Kansalaismedia Somus

Etusivu | Ajankohtaista | In English

"Social media for citizens and public sector collaboration" (Somus) is a research project funded by the Academy of Finland during 1.1.2009-31.12.2010.

Project description

The Somus project will create new understanding of citizenship, publicity and participation in decision-making in the era of social media. Open, citizen-driven media must support the different phases of participation: public definition of common problems, collection and accumulation of knowledge and other competencies, development of socially grounded innovations, and actual decision-making.

The main objectives of the project are:

1. To produce basic knowledge about dynamics of information, knowledge and citizenship in the participative media environment
2. To develop new technical solutions for user-driven media service development
3. To demonstrate and evaluate new media concepts that are enabled through open interfaces between public sector, mass media and citizen groups
4. To create and validate a model for open Internet-based research in collaboration with The Open Research Swarm and collaboration network of different actors

The project will result in understanding the phenomenon of self-organizing ubiquitous media as well as theories, methods and demonstrations that will be evaluated in real life situations with users.

Research partners

• University oj Jyväskylä: Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy (Esa Konttinen, Kari A. Hintikka)
• University of Tampere: Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (Risto Kunelius, Auli Harju)
• Helsinki University of Technology: Department of Media Technology (Petri Vuorimaa, Antti Poikola)
• Research Swarm: (representative Petri Kola)
• VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland: Media Technologies (Caj Södergård, Pirjo Näkki, Asta Bäck)

Open research

The project will be carried out openly on the Internet. You can follow the project in the wiki (mainly in Finnish) or participate discussion in our Jaiku channel.

Contact