Mission & contact

Jarkko Moilanen (PhD)

Published in

API Economy Hacklab

3 min readJul 22, 2017

Aims and focus

Produce valid research and information about API economy topics which serve API economy growth especially (but not limited to) in Finland
By default results (articles and blogs in this platfom) will be open access licensed under CC licenses. Some posts might evolve to articles in academic journals. Publishing some of the results in blog is a tool to raise discussion about the topic.
Connect API economy researchers. Push more Finnish API and platform Economy researchers towards PhD and create more scientific research. Acting jointly will increase are possibilities to prosper, publish more papers and gain traction.
Focus on API economy (major focus) and also on Platform economy (minor focus). Detailed focus depends on researcher.

The group has no obligations towards anyone, but acts like research hacklab and think tank.

Mid term plan (1–2 years)

Collect top / well-known API Economy researchers together under AEH umbrella.
Setup surveys engine (LimeSurvey) for research purposes — Done 9.7.2018
Conduct research in the area to show value for companies participating in API Economy
Become affiliated with Tampere3 (three united universities in Tampere). Tampere3 will be official organization for the group.
50 active researchers from Europe
Own track or multiple sessions in MindTrek 2019. At least 5 academic papers.

Long term plan (3–5 years)

Become _the_ major API and platform Economy research group in Europe.
Top 10 API and Platform economy researchers are members of the group
100 active researchers from Europe
Steady rock solid future

Communication

Facebook In the first phase we’ll use existing groups:

API:Suomi — API economy focused Finnish community
APIOps — API automation focused technical community

Twitter. Lets use hashtag #APIHacklab

Blog

This blog is free for all to write about the focus area. Researchers might post blogs about interesting phenomenons and preliminary results to gain co-authors or/and feedback. Some posts might evolve to articles in academic journals.

Main event — annually organized MindTrek

Community’s main event is MindTrek. Instead of arranging conference our selves, we participate in MindTrek conference program and content. Of course participants of our community participate other events as well.

Mode of operation (July 2018)

Currently not connected to single university. Instead this group is peer production driven. Group is not formally organised. The group has no obligations towards anyone, but acts like research hacklab and think tank.

Group is actively participating in practical activities around API economy. Connections and discussions with API economy related companies is desired. We could operate under COSS ( the Finnish Centre for Open Systems and Solutions) which has network of ICT companies already. That might give us credibility. Another direction is to approach P2P Foundation (Michel Bauwens).

By being close to API owners and API consumers (app developers) we gain knowledge about topics to do research on. Close connection to hacklabs has two purposes. Firstly, they have physical spaces to organize meetings and tools to create real experiments together with companies and enthusiasts in the field of IoT. Secondly, they share same value base of valuing freedom and free innovation above anything else.