Title : Remote co-working Hackathon on Wearables and Smart Environments



Project Lead : Francesco Botto From : CREATE-NET (None)

Dates : from 2014-06-16 15:55:06 to 2014-11-28 15:03:26

Description :

Motivation and objectives :
The citizen movement called Makers is one of the more active innovation communities in the cities these days. Makers combine traditional arts and technological methodologies to design and to create new products that solve their specific needs. On the other hand, nowadays Hackathon is a trending methodology for enabling synergies between and connecting different artistic and technological disciplines, from scientists or developers to artists with citizens. A Hackathon is a intense and non-stop development session, in which several teams take part and normally compete for a prize. There is an infinity of topics to be addressed in a Hackathon, but normally are IT related. The dynamics of the event is basically, to create (normally an App or small software) the best solution in the given time with a team of developers. The most expanded Hackathon model brings all competitors in one single location. For this reason, on-site Hackathons are spatially limited. This fact does not facilitate cooperation or competition with or against other creative people from other countries. CREATE-NET, is proposing to i2CAT in this TNA to define and propose a distributed scenario for testing remote co-working Hackathons environments in order to connect Makers communities located in multiple venues and different cities and countries. The main objective is to research and to experiment new ways of collaboration between, in this specific case, European Makers that are joining a Hackathon. The final goal is to open the concept of a Hackathon and to tear down spatial boundaries for collaboration. From an anthropological point of view, there are many issues and parameters (e.g.: user experience, interactivity, etc.) to analyse for characterizing a useful distributed co-creation space. In this sense, this project is focused to provide first results for the design and description, from a technical and human perspective, of a proper environment capable to foster creativity and collaboration in certain processes that requires of physical interaction between makers. Furthermore, this project will draw the initial guidelines to create an optimal experimental procedure for conducting real-time distributed collaborative innovation projects between different cities and communities overcoming distance and communication issues. One challenge derived from this concept, is to open to the creative people itself how to overcome this boundaries, just giving tools and observing how their instinct brings them to find new ways to cooperate and maximize the results obtained. From a technical perspective, the output of this TNA will be useful for identifying and testing the most suitable infrastructures, tools and services needed to be deployed in such a generic scenario. After this step, the project will work on more specific use cases and scenarios in order to contribute with the detection of further utilities and features identified as necessary for future steps of the project. The potential of the solutions that could arise could have a relevant impact on how people interact in distributed cooperative spaces. In this sense, one of the main objectives is to deploy a distributed scenario connecting two remote co-working hackathons. This will enable the proposing entities to analyse technical requirements of the network architecture and usability and experience from an end-user point of view. The proposed experiment will be conducted between the cities of Trento and Barcelona, connecting two different venues with several teams interacting among them. In this sense, the test-bed foresee a semi-controlled environment: 2 venues with 8 half-teams per venue, simulating 16 different locations (despite they are sharing location and connectivity). From a network and software point of view, each table and stage is considered as if they were located in different locations. So, by conducting the project we will be able to provide a technical solution for connecting N co-located hackathons. This scenario makes sense for connecting small creativity Makers spaces between them. Despite of only connecting table-to-table and stage with stage to provide a common big window for joint presentation (i.e.: challenge description and projects results showcase), it is planned also to connect each table with a workstation located in each stage in order to emulate the role of an external mentor located in another place. Moreover, with this architecture we will be able to test future possible scenario with an external specialist located in another site for mentoring the collaborative developments. Besides, from the network point of view, within this architecture each table is also located in different locations, so we can emulate the co-located hackathon between the two sites as a hackathon where all the tables and the two stages are distributed in different locations. In this sense, the deployed scenario for the project will emulate a network where the peers are located in 18 different locations, 2 different locations for the 2 stages and 16 more locations for all the tables (8 tables for each site).

Teams :
The proposing group of CREATE-NET is the "Future Media Solutions" (FraME) application area of CREATE-NET . This application area aims at supporting and sustaining the media and creative industries in exploring, prototyping and validating new ICT services for the production, management and distribution of digital content that leverages on open platforms and the availability of future internet network infrastructures. The application area combines internal expertise on networked media and pervasive computing with software prototyping and engineering capabilities in order to support and complement research activities through an experimental approach.

Dates :
starting date : 01 August, 2014
ending date : 21 September, 2014

Facilities descriptions :
http://visionair-browser.g-scop.grenoble-inp.fr/visionair/Browser/Catalogs/DML.SP.html

Recordings & Results :
The IoTogether project aimed at organizing an Internet of Things (IoT) Hackathon co-located in Trento (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain) with eight remote co-working teams divided on the two sides. A low-latency and UHD streaming system (UltraGrid) was adopted and configured to enable a 9 channels videoconferencing service, for the 8 teams and the plenary view between Trento and Barcelona. Even if distributed hackathon are commonly organized, a Future Internet (FI) videoconferencing system for co-working hackathon teams constitutes a unique experience in literature. For this reason the experience was sustained by the SPECIFI project under a series of international activities in order to enable FI services for the creative industries. IoTogether was possible with the contribution and coordination of experts from the IoT (COMPOSE project), the FabLab (MuSe and BCNLab facilities) and the UltraGrid technology field (i2CAT), to which the TNA is focused. The main scientific challenges of the experimentation can be summarised on three crucial levels: (i) the organizational one, because the many different stakeholders needed a common vision and adequate coordination (ii) the network/bandwidth level, because the high level connectivity that was required involved the coordination of many different stakeholders and systems, and (iii) the Hw-Sw level, because of the need to create stable and efficient video and audio connections between the two sides of the hackathon. The videoconference and network technology testing phase started in July 2014 and involved: (1) local facilities testing mainly in I2CAT in remote cooperation with CREATE-NET until the first validation of the system, (2) setup, configuration, testing and demonstration of the videoconferencing solution between the 15th and the 20th of September -. The event took place the 20th of September 2014 at the MuSe Science Museum, Trento, and in Fabra i Coats, Barcelona. 58 participants with different backgrounds makers, designers, hackers worked for 12 hours creating and presenting 8 prototypes. A set of IoT sensors and tools constituted the prizes for the firsts 2 classified projects: 1 "BluePresence": a smartwatch managing smartlights with power consumption profiling. 2 "LoveTotem": a lamp to express remote feelings for lovers.

Conclusions :
The IoTogether TNA project results in the following achievements: Organizational side: - Definition and involvement of the relevant stakeholders with specific responsibilities - Participatory definition of the event main issues and promotional webpage created (http://iotogether.splashthat.com) - Management of participants registration and questions - Team-building - Operational website created for the events practical issues (http://iotogether.compose-project.eu/ ) - Coordination of the event: preparation, team-working, presentations, evaluation and closing ceremony. Network/bandwidth side: - Stakeholders agreement on the Italian side for a 100 Mbps involving the local public network provider (Trentino Network), the local research and experimentation Testbed (managed by the University of Trento) and the MuSe for the last mile. - Successfull Future Internet network configuration tests. - Successfull network performances during the event. Hw/Sw side: - Definition of a detailed list of technical tools and requirements. - Successfull UltraGrid Hw/Sw configuration (compressed streams with low loss codification parameters; H.264 for video and OPUS for audio), installation and test on both Italian and Spanish sides.




Project Images :

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Other project resources :

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