Urban Tapestries in 2004

A new year beckons and its time to reflect back on the previous year's activities and peer ahead into the future. After a few weeks' welcome break we're now in the process of evaluating what we learned from the trial and planning the next stages of development: both of the Urban Tapestries platform (software) and of the social, cultural, economic and political uses of public authoring. We will be drawing out key themes from the trial and creating a section on this blog as a discussion forum exploring these issues and their implications.

We are continuing to develop the client software for the P800 mobile phone with France Telecom R&D, and extending and refining the server-side elements, hopefully to run a small trial of the P800 version in the Spring. Now we have the basics of a system that works, we are also starting to prepare a development roadmap for functionality: planning key stages in which to add more and more enhancements.

Beginning in April we will also be starting the next major research phase under the title 'Social Tapestries: Public Authoring and Civil Society'. In parallel with our technical development of the Urban Tapestries software, we are putting together a consortium of partners to explore specific uses of public authoring technologies in civil society contexts – collaborating on experiments to explore why people may use these technologies, what they will do with them, as well as how they can be delivered.

A Cultural Snapshot exploring this area of research will be published by Proboscis in the near future.

Posted by Giles Lane at January 8, 2004 03:43 PM