IoT council, a thinktank for the Internet of Things, is Number 2.
Follow Blog IoT Council brings you news on Internet of Things. It aims to offer the latest on technical building blocks but also tries to put this digital transition into a social and circular economy context.
Rob van Kranenburg is the founder of IOT Council.
The name was conjured up during the Radiator Festival in Nottingham in January 2009. I was having tea and sandwiches in Rosy Lee, next to where Radiator was kicking off, with Sean Dodson, who wrote the foreword to the IoT report I wrote; Christian Nold, the artist who created Biomapping (www.biomapping.net); Régine Debatty, founder of we-make-money-not-art.com; and Usman Haque, founder of Pachube (www.haque.co.uk/pachube.php). We thought the name “Council” would carry some weight, but the URL was not yet fixed. We considered things like “extremeconnectivity.com,” but then Kitty De Preeuw (the Council webmaster), suggested I look up “theinternetofthings.eu,” which, very much to my surprise, was still available.
I spent the next few months building news items. Then, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsinso (from Tinker) and I kicked off the official Council launch with a full day and evening of talks and workshops at the Interactive Media Art Laboratory (IMAL) in Brussels (see www.theinternetofthings.eu/content/council-launches-brussel-blogs-reports-and-videoclips).
The invitation to join Council, presented to people who attended the event, read in part,
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vision. Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start…. So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart?
The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes. Currently IoT applications, demonstrations and infrastructures are being rolled out primarily from negative arguments. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For e-health, it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view, it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance at item level and in public space. For retail, it is shelf space management.
Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counter part to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IoT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory budgeting, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans and other humans, humans and things, and humans and their surroundings.
As Gerald Santucci (then Head of IoT at the European Commission) wrote in his review of the event, it “brought together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, including industry, designers, artists, thinkers, regulators, etc., to form a new community of people committed and dedicated to exchanging and sharing their Internet of Things visions and experiences” (see http://media.digitalarti.com/comment/reply/100862/43889).