Project #1: Future in the Alps

Being mainly involved in European Commission funded projects and activities, we tend to forget that there is a lot of extremely interesting, exciting and well-managed projects that are not necessarily funded from the Union.

It aims, as expected, at promoting sustainable development in the alpine region but includes a lot of points that could have been used as guide for designing a new project. Especially one stream of work that concerns new forms of decision making and researches the (new) types of decision-making that are the most promising with regard to sustainable development when it comes to negotiating regional planning demands.

mCity is the acronym of the Fully Mobile City Government project of the Center for Human-Information Interaction (CHII). The Center is part of the Information School of University of Washington (UW). So what makes this project special, is the expected question. The best is that you go and visit the site of the project, have a look in the organisational aspects, read the proposal that the people submitted and get an idea why our way of doing things might be in the totally wrong direction.

For me there is no shame to accept that the best way to have a successful project is by copying a best of breed project that has run in the past in the same area of research or business. And in order to not violate any intellectual property ethic you can always invite key people of the original project to help you in any of your project’s phases: planning, execution or evaluation. You may think that it is not a good idea even for image reasons to do so – but don’t forget: at the end, you will not be copying someone else’s project: for sure you will need to make adaptations and changes to reflect your own reality and improve the original processes to fit your situation. Of course one may see no innovation in this approach. But how happy are we with monolithic innovations? Or fruitless innovations? Or innovations that lead nowhere? And cost much money? For sure, FP7 research ‘templates’ in ICT have evolved positively and improved in several aspects but we should not forget that the pattern that is used was conceived at times that Internet was not populated by much (and valuable) information. At that time, it was extremely important that some people from a Computer Science Department from Turin would leave their offices and travel once per year to meet some partners in Dundee or Thessaloniki. And discuss about the progress of work in a WorkPackage that aimed to develop a new language for describing the composition of a new service – and all these with the assistance of a new graphical editor or browser. Nowadays, it is only a matter of (silently) selecting what repository of ideas, science and software you will copy from. Or rob.

So take my advice and visit the mCity project site.