UPDATE: Dan has just informed us that he won’t be able to travel to Helsinki on the scheduled April 12th date! We’re currently searching for another speaker. We’re also looking into the possibility to reschedule Dan to a later date this year. Stay tuned…

Our guest speaker at the next Aula klubi on Tuesday, April 12 in Helsinki will be Dan Gillmor, who will talk about ‘The Rise and Importance of Citizen Media.’ From the summary:

The collision of technology and journalism is having profound effects on the three major constituencies of news: journalists, who are having to learn how to turn what they do into a conversation, not a lecture; newsmakers, the people and institutions journalists have covered, who are learning about an entirely new class of journalists but who have new options for getting their own messages out; and the former audience, which can get a better news report and participate in the journalism process as well.

When Dan spoke at Aula’s Exposure event in 2003, he was in the process of putting these arguments together. The outcome was a book titled We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, published last year by O’Reilly. Dan also practices what he preaches: at the turn of the new year he quit his job at the San Jose Mercury News to found Grassroots Media Inc., ‘a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach.’ Welcome to Helsinki, Dan. I’m looking forward to this.

We’re organizing the year’s first Aula klubi evening in Helsinki with Henry Jenkins from MIT as the guest speaker. He’s going to speak about the future of gaming. I get to slack this time, since Marko is taking care of most of the practicalities. For more information, have a look at the announcement. If you’re in town, hope to see you at Korjaamo 6 pm tomorrow!

Back in Lancaster, working intensely now on the scraps of notes, fragmented narratives, fuzzy ideas, whatever there’s to go on in the general direction of a PhD thesis. Yet it’s June, and there’s always much happening in June: local Lancaster highlights include the Interface workshop (starting today!) and the What’s Life Got to Do with It symposium. I’m also hosting the Word in Edgeways lunch next Tuesday; I’m planning to discuss the technologies of ethnography there. I’ll miss the EVA party in Helsinki (featuring Joi Ito and Jorma Ollila among others). Steve Woolgar’s organizing an interesting workshop titled Does STS Mean Business over at Oxford later this month, which I am planning to attend. One last thing: up until now I purposefully haven’t blogged about the substance of my PhD research, but might start to experiment in that space… still need to do some thinking on that.