Tag Archives: realtime cities

Human Ecosystems at the MACRO Museum of Rome for Aperitivi Formativi

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What is the Human Ecosystem of the city?

How does it transform with the wide and accessible availability of ubiquitous and nomadic technologies?

How can we capture and visualize the Human Ecosystem of a city?

How can we transform this possibility to represent the Human Ecosystem into the opportunity to perceive its complexity and to perform it, to position ourselves within it and act creating new relations, new opportunities and new, yet unexplored possibilities?

These are some of the themes we will confront with on Tuesday, November 12 2013, at the MACRO Museum of Rome (in via Nizza 138) for a session of Aperitivi Formativi which will revolve around the idea (and project) of the Human Ecosystem.

Here is the Facebook Event of the day: Human Ecosystems at Aperitivi Formativi, at the MACRO Museum

About the Human Ecosystems project:

The Human Ecosystems Project

The Human Ecosystems Project

The main idea driving the philosophy of the project is that with the advent of ubiquitous and nomadic technologies (digital) information has become part of our landscape. The world is wrapped in an everchanging, liquid, emergent membrane of information which people have learned to use to take decisions, express emotions, communicate and, in general, to transform their perception of the world.

It has become, in more than one way, a new sense, a new tactility and a new possibility for performance.

We see this as a “new part of Nature” (or, possibly, an “updated part of Nature”), expressed along the models of the Ecosystem, the whole of the subjects, energies and flows of a certain environment, as described through the relational networks interweaving their lives. A new conception of the Body of the City, to which we will try to operate grabbing inspiration from the idea of Urban Acupuncture, as expressed by Marco Casagrande, and expanded to include the reality of the ubiquitous informational and communicational landscape.

And, thus, we are bringing up a series of projects which deal with both the progressive sedimentation of the ubiquitous infoscape, describing both its ruins, and its emergence. And, with them, the coagulation and continuous evolution/transformation of stories, relationships, emotions. Or, looking to the other direction of the time arrow, to possibility and opportunity.

With these projects we are trying to bring augmented sensibility to the Third Landscape of Information, the Third Infoscape, gathering inspiration from Gilles Clèment.

The project has already started in the city of Rome and, soon, more instances will start in many other cities, establishing conversations with city administrations, organizations and citizens.

Cultur+: an Office for the Ecosystem, for a Smart City and an even Smarter Community

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Next steps for the Human Ecosystems project in Rome.

Together with the Council for Culture of the First Municipality of the City of Rome, on November 9th 2013, in Rome at Porta Futuro, from 10am to 5pm, we will be at Cultur+, the second meeting for the Cultural Ecosystem in the city.

Cultur+: the Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome

Cultur+: the Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome

After the first event, held at the Casa della Cultura in Rome, we have received an enormous amount of feedback, and we have also been doing some thinking on our own, integrating all of the ideas that have been popping up and also designing a set of new concepts.

The day will feature:

  • an official introduction by the the Administration, with Councillor Andrea Valeri that will lead us into the state of the art of the activities and into the discussion (at 10am);
  • Art is Open Source will introduce the recent updates of EC(m1), the Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome, with the new ideas that have come up from all the feedbacks, and from the results of different experimentations which we have been doing at local, national and international level; for example with the innovation-centered experiment that we have conducted at the Internet Festival with the Innovation Ecology installation; (at 10:30am)
  • then, at 11am a series of thematic, vertical groups will form around the tables, to explore the opportunities offered by the approach we are following, and by the creation of collaboration practices among all the operators, the citizens and the administration; groups will form on:
    • Performing Arts
    • Communication, Design and Architecture
    • Resources (including funding, European projects, public spaces, and the reuse/recontextualization of existing spaces)
    • Visual Cultures
    • Publishing
    • Multiculturalism
  • this is a first classification we formed for the groups, matching the specific focuses of the administration; we are imagining ways to create additional/different classifications/groupings, and ways in which to allow people to group around their own defined themes and interests, and share the results with the rest of the ecosystem;
  • this activity will go on until 3:45pm, with a break for lunch
  • during this activity a parallel Office for the Ecosystem will be present, through which we will demonstrate one of the possibilities for the Human Ecosystem: what if you city administration offered an Office through which you (or your organization) could position yourself in the Human Ecosystem of your city and learn how navigate, understand and use it to find collaborations, resources, participation and the possibility to confront with common issues? (from 11am to 3:45pm)
  • at 3:50pm a short presentation of the concept of the Office for the Ecosystem will be given by Art is Open Source;
  • at 4pm the groups will take turns in communicating the results they achieved and the objectives which they set forth for the next phases;
  • at 4:30pm the conclusions will be made and the setup for the next meetings will be arranged.

Here is the Facebook Event page for Cultur+

Here is the Facebook Group of the Cultural Ecosystem of Rome

The Real-time Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome

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The Real-time Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome is a visualisation which captures all the interactions on social networks through which internet users discuss about the cultural life of their city. (it is the first part of the Human Ecosystems project)

Real-time Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome, Space

Real-time Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome, Space

Built with the support and collaboration of the Cultural Council of the First Municipality of Rome’s City Administration, it is the first of a series of Ecosystems which we will be publishing in the next months.

What is it?

The system captures in real time the public activity of citizens using social networks to express themselves about culture (Music, Theater, Cinema, Arts, Publishing, Traditions, History and Heritage, Sport, Tourism, Media).

The system:

  • captures the public activity of operators (publishing and communicating events and initiatives) and citizens (taking participating, storytelling and expressing along cultural themes in their daily lives);

  • understands the theme of the online discussions (for example contemporary arts, publishing…) and the emotional states which they express (for example an operator’s joy in communicating a new event; a citizen’s surprise and anxiety to participate; and his satisfaction or delusion afterwards);

represents information visually in three ways

  • space, the geography of culture, showing a real time map with the evidence of the places in which culture is discussed and made;

  • the time of culture, showing the online discussions as they emerge on social networks, across operators’ communication and citizen engagement;

  • the relations of culture, showing how operators and citizens relate by collaborating, participating, communicating and expressing opinions;

  • makes available a novel source of real-time Open Data with all the information captured and processed
  • contributes to the creation of a continuous and emergent census of culture, in real-time, including the operators creating and communicating events and initiatives, as well as the citizens and tourists which take part in them and publicly engage discussions.

Why is it Important?

It is the first time that such an action is made available to a public administration and, through Open Data, to operators and citizens, who will be able to use it to better know and understand the cultural landscape of their city, to support innovative phenomena to emerge, and to create services through the web and smartphones.

It is a replicable model, ready to be adopted by other administrations. And, most important, it is interoperable, allowing direct comparison among different territories, allowing to understand their characteristics and practices.

How is it done?

By using the possibilities offered by major social networks to harvest in real-time the public information generated by users and operators.

This information is captured as soon as it is generated in the geographical area of interest, and processed using a series of techniques and technologies (Natural Language Analysis, Emotional Analysis, Network and Relational Analysis), and are thus enriched and annotated with additional information regarding the themes and issues being discussed, the emotional states they express, and a best-effort guess of the location from which they have been generated and of which they are talking about.

All information is visualised practically in real time, and made available through a source of Open Data accessible through APIs.

When will it be available?

The official presentation will happen in the Cultur+ event, Sept. 28th 2013 in Rome‘s Casa delle Culture, via di San Crisogono 45.

An open beta version is available HERE for anyone to access. It is an early beta, and we’re asking all the community to support in making it work perfectly, helping us out to identify data and information which seems out of place and also getting the interfaces to work as expected. To have access to the Open Data source you might have to wait a few days more, but please contact us to know more and get early access.

Keep in touch for more posts right here, as we will unveil updates, additional information and knowledge we have collected about Rome’s Cultural Ecosystem.

Real Time Cairo: the real-time digital life of the city of Cairo, Egypt

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Real Time Cairo: the real-time digital life of the city of Cairo, Egypt

Launch the project by clicking HERE

Real Time Cairo screenshot

Real Time Cairo screenshot

To harvest all the data generated through social networks in a city.

Each day we use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare as public spaces in which we express ourselves, our feelings and emotions, our perception of the spaces around us, our desires, wishes and expectations.

Or, such as in Cairo, Egypt, right now, to express our dissent, to enact our freedoms, and to inform of the difficult situations in which we find ourselves and with the communities we live in.

But social networks are not public spaces.

They are privately owned digital spaces whose strategies and interests have nothing to share with public space.

Through hundreds (if not thousands) of years of development of our cultures we have learned to form our expectation about what is public space, how it works and what to expect from it. We have developed shared ways by which we have collectively shaped our idea of what is a public space, and how to change its rules.

On social networks this does not apply.

A simple, unilateral, change in the terms of service of any of these networks/spaces can radically change the ownership and modalities according to which the information that we publish and share is used and leveraged, possibly giving rise to its exploitation, censorship, business usage.

But everything in these networks/spaces is designed to augment our understanding of them as public spaces and, thus, to apply or expectation of how public spaces work to them.

So,

  • on one side, we perceive a public space in which to express ourselves, expecting that it will function according to our understanding of the ways in which public spaces work;
  • on the other side we have private spaces whose objective is to mimic the ways in which public spaces work, so that people use them, increasing business
real time Cairo

real time Cairo

Just as we did with the VersuS and ConnectiCity projects, Real Time Cairo captures the life of the digital city and visualizes it on a map.

The intent is to create the availability of tools by which to re-appropriate information published on what we perceive to be our digital public spaces, and to make it available for visualization, aggregation, etc: to establish a novel source of Open Data in our cities by gathering all the conversations that take place in our digital public spaces, to allow people to use them to understand their cities and to imagine shared practices and methodologies to use this information, making it accessible and usable by everyone, not only by social network service providers.

The interface shows

  • the map, with the information popping up as soon as people in Cairo publish it using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare (information that is not geo-referenced using the networks’ tools is harvested as well, but it does not show on the map)
  • a tag cloud of the most used words in the last 80 minutes
  • some statistics showing the number of messages and users who published information in the latest 80 minutes, and in what languages they write
  • a timeline, allowing the comparison of the number of messages posted during each hour of the last few days

We are still developing elements of the project (more updates will come soon) including:

  • an API through which to download all of the dataset (or only parts of it, selected by date range, source, keywords etc)
  • a visualization to show the human geography/topography of the city

The source code will be released under GPL as soon as we are able to finish adding these first few pieces.

Stay tuned!

Real Time Cairo

Real Time Cairo

Cairo, Egypt, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

Cairo, Egypt, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

 

Cities out of Control: on Krisis Magazine

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Cities Out of Control on Krisis Magazine

Cities Out of Control on Krisis Magazine

The new issue of Krisis Magazine “Orientation” is out!

You can get it HERE

Among the contributions you will find our “Cities Out of Control“.

Here we wanted to share our point of view on the possibility to define a crisis (a breakdown, to be followed by a new rise) on the ideas about the ways in which we interpret (and control, and govern) our cities.

New modalities, rituals, perceptions have entered our daily lives, through the availability of digital ubiquitous sensorialities through which we perceive the world around us and we orient ourselves, make decisions and decide our tactics: the digital info-scape has merged with the physical landscape, producing a new whole in which multiple (even millions) points of view are constantly at our disposal (through search engines and social media) to support our presence and decisions in our daily lives.

How does orientation mutate? How does governance transform? What is the evolution of our tactics in the city?

S. Iaconesi, L. Simeone, O. Persico, (2013) “Cities out of Control” on Krisis Magazine “Orientation”, AIAP, Brescia, ISBN 9788890583933