Council Mission

We believe the "winning solution" to making the most open, inclusive and innovative Internet of Things is to transcend the short-term opposition between social innovation and security by finding a way to combine these two necessities in a broader common perspective.  The Internet as most people know it – the www - is 16 years old. In these sixteen years we have seen disruptive innovations in content (individuals gaining power with their ideas and opinions through blogs, issue websites, online collaboration), and in formats (youtube video, tomtom navigation).

The next step is the change we are witnessing daily in our conceptual models of framing data-informating and knowledge in our institutions and formal environments. The Internet of Things; imagine a world where everything can be both analogue and digitally approached - reformulates our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves.

Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a RFID reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere.

It holds dangers, but it also holds promises. And maybe it can be the positive solution, the logical step in the history of outsourcing memory to objects, devices and the environment, for the challenges we all face today of an ever growing individualization that might tempt citizens into breaking with existing solidarities (among race, gender, ethnicity, age…) that are currently harnassed through a model of organisation that is under severe pressure to reform.

Currently we can break down the work being done on the IOT into smart things, homes and cities. The rationale behind the work of all three is defensive, driven by designprinciples of control and fear and has in the past six years not been able to create much enthousiasm, on the contrary, it has sparked lots of defensive debates on transparency, privacy and fear mongering.

The main driver behind smart things is inventory management and anti-theft.

Fuelling smart homes is the fact that we will simply have to stay in our homes longer because no human being will be there to care for us. That is the reason your house will become proactive; ie telling you to exercise.

Face recognition, biosensors and smart architectures is what makes a city smart according to most town planners, not realizing they only fuell more fear, more dehumanization, and in the end less community, less business, and certainly less innovation (scared people do not innovate).

We feel that this defensive and negative attitude will only help to strenghen dark scenarios. It also does not recognize the tremendous efforts of bureaucracy and democracy in the EU to build as open and inclusive societies as possible. Its fundamental quality: slowing things down; does not work in the Internet.

It is precisely one of the reasons for the huge shifts in the recent decade. We offer scenarios and real applications that recognize this fundamental quality of democracy, the real possibilty to slow things down in order to bridge disruptive innovation for a few into facilitating a way of organizing solidarity for most and if possible, for all.