Wednesday, August 9, 2017

MATRIOSHKA HUB DE MOBILITÉ





Pour une mobilité en réseau,
inclusive et soutenable



Actuellement, nos villes et nos territoires font face à de nombreux défis de mobilité, ce qui accélère l'innovation basée sur de nouvelles technologies, dans un cadre d’un développement durable. La démocratisation de l’internet permet l'intégration des offres de transports publics et privés qu’imposent les nouveaux besoins des citoyens modernes, et surtout de la nouvelle population jeune et très bien connectée. Le numérique et les systèmes intelligents engagent les citoyens dans la production et l’utilisation de services publics de plus en plus complexes. Également, les pratiques collaboratives dans l’espace publique sont en croissance dans nos villes modernes.

En réponse à ses tendances, une nouvelle approche a la mobilite a été proposée: la mobilité en réseau (OuiShare et Chronos). Cette approche répond aux besoins d’une mobilité de demain, car les moyens de transport du futur proche seront partagés, écologiques et seront nécessairement conçus en réseau. Cette transformation bouleverse l’aménagement urbain, la gouvernance et les services traditionnels associés à l’écosystème de mobilité. Pour y faire face, nous devons faire appel à l’innovation ouverte, faire preuve d’inclusivité et prendre en compte la proximité.

La mobilité en réseau amène la société d'aujourd'hui à faire face au besoin d’une mobilité à une échelle d’approche plus large. Nous faisons appel au cadre théorique de l’écologie du paysage (Carl Troll, 1939), qui a été traditionnellement utilisé pour l’analyse spatiale à grande échelle. Étymologiquement, le mot paysage réfère à l’agencement des traits, des caractères et des formes d’une portion de l’espace terrestre. Donc, le paysage est utilisé dans la géographie et l’écologie ou il peut jouer un rôle de medium entre la nature et la société, à l’échelle supérieure de l’écosystème.  (Bertrand, 1975; Baudry & Burel 1999). Le paysage est alors perçu comme un système d’un ensemble d’éléments interconnectés soit un réseau.

Ceci dit, la mobilité est de plus en plus comprise en termes de création de liens, d’opportunités et de synergies, plutôt qu’en terme de pure franchissement de distances. Autrement dit, la  reliance devient la valeur nouvelle de la mobilité, (Amar, 2010). Dans ce scénario de la mobilité, qui est pensé à travers le prisme de l’Écologie du paysage,  l’innovation ouverte et l’ecodesign deviennent des outils essentiels pour trouver des nouvelles solutions. Ces méthodologies s’appliquent bien à une situation complexe ainsi que transdisciplinaire et produisent des résultats favorisant des valeurs environnementales.
CONCEPTS D’ÉCOLOGIE DU PAYSAGE UTILISÉS::
Les “patches” / zonage. Arrangement spatial, ou patron paysager, peut se décomposer en tâches homogènes (Baudry & Burel 1999). Les “patches” jouent différents rôles: élément d’orientation, élément clé (donne accès à), dynamiseur (engendre des actions, vivre une expérience), ou hub de rencontre (par exemple permet la pause pour découvrir le quartier).
La Matrice. Constitue l’ensemble dominant du paysage qui englobe les “patches”. Elle peut être par exemple une matrice urbaine, rurale ou périurbaine. De façon représentative, elle peut aussi être une matrice culturelle, une distribution géographique des traditions.
Les Corridors. Sont des éléments linéaires dont l’ensemble forme un réseau lineal à travers la matrice, permettant ainsi de relier certains ‘’patches’’ entre elles, qui ont des fonctions importantes. Nous pouvons les voir comme des connecteurs d’idées, d’information, de connaissances ou comme des objets IoT (‘’Internet of Things’’). Ils assurent la connectivité entre les éléments.



Un bon exemple de corridor à Montréal est la nouvelle Promenade Fleuve-Montagne, qui crée un lien piéton entre le fleuve Saint-Laurent, au sud, et le Mont Royal, au nord, comme occasion de rencontres, lieu de pause, passages verts.

Métapopulation. Se caractérise par des mécanismes d’interaction entre groupes de populations séparés spatialement, reliées par multiples éléments (Gilpin & Hanski, 1991). Pour la mobilité en réseau, ces éléments interreliés peuvent être des connecteurs des populations au niveau ethnique, des âges, ou genres, qui peuvent réduit l’isolement géographique.

Métacommunauté. Se caractérise par des mécanismes d’interaction entre communautés locales, séparées spatialement, mais reliées par multiples éléments. (Levins, 1969). Le concept de la mertacommunauté, au niveau de mobilité en réseau, peut jouer un rôle de connecteur des arrondissements, des savoirs, des goûts et préférences, des intérêts. (Levins, 1969)

Théorie de la percolation. S’intéresse au processus physique de flux d’information à travers un réseau. Elle est appliquée par exemple pour accélérer le mouvements des objets (De Gennes, 1990): La Remise est, par exemple, une coopérative de solidarité à but non lucratif à Montréal, qui entrepose des outils d’usage commun (cuisine, menuiserie, artisanat, mécanique, jardinage, électricité, etc.), mis à la disposition de ses membres sous forme de prêts. Ce partage crée des liens sociaux en plus de diminuer le gaspillage.

Le Patches / zonage
La Matrice
Corridors
Métapopulation
Métacommunauté
Percolation
    
 
    
Ces concepts d’écologie du paysage peuvent être utilisés pour analyser la ville de Montréal et sa mobilité, faisant appel à des mobiliers urbains, des systèmes numériques et interactifs.

LES MOBILIERS URBAINS DANS L'ÉCOLOGIE DE LA MOBILITÉ

Différents mobiliers urbains autonomes en énergie ont été déjà utilisés dans le but d’une mobilité en réseau. Tel est le cas des abris pour les voitures ou vélos munis de panneaux photovoltaïques, ou des abribus pour les utilisateurs du transport en commun offrant une connectivité WiFi et des informations locales. Ainsi, les mobiliers urbains sont des créatures dans l’écologie du paysage urbain, avec un potentiel pour devenir des éléments clés ou des stations, offrant différentes utilités: hubs de rencontres, expositions artistiques, expériences interactives, bornes informatives ou de connexions. Ces stations peuvent aussi être reliées les unes aux autres.

Le mobilier urbain Matrioshka, dessiné par Quatorze, est un des exemples de mobilier urbain autonome en énergie, qui est maintenant en voie de commercialisation à Montréal. La Matrioshka offre la possibilité de recharger des appareils portables électroniques et de se connecter à l’Internet. Ce mobilier a été enrichi en lui ajoutant d’autres systèmes électroniques: écran, système de son, capteurs de présence et de mouvement, panneaux interactives, etc. Ces fonctionnalités permettent au mobilier d’être un espace convivial et un hub de convergence, d’occupation temporelle et événementielle. La Matrioshka peut aussi jouer un rôle éducatif, pour sensibiliser la population à la production de l’énergie renouvelable et aux enjeux environnementaux.
La Matrioshka a déjà été utilisée comme une station de travail mobile, un mobilier sonore et visuel éducatif et aussi comme élément artistique ou informatif. Maintenant, le grand défi est de passer d’une conception de Matrioshka comme mobilier urbain connecté, agissant au niveau local, à un objet ayant un rôle dans la mobilité en réseau.
Dans cet objectif, l'équipe Matrioshka propose une expérience de création avec une approche écodesign reliée à la mobilité, dans le cadre de la Foire Écosphère et de l'événement Eco2Fest de Ouishare au Vieux Port de Montréal, le 12 et 13 Août. Le but de l’activité est d’écoconcevoir de nouveaux usages et fonctionnalités du mobilier urbain Matrioshka, dans différentes scénarios de mobilité à Montréal, dans un contexte de mobilité en réseau. Pour faciliter le processus d’écodesign, les participants auront une session éducative portant sur des concepts reliés à l’écologie du paysage, ainsi que sur les technologies durables. Ensuite, ils travailleront à partir d’un parcours de mobilité qui contient des stations Matrioshka, dans des scénarios de mobilité active, covoiturage et transmodalité. Ce sera une excellente opportunité de participer dans un exercice d'écodesign, pour apprendre, pour s’amuser et pour rencontrer des gens intéressés à cette thématique. N’hésitez pas à participer et jouir de cette superbe experience!

Pour participer à cet événement cliquez ici.

Pour plus d’information sur le projet Matrioshka cliquez ici.

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Sunday, March 19, 2017

Sensorica’s footprint in Open Science


Sensorica is presenting at GOSH 2017 in Santiago, Chile. This is a short document that we prepared for this conference. See more of our involvement here.



Saturday, September 17, 2016

Sensorica and health care

There is a growing recognition about the negative effects stemming from commodifying innovation through restrictive I.P. protection and exclusivity, especially in the medical field. Open Source Development methodologies in software emerged as the dominant form of collaborative innovation in the late 90’s and the trend has been spreading to a wider sphere of work. The IT infrastructure of today’s world enables peers to connect, share and collaborate on solving common issues through use of collective knowledge. Commons-based peer production is the term that defines such collaborative efforts by peers. The collaborators act as the stewards of commonly held wealth and assets which could be anything ; monies, knowledge, equipment, reputations, social capital etc.The beauty of such networks is that development for one project can be mixed and remixed to suit a variety of other needs. Traditionally, such endeavors have been part of a gift-economy where peers do not seek tangible rewards for their contributions. However, for larger scale and mainstream economic model, gift economy is not a viable method for development. The question, then, is how do we keep track of contributions to inform fair rewards?

That is where the Open Value Network model (OVN) comes in. An OVN is built around a core open source community, preserving its nature, and adds layers of governance, infrastructure and methodologies in order to make large scale, open innovation networks as predictable and accountable as traditional organizations, such as coops or limited liability corporations. In an OVN, contributions to a process, be it tangible items such as time and money or intangibles such as social capital, are recorded and whatever benefit is derived from this process is proportionally divided and distributed back to contributors. This makes open networks sustainable, by allowing the implementation of capturing and redistribution mechanisms. Networks have yet to gain public recognition, legitimacy and legality, but the jury is out already, the OVN model makes open networks fully capable socioeconomic agents.

Sensorica is the first instantiation of the OVN model. It originated in Montreal, in early 2011. The initial focus of the network was to develop open source scientific research equipment using commons-based peer production methodologies. Indeed, most of activities are coordinated from the Sensorica Montreal lab, a physical location where local affiliates can meet and work together. However, the Network Resource Planning (NRP) tools that Sensoricans have developed lays the foundation of a strong decentralized community without geographical borders. It allows tracking of the flow of resources through the entire system, at both micro and macro levels. NRP is the mainstay of all Sensorica projects, and enables Sensorica to practically implement the ideologies of collaborative and open innovation in a transparent and equitable manner.

The video bellow explains the idea in detail.



The wellness of societies and communities also depend on the innovation of its peers. Over the past few decades, the care aspect of communities has also been commodified. Healthcare and Education, the basics of human needs, have slowly been removed from the sphere of communities and instead, been handed over to closed and elitist institutions, including companies for profit-maximization. The result is a disjointed system where even these basic necessities are the purvey of the well-off. Moreover, in health care the quest for new cures and treatments is a quest for profits, and resources are mainly deployed in research and development (R&D) that promises good returns on investments. The illnesses of a few are forgotten. Just like with technological innovation, we, as a society, need to free knowledge and break down barriers to participation. For that to happen, Open Science will play a big part, meeting the requirement of creating open source scientific equipment and research methodologies that enable peers to do R&D on issues most important to them.


Sensorica's position on Open Science



See more on Open Science on Sensorica's website.

Guy Rouleau, the director of McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) announced recently in the Science Magazine that his institute was going to steer towards Open Science.
“We think that it is a way to accelerate discovery and the application of neuroscience.” (…) “There is a fair amount of patenting by people at the institute, but the outcomes have not been very useful” (...) “It comes down to what is the reason for our existence? It’s to accelerate science, not to make money.”
Sensorica has already taken concrete steps towards implementing this vision. One of the first projects undertaken by Sensoricans was the Mosquito, a force-transducer with ability to detect micron-scale movements, designed for applications in biomechanics at the cellular level. Today, Sensorica has over 15 projects for open source scientific instruments in different stages of development, some of them being used in University labs (see the full list). However, the main potential lies in the ability of the community to build upon these and many other devices and repurpose them to fit needs in diverse fields.


Sensorica's Mosquito system - by photo Daniel Brastaviceanu

Open source scientific instruments cost only of a small fraction to produce and to maintain, compared to their proprietary equivalents. This reduces the costs of innovation and widens participation in research. Professor Joshua Pearce from Michigan Tech University, and contributor to the Sensorica OVN mentions in one of his papers:
A case study of a syringe pump with numerous scientific and medical applications is presented. The results found millions of dollars of economic value from a relatively simple scientific device being released under open-licenses representing orders of magnitude in-crease in value from conventional proprietary development. The inescapable conclusion of this study is that FOSH development should be funded by organizations interested in maximizing re-turn on public investments particularly in technologies associated with science, medicine and education.
During its six years in development, Sensorica has prototyped formal relations with Universities and medical centers, demonstrating how the crowd and the institutional academia can successfully interface, opening wide and filtering participation in medical research, allowing discovery to go towards what matters to people, not just to Wall Street. The Mosquito sensor has been developed in collaboration with the Montreal Heart Institute and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, the Manipulators have been developed in partnership with McGill University. Numerous students have done their internship within the Sensorica lab, not only practicing their technical skills, but also learning how to operate in a network-type, highly collaborative environment. See Sensorica Interns webpage.
--> Lower cost open source scientific instruments lower the barrier to entry to medical research.
--> Interfacing institutional academia with open networks frees research topics from the narrow profit motive and speeds up innovation
In early 2015, Sensorica partnered with Breathing Games to produce an open source therapeutic device for kids suffering from cystic fibrosis. But this project is very different. As we are designing the hardware device, we are also thinking about how the data generated from its use during therapy sessions will be managed. It turns out that the blockchain technology can truly revolutionize how therapy and medical care are administered, and how the medical data is managed, and Sensorica has already embarked in blockchain applications development.
--> blockchain and other p2p technologies create the possibility of new health care services
The vision for Sensorica is to demonstrate the economic viability and practical superiority of open innovation. Since innovation has been segregated from community for the better part of the last century, the possibilities of applications are endless. We are not claiming to have the solution all the problems that our health care system is facing, but our past experiences have allowed us to peer into a new realm of solutions, enabled by the new digital technology and the new socioeconomic processes it has made possible.

There is a lot of criticism for commons-based peer processes pertaining to their ability to deliver large scale solutions, while being self-sustainable. In other words, the conclusions point to the persistent need of traditional forms of organizing innovation, production and distribution, in order to fuel these new processes: one needs to have a paid job to contribute to open source development. The flaw in these arguments is that they analyse these new practices within the traditional capitalist paradigm. Commons-based peer processes are part of a new socioeconomic paradigm, which prescribes its own underlying theory of value and its own capturing and redistribution mechanisms. Saying that open innovation is unsustainable is factually false, even within the capitalist regime. Arduino, for example, is a very successful commercial operation relying entirely on open source hardware and software technology. Most successful 3D printing and personal drone commercial operations also rely on open source, as well as operations that provide blockchain applications. All these new and disruptive technologies are dominated by these new types of ventures who know how to steward open networks. Something is going on here, for those who have eyes to see. And all these organizations are only hybrids, in the sense that their structure have capturing mechanisms that function in a market-driven economy, while relying on commons-based peer processes for innovation. Sensorica has data that shows, perhaps for the first time, how capturing mechanisms that are fully compatible with the logic of the p2p economy can be gradually introduced within this transitory economy, to become dominant in a very near future.

We do not have experience in pharmaceuticals. We cannot prescribe today a method through commons-based peer production to deliver a new drug, going through all the norms and regulations. The monetary costs associated with this type of ventures are huge, and if we transpose the challenge in an OVN setting it would require the deployment of an amount of resources and a complexity that we cannot sustain, at this point in time. But we do not see a hard barrier... As these systems scale, one day they will be capable of undertaking such challenges. Alternatively, we do have extensive experience with scientific instruments and less costly, and less regulated therapeutic devices. This is the path of least resistance for OVNs to infiltrate the care domain and gain strength. Joshua Pearce's conclusions show that once open source-based scientific instruments enter a market niche it totally disrupts it, putting traditional companies out of business, as they cannot sustain their operations at such low product prices. This trend is starting now with medical devices, like this 30$ DIY EpiPen example. Operating at lower prices, the monetary rewards an organization gets for the product, doesn't mean that we are going towards poverty. The zero marginal cost tendency, driven by open innovation, only makes sense in the capitalist paradigm. These new organizations pull other benefits from non-market-based sources, which are forbidden to traditional for-profit enterprises. We need a different type of accounting in order to determine the wealth of network-type organizations, one that goes beyond monetary currency, because innovation, production and rewards are more and more driven and organized by new types of currencies, by new types of symbolic systems, by current-sees [a concept proposed by Arth Brook].


Written by Abran Khalid and Tiberius Brastaviceanu.



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The text has been remixed from a post for a book made by Tibi. Please see here for the original text.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Meeting in Ottawa to help the Canadian Liberal Government understand the participatory economy

Monday, June the 20th, 2016, Jim Anastassiou and Tiberius Brastaviceanu met with the cabinet of minister Bains on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, to inform the Canadian Federal Government of issues related to the emergence of the participatory economy. 

This meeting was organized by David Lametti, member of Parliament from Verdun, who is following Sensorica since 2013. We invited to this meeting John Macdonald from Robco Inc and Dhafir Burhan from eVision, two vanguard companies that already interface with the SENSORICA OVN and are experimenting with new participatory economy practices, as well as Alexandre Bigot from OuiShare Quebec. The composition of this delegation was designed to demonstrate the relevance of SENSORICA in today's transition economy and its alignment with the future.  

Our message was very well received. SENSORICA was seen as a "very innovative model for innovation", covering everything from open science, open innovation to peer production. The OVN model, its current reality and its potential will be discussed in the Parliament to create new legislation that will foster the development of the participatory economy. We will continue to help the cabinet of Minister Bains by sharing our knowledge, our experiences, and our opinions. 

The invitation to Canada's Parliament Hill comes one year after our meeting at the White House.

Also note that the Sensorica initiative will support Canada playing a lead role in international standards development on OVN. In this context, it should be noted that the OVN work will input directly into international ISO standards development, namely, ISO/IEC 15944-15 "Information technology - Business Operational View - Part 15: Ope Value Networks(OVN): Integrated perspective on Open-edi, eBusiness, blockchain and distributed transactions". The lead international ISO Project Editor : Prof. William McCarthy, with Jake Knoppers as one of two Co-Project Editors. The international ISO standards committee responsible here is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC32/WG1 (where JTC1 = Joint ISO, IEC = Technical Committee on Information technology, SC = Data Management & Interchange, WG1 = eBusiness)

Monday, September 7, 2015

Sensorica affiliates are invited at Impact Economy

25 world leading thinkers and doers have been invited to the Impact Economy Summit in Whistler, BC, Canada, between October 5th and 9th, to design new and cutting edge business models based on peer-to-peer theory and practices. This event is organized by The Citizen Media.

"Inspirations and ideas throughout the week will be recorded through a Systems Diagram, Podcasts produced by award winning Quebec based filmmaker Samer Beyhum, and a Documentary directed by Inspirational Film Artists and New Paradigm Storytellers J’aime Gianopoulos and Ian MacKenzie."

 Open brochure

 

Videos






Sunday, June 14, 2015

Sensorica Presents: pioneering open innovation at the White House

Posted Jun 14, 2015, 6:39 PM by Tiberius Brastaviceanu   [ updated Aug 20, 2019, 3:30 PM

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On June the 11th, 2015, Sensorica's co-founder Tiberius Brastaviceanu was invited to the White House, Eisenhower Executive Office, to discuss the open value network model pioneered by Sensorica.


Hosted by Jenn Gustetic, Assistant Director for Open Innovation, the focus of the discussion was around collaborative crowdsourcing models and interfaces between open communities and traditional institutions.


Sensorica's open value network, or ‘OVN model’, with its network resource planning and contribution accounting system (NRP-CAS), allows collaborative crowdsourcing at large scale. The system allows people and organizations to collaborate on the best possible solutions by rewarding them fairly in proportion to their contribution. This stands in contrast with the XPrize crowdsourcing model (used by NASA), which produces one solution as a result of a competition, instead of capturing the value of collaboration and leveraging the work of the cohort.


The White House is looking into how to make open communities and networks play a more efficient role in our society. Since the advent of the Internet there is a growing role for open communities in culture, education, and innovation. Open source hardware communities are driving industries like 3D printing and consumer drones, which are both groundbreaking technologies. Sensorica is a working model in the evolution of open source communities, with infrastructure, methodologies, governance and legal structures adapted to bridge the model to traditional institutions. The open value network model makes Sensorica a viable, reliable, accountable and auditable open source community.  


We used THIS slide deck as a visual support for our discussion.