A free public Wi-Fi network will open in Helsinki in the beginning March, reports Helsingin Sanomat today. The network will cover the cafés and boutiques around the central Esplanadi park.

This good news to anyone wishing to access the internet wirelessly in Helsinki, where free Wi-Fi is practically nonexistent. In a surprising departure from the open access approach of neighboring cities Turku, Tampere, and Tallinn, the mayor of Helsinki has taken a stand against open wireless networks.

The open network is the accomplishment of a private individual, former Nokia CEO Kalle Isokallio, who grew frustrated with Helsinki’s Wi-Fi aversion. Isokallio funds the operation together with a restaurant chain and Fujitsu.

“I wanted to show that this can be built as a one-man operation. It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of will”, Isokallio is quoted saying.

I’ve recently had conversations with politicians and public officials about social software in the context of their efforts to stimulate ‘creative’ cities in various parts of the world. I’ll try to sum up here my observations about how the municipal administration’s approach to technology affects the capacity of a city to function as a platform for creativity.

First, I want to touch on the definition of creativity. I believe that it is more useful to approach creativity as cultural remixing that all kinds of people can do, than it is to label some professions as a ‘creative class’. Culture evolves through the recombination of existing elements into new, meaningful outcomes. Cities, who define creativity in terms of a specific class of professionals, risk turning a blind eye to the creative potential of, for instance, local hobbyists and teenagers, who are especially important creators of new culture.

The creative city discussion could also benefit from a deeper appreciation of the role of technology. During the course of the last decade, computers have become the most important platform for remixing culture. It is likely that computer-based creativity will flourish in places where the ability to remix is supported by 1) a political climate that embraces online conversation; 2) cheap wireless access to the internet; and 3) regulation that sides with the new innovators against the interests of the established corporate elite. City officials can play an important role by launching creativity-enabling initiatives on the political, the technical, and the legal front.

On the political front, cities can start to actively participate in the growing online conversation by establishing weblogs and engaging in dialogue with bloggers. Mayors like Jerry Brown of Oakland, California, are blogging, and there are plenty of local blogs maintained by citizens around the world. For instance, I follow local talk on a blog named Kallioblogi, which focuses on the area where I live in Helsinki, and periodically check the Metroblogs of my other favorite cities. In France, the newspaper Libération recently ran a cover story on how a blogger’s intervention exposed one town’s corrupt local politics. By establishing personal and project-related blogs, city officials could greatly enhance the transparency of local government and perhaps also find new ways to engage with the public. For example, the public officials in the U.S. city of Northfield, Minnesota, have made a joint effort to keep blogs, and discuss their experiences at j-newvoices.org.

On the technical front, cities can promote open access to the internet over Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), also known as the wireless local area network (WLAN) and in technical articles referred to as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ standard IEEE 802.11. There are at least three ways to create public Wi-Fi hotspots in the city, and a wise municipal strategist would probably combine elements from all of these:

– The first option is to activate commercial operators to establish affordable Wi-Fi networks that cover not only the hotels and airports frequented by visiting businesspeople, but also the places where regular inhabitants spend their time. For instance in Tokyo, the Livedoor company has announced it will begin to offer basic access for less than 5 Euros’ monthly fee in central locations around the city.

– The second option is to treat wireless access as a basic resource just like electricity and water, and set up a municipal Wi-Fi network that covers also the areas that aren’t profitable for commercial operators. The ambitious municipal Wi-Fi strategies of some very large cities, such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, have been met with controversy in the U.S. (For an anti-muni argument, it’s worth reading columnist Larry Seltzer’s article on eWeek.com. For pro-muni viewpoints, see the entries on Harvard Fellow David Weinberger’s blog and investor Joichi Ito’s blog). Here in Finland, on my count at least ten cities have already rolled out muni Wi-Fi networks. Hopefully Helsinki will also join the list soon.

– A third approach is to smooth the progress of a more organic spreading of Wi-Fi by encouraging private residents and businesses to set up their own public hotspots. For instance, in the U.K. the Wireless London initiative is providing information about the city’s free hotspots, and developing free software to keep publicly accessible hotspots secure. The Île Sans Fil group in Montréal, and NYCWireless in New York, are doing similar volunteer work.

Cities also already produce a wealth of information about local news and events online. This information can reach a broader audience if administrators require contractors to build in support for standards like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and open up the application programming interfaces (APIs) of the databases. Open interfaces allow other web sites, including ‘social event-marking services’ like the non-profit Evnt.org and Upcoming.org, and commercial ones like 43 Places and the Events and Venues Database, to pull out information from a city’s database and offer internet users around the world the means to add socially meaningful metadata, such as tags, comments, and recommendations, to the local places and events. Although this may sound complicated, the investments required are not large when the databases already exist (in Europe, some have been created with EU funding: for instance the KuhuMinna event database in Tallinn, and the Kulttuuri.net information and ticketing service in Helsinki). Cities can also support the innovation of new location-based services by making map and traffic data freely available in both human and machine-readable formats online.

On the legal front, cities can promote the accumulation of an open library of locally produced stories, images, songs, and movies by supporting the licensing of cultural creations under the Creative Commons license. Brazil, for instance, has adopted Creative Commons as a way to promote the independence of its rich musical culture, which has historically been dominated by the commercial interests of the U.S. music industry.

The next few years will be important in defining where the global creative balance shifts, and open technical platforms will play a major role in the process. Cities, who understand how to leverage these technologies, may discover a community of creative practitioners surprisingly close to home. Such cities are also likely to have better success in attracting foreign creative people, who have grown tired of ignorant officials and politicians that in the worst possible case try to mislabel them as criminals.

As for myself, I’m on the lookout for a creative city where to live next!

I’m off to Redmond tomorrow, having been invited by Marc Smith to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. Judging by the documentation from last year’s workshop, it promises to be an interesting gathering.

Here’s my short position paper:

The Social Implications of Location Awareness in ‘Third Places’: Learnings from Aula Helsinki

A large part of mobile messaging traffic is about coordinating face-to-face meetings, many of which take place in so-called third places between home and work. A growing number of mobile social softwares (e.g. Imahima, Dodgeball, Plazes, GeoNotes) allow people to define a physical location, announce their presence in that location, and see who else is now checked in, was there earlier, or plans to head there in the future. However, we know relatively little about how these services actually affect the usage patterns of cafés, bars, and other third places. In our research on the use of the Hunaja (Finnish for ‘honey’) system at Aula’s social club in Helsinki, we found that new forms of serendipity, self-promotion, stalking and avoidance emerged when club members used their mobile phones to check who was in the Aula space. The focus of the talk will be on an ethnographic case study of these emerging social uses of the Hunaja system. The case will be related to the broader social implications of proximity and location sensors in mobile devices. The central argument is that location-awareness services can turn third places into physical buddy lists where comings and goings become ways to change one’s status from ‘online’ to ‘offline.’ To the users, such services can function as symbolic instruments for acquiring and maintaining membership in a community and marking territory; practical tools for optimizing paths in the city to initiate and avoid encounters with specific others; and playful objects for expressing humour and triggering creative social mischief. However, they are also a rich source of misunderstandings and afford ways to purposefully stalk and deceive other users.

Here’s a link to my profile at the MSR SCS2005 site.

For a few years now, socially-minded tinkerers have been building various systems for locating friends in bars. The most popular approach to solving this problem technically has been to dump the required computation about where you are to the user (see Imahima and Dodgeball, for instance). The problem is that to shout “Here I am!” users have to learn to input the commands, which is a bit clumsy even on i-mode phones. Another approach has been to use GPS or cellular positioning, but even where the technology is available, it’s not precise enough. A third way is the check-in/check-out approach, where some piece of technology (usually a low-cost card-swiper, infrared beacon, or RFID reader) is installed in the physical setting and users carry some sort of ID tags. There the problem is the cost and scalability. When building the Aula space for instance, we wanted for there to be a graceful way to let other members know when you’re there. After months of negotiations with the building management, wiring the door locks, and scavenging hardware, we managed to get the RFID-based Hunaja system working. But transferring the system to other premises was too costly, and so we had to shut Hunaja down when Aula left that space. The fourth and most recent solution is to do the tracking with WiFi or Bluetooth, although users then need an expensive terminal. Even if no one has quite figured it out yet, there might be a niche for a business model here, because (some) proprietors are willing to pay to attract a community of regulars, and (some) people will pay to publish their whereabouts to their small worlds when they’re out in town. (Although for sure it does have its problems, like stalking.)

Well, I’m back in Lancaster after a really strange christmas vacation in Cuba, which felt like a leftover chunk of soviet russia lost in the Caribbean. “Matkailu avartaa”—traveling opens the mind—goes a Finnish saying. Not only to the faraway things, but also to those subtle discrepancies in one’s home environment that normally go unnoticed. Like how annoying it is to search for a decent place in Helsinki to log on and do email. Just as annoying as in Havana, not to mention Lancaster where the café by the castle just shut. The spots keep changing. How to keep track?