Small streams leading to awesomeness?
Although the official strategy work of Information Networks is being planned, there are few initiatives that could not wait for an official strategy. Nevertheless, I’m sure these small things definitely support and take forward the awesomeness of Information Networks and its students.
They either give great opportunities to info students or help make information networks better known. Here are few things in the cooker at the moment, and ways in which you (the info student) can join in.
Webinar with Holvi & BearingPoint on design culture in the financial sector.
If you are interested on how banking is being “disrupted” by new business models, APIs, and smart small companies this is for you. If you are also interested on design thinking and lean startup mindset being applied to large companies (and smaller ones, like Holvi) this is for you as well. The webinar will be filmed in front of a live audience on October 4th. Mark the date and look out for official invite to take part. My role here is to facilitate the discussion among the speakers/panel, who are from OP, Nordea, Holvi, and BearingPoint. My true role is to promote Information Networks within these circles.
AaltoEE Roundtable of Super Experts: what skills does our society need?
One of the BIG questions for Information Networks is what to teach now so that it remains relevant. To help me out I joined forces with AaltoEE. Now we are putting together a group of 16ish smart people from academia, business life, startup scene, and the public sector. We are pulling all our strings to get a really amazing group to workshop around the question of what skills does our networked Finnish society need (focus on higher education and professional training). Once we get the 16ish committed we need a handful of (info) students to join the talks and help out in distilling the results from the workshops. In addition to credits, you would get super experience and help out in info strategy work.
Major Super Aalto Alumni Event Hackathon Thingie
Aalto University’s strategy work has identified a need for a high profile event to bring together alumni, students, graduates and their proud parents, and Aalto employees. Today we sat down with a small group to start the planning. It seems that a “hackathon” type of event would suit Aalto’s values of learning and doing, and perhaps June’s graduation week would be a good time to insert a big-name-keynote-speaker with a hackathon for 500+ people. As long as I’m involved, I need lots of smart facilitators to make the 500 strong hackathon a reality. Sounds like a task for Information Networks to me! More about this as we proceed.
Info Networks Public Lecture Series: Society & Tech
I just sent a quick application for some money from Digital Aalto Platform to arrange for a public lecture series “powered by Information Networks”. The line-up for this year’s Social Media course is so kick-ass, that with few thousand euros, I’m sure I could turn the same line-up into a public lecture series and market it as well. I think the societal topics of these speakers (cyberbullying, addiction, digital divide, online hate speech, gender & race in social media, journalism in disruption, filter bubbles, and information warfare) would be interesting to a large audience and would nicely represent the societal thinking within Information Networks. If we get this up and running, help is needed :)
That’s all for now. Let’s see after next Wednesday what else is on the event calendar after I sit down with the “steering group of awesomeness” a.k.a. Athene Hallitus.
