken into account when developing new social media services.

Technology. The project will develop new technical solutions for mashup services. The mashup services will be based on the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) paradigm. New methods to link information sources and dynamically update user interfaces will be developed. The aim is build tools for citizens for creating new mashup services, while public authorities and media companies can publish their information using the defined mashup interfaces. The objective is to create a platform for mashup services that allows one to combine information from different sources as easily as copying and pasting data between office applications.

Impacts on society. The main beneficiaries are Finnish society and its citizens, to who better services can be offered. The research can have an impact on the strategical level on how the Finnish society works and collaborates with citizens. Additionally, opening the official information channels provides huge opportunities for both web service providers and traditional companies for new service concepts. Although the data would be free of charge, many commercial services can be built on them, as well.

The goal of the project is to open one central governmental or municipal web page with data that can be utilized in different services via mashups. Within the project we will build up a web portal with public mashup services, including a breakthrough service that becomes widely used and improves citizens' opportunities to participate in decision-making and development of social innovations, and several demonstrations of mashup services that combine data from public and private sources. Users may develop mashups also by themselves utilizing the platform developed in the project.

Impacts on industry. The results of the project may also be utilized in industrial research and development processes, in which the same challenges of empowering customers (citizens) in open innovation processes are encountered. The knowledge created in the SOMUS project will benefit both web service providers and traditional companies in creating new service concepts together with user communities. There are also opportunities for commercial mashup services based on combinations of both public and commercial data.

Impacts on research. Within the project a new way of doing research work openly on the Web will be tested and evaluated within the Research swarm.

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