[Dev-flock] Joining BILUMI

[wesa aapro]

Hi all,

I am Wesa, founder of Finnish based Consumer Gadget. It is a mobile tool for
ethical shopper, utilizing barcodes, see http://consumergadget.org/.
Consumer Gadget has it's own database of ethical information, but for the
three years the service has existed, we haven't been able to grow the
database. I am ready to try something new and I am happy to join BILUMI.

I got interested in BILUMI, since Consumer Gadget's information model is
pretty much the same, with only small differences. BILUMI has very good
philosophy about letting users evaluate nodes, something that Consumer
Gadget is completely missing.

I should explain my background, because it may help in understanding my
writing. I have graduated from Medialab / Helsinki University of Arts and
Design, but I actually started my studies in Helsinki University of
Technology. My masters's thesis was about Consumer Gadget. Even though I
have done studies in CS, I am self taught programmer and information
architecture. This means I don't know the correct terminology, especially in
english. I tend to see everything visually, as boxes and arrows, so if my
thoughts don't make any sense, it's propably because I have written
something else than I see in my head.
I have a lot of experience on the subject, but I have few disadvantages: 1)
I have worked pretty much alone for the last three years, so I am really
blinded on many things. 2) I haven't coded a single line of Python.

I am really excited about working with BILUMI, because there are many of you
and you clearly understand what you do! I have had a lot of support in
Finland, managed to do well in competitions with just the idea of Consumer
Gadget, but I haven't had anyone to talk to in the level I now can.

I have worked with Finnish NGO's (we actually are one ourselves) and found
out that the biggest problem is, that the research goes into too much
details, so that the overall picture is lost. There are too many products in
the world to focus on everyone of them. We need powerful tools to cover many
products easily, even if it goes slightly wrong. My focus is currently on
how to model reality efficiently. My focus is not on the ethical debate
about the reality, it is a field I really don't understand. Actually my
interests in ethical shopping came from Consumer Gadget - purely technical
idea, which no one at the time seemed to have came up with before.

I wrote three wiki pages and I would be happy if some of you had the time to
read them and discuss about the thoughts presented in them. The terminology
I have chosen may not be understandable, it can be even misleading, so feel
free to discuss about my thoughts directly on the wiki pages.

Modelling reality efficiently, but not 100% accurately:
http://bilumi.org/trac/wiki/Approximation_groups

Presenting the information in understandable way to simplified UI:
http://bilumi.org/trac/wiki/Rendering_nodes

Accessing the information through context identifiers:
http://bilumi.org/trac/wiki/Identifying_nodes



Happy to be on board,
Wesa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dev-flock/attachments/20080924/5b1dc1dd/attachment.htm