On March 2 a cross-disciplinary seminar OpenUrban - Urban Informatics, the first event in a series of seminars and creative workshops prepared by Open City Lab. took place in St. Petersburg. Open City Lab. is created by community of architects and designers, sociologists, and software developers represented by e-Legion.
The main goal of this seminar and the Lab. is to get together professionals from different fields to join their effort in solving problems of the city, create a ground for cross-professional communication, information sharing, and interaction.
The event was opened by the speech of Constantine Chubarov, a representative of St. Petersburg government's program "Innovative Development Territories". He called for cooperation and told the audience why his department is looking for bold innovative projects, how projects are tested in two "experimental" districts of St. Petersburg, and how successful projects may be then extended to the whole city.
Mikhail Klimovsky from architects and designers community compared a typical 20th-century industrial city with a big mainframe and a modern postindustrial city - with Web2.0, mentioned that methods now applied to planning and development of major Russian cities are similar to those used in Europe and America in 1950s, and gave an example of how a thing from the virtual world can come to the streets, into the real world
Sociologists Dmitry Vorobyov and Oleg Pachenkov told us about needs of sociologists in the information processing field and what kind of information about city sociologists have. Evgeniy Nikolaev from Yandex company showed a very interesting presentation about using and processing information with Yandex Maps. Sociologists, architects, and traffic engineers literally bombarded Evgeniy with questions - the most popular one was "What is API and how can we use it to take advantage of information shared by Yandex?".
Anatoly Larin from e-Legion closed the "programmers" block with his story about the most interesting features of "Garage48 for Public Services" event in Tallinn.
At the last part of the seminar - public discussion Olga Pavlova, a manager and UI expert, raised an interesting question: huge amount information we actually already have access to and our inability or lack of skills to use it. Immediately, the problem of informational needs of various social groups came up, and a question how to formulate these needs correctly. The audience participated very actively: ideas and questions came in such a great number that they couldn't all get into the time limit. We are going to continue the discussion online - look for our updates!
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