In the past three days we had the pleasure to attend the 12th International MindTrek Conference in Tampere, Finland. The conference featured 3 academic tracks covering the latest research in ubiquitous media, social media, and gaming. We presented our SocialMatch™ methodology for building enterprise communities in the social media track.
Among the other academic presentations we attended during the conference, we found Sal Humpreys' presentation about the challengers of intellectual property rights based on her research of Ravelry (an online knitting community) the most interesting. She discussed some of the IP related issues that arise among a community that is focused around amateur and professional user generated content and the interlacing of social (based on gifts and reputation) and financial (based on monetary rewards) economies that occurs. We certainly think her findings can be applied to other communities (for example, the Second Life content creators' community) and that the real discussion about IP right is just getting started and will be one of the main issues in the era of increasing content production by non-professional enthusiasts.
We were also intrigued by the presentation of the Wreck A Movie project by Timo Vuorensola and Atte Joutsen, two of the creators of the popular low budget sci-fi movie Star Wreck, which was created with the help of 3000 online supporters. Wreck A Movie is an online collaborative film community platform that will try to bring together talented people interested in the production of short or feature films in different media formats with the help of the internet. We are certainly looking forward to seeing films that will be collaboratively created by this new community!
Marc Davis during his keynote (Photo by Frans Mäyrä)
Another highlight of the MindTrek conference was Marc Davis' keynote about understanding mobile social media and Yahoo!'s existing and upcoming products for the social web on the go, including the Yahoo! oneConnect application that has been just released for the iPhone.
We also enjoyed the The Business of Playing Together panel with Ville Mujunen (Sulake Dynamoid), Joakim Achrén (Ironstar Helsinki) and Jussi Laakkonen (Everyplay) that covered a number of different topics including the value of virtual goods and various emerging trends in gaming.
Of course there were many other interesting projects and research efforts presented at MindTrek, and the good news is that you will soon be able to watch some of them on the conference website.
I'd like to end this report with an interesting observation: we were quite surprised to see that Jaiku, a Finnish micro-blogging service, which was bought by Google some time ago, is extremely popular among the Finns and was successfully used during the conference as a live blogging tool. You can find the notes and conversation from the conference on the MindTrek Jaiku channel. However, we were a bit disappointed with the fact that Jaiku doesn't yet support open registration of new users, so for now Jan and I are still bigger fans of Jaiku's arch nemesis, Twitter :)
