It’s been a busy academic year for us researchers in the VISCI group with many projects keeping us occupied. We’ll report on the results here as we start reaching conclusions, but here are a few teasers of some of our activities:

• Seminar on social media reseach methods. Some of you already know that we are co-arranging a method seminar for researchers that are interested in studying social media or utilizing data gathered from it in their research together with the SOMUS project during 31st of August 2010. See this blog post for more information and click here for registration.
• Re-developing a collaborative writing tool. Recently a collaborative writing service called Etherpad was acquired by Google and consequently closed for users. However, the source code for the service was shared, which provides good ground for further developing the system. We’re looking into possibilities for enhancing it with various features. Right now it’s has a basic version up called VisciPad (*better name pending*) and you can use it here. Just remember that it’s officially for testing only and we give no proof for stability.
• Studies into collaborative innovation. We’re looking in our Tekes-funded Visci Tools project into the social dynamics of collaborative innovation in one of our partner firms. At the moment we have just finished the first research round and will be publishing early results starting this fall. We suggest you follow this up if your interested in how to utilize social software for furthering the innovation capabilities in your organization.

In the meantime, enjoy your summer plans if you plan of having them. We know we will.