Creative Collaboration: How Communities and Cities Do It

In terms of cities, a good community to follow is the European Network of Living Labs (ENOLL -- www.openlivinglabs.eu/), a combination of local communities with technology players and entrepreneurial startups. A Living Lab, as one of the ENOLL founding members explained at PICNIC, is about “experimentation and co-creation with real users in real life environments.”

An interesting working experiment was spun off as a company called ConnectedDay, which offers photo and video services of content created by children and their daycare centre managers. The concept arose in the Living Lab in Helsinki, and is now offered as a paid service via the Net or mobile phone in countries as diverse as Finland, UK, USA and Singapore.

A terrific hotbed of such connected innovation is South Korea, according to Nokia’s Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.” The concept of ubiquitous computing has caught on with the “u” prefix applied to a range of things including even cities, such as the “u-city Songdo.”

The mobile phone is a very useful platform in this regard due to the fact that content is made available locally, on demand, and in a way that it can acted upon. “We never had this potential before, and can create addressable, scriptable and queryable surfaces,” said Greenfield.

Other case studies of successful connected communities were presented by Dopplr’s Matt Jones. Dopplr is an online tool for frequent business travellers, which lets them share future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues.

New ways of creating connections between communities are being facilitated by Internet-enabled mobile phones, according to Jyri Engestrom, a social scientist as well as the founder of Finnish mobile presence service Jaiku, which was acquired by Google in 2007.

“Mobile devices make it possible to capture slices of reality that people could not capture before. Many services will become socially aware,” he predicted. The most exciting part of the Google Android phone is its open nature. Mobile on the Internet can bring power of social networking to a much broader audience and with new layers of functionality

One of the most notable examples of a corporation harnessing digitally technologies for connecting communities is Nike, whose NikePlus site brings together runners who are music lovers, thanks to an alliance between Nokia and Apple.

Michael Tchao, general manager of Nike Techlab, explained how the alliance has helped the company “turn information into inspiration” by letting runners profile themselves on the company’s site and support, encourage and congratulate one another to fulfil their running ambitions. They can also check out each another’s favourite “power songs” for inspiring runs.

Nike organised one of the world’s largest running events, The Human Race, coordinated across 26 cities around the time of the Beijing Olympics.

Communities which leverage online and mobile communications can also indulge in ways of playful cheating and lying, explained Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and director of user experience for Intel’s Digital Home Group.

Using cute devices with funny and cool features can also help create fun communities, explained Rafi Haladjian, founder of Nabaztag, who regaled the audience with his presentation of the Internet-connected rabbit Nabaztag. It is a good example of “snack media” and “low calorie information.”

Nabaztag's fully mobile ears can engage in "ear play." Just move the ears of your rabbit, and the ears of your significant other's rabbit will move in the same way!

"Nabaztag is not just a rabbit, but a messenger of emotion creating another layer of communication and expression between individuals online," according to Rafi Haladjian.

So what are some emerging trends we can see in this field, and who are some startups who have latched on to such models? More on that tomorrow!