About the Internet Society 

Board of Trustees

2000 Board Election

Candidates

Toni Alatalo <antont@netppl.fi>

Nominated by: Tommi Karttaavi <tommi.karttaavi@hpy.fi>
Country: Finland

Personal and professional information in response to the request from Board Of Trustees election organizers.

ISOC activities

Starting now, January 2000, working part-time as the CEO of the Finnish chapter. Main responsibility international (global) collaboration with other chapters (representative in CAC) and ISOC in general. ISOC.fi is relatively newborn as a chapter, transformed from the independent Finnish Internet Society ("Suomen Internet-yhdistys", http://www.siy.fi/) founded early 1990’s. The chapter has been quite Helsinki-centric, but nowadays is more active in Oulu too (approx. 600km further north) where one of the board members and I myself are based.

Currently, I’m partly responsible for the Internet Fiesta activities in Finland. We are also preparing the InterTech2000 seminar here in Oulu (previous two have been successful in Helsinki, organized by our chair Tommi Karttaavi) about mobility, together with Nokia people.

Before visited Inet’97 in Kuala Lumpur, then organized the youth panel at Inet’98 in Geneva with Laura Breeden (see http://an.org/inet98/ and Steve Cisler’s report on nettime and other forums) and also Inet’99 in San Jose last year. I was also involved in the Dutch chapter (http://www.isoc.nl) when studying at the free university in Amsterdam in 1998 (http://www.cs.vu.nl .. own page archived at http://www.netppl.fi/~antont/cs.vu.nl/)

Work

Since returning back home in Oulu, have been working at the university, currently as a researcher at the department of information processing sciences. The responsibilities have included planning and teaching in a new curriculum called (http://www.tol.oulu.fi/digimed/) digital media, there especially basics of i/Internet (autumn 1998) and later e.g. time-based media and hypermedia engineering (autumn 1999) and hypermedia/communication research (right now, i.e. spring 2000).

At the moment, after getting the master thesis (working title: Internet as Hypermedia Communication Environments) finally together, I’m starting to work on Ph.D. research as a part of a project called OWLA.

OWLA, besides being the old Lappish name for our city Oulu (meaning flood, the big river used to do so before we took control of it to generate electricity for the area), stands for Open, Web/Wireless and Adaptive hypermedia information systems. The goal is to develop methods and tools for their design, development, maintenance etc. such as CASE tools and perhaps server platforms for running the services. Work is done in collaboration with the five participating companies (including Satama and Nokia) and other research projects at the department (about mobile Internet etc.). We also look forward to starting new projects related to these developments during the years 2000-2002 and beyond.

Before I’ve been involved in the Internet development first as a hobbyist (computer kid) and later in school and business as a co-founder of Net People Oy (http://www.netppl.fi/, recently merged with http://www.nixu.fi/) in Oulu, Helsinki and abroad in quite a variety of net.development projects professionally since 1994 (reference?). Some experiences from these years where written down when preparing the youth session in Geneva and parts of them where later published in the ISOC magazine OnTheInternet summer 1999 (http://an.org/inet98/paper.html is the original, a bit messy working version – archived also in the Inet’98 proceedings).

Current involvement in business is down to consulting and idea generating together with entrepreneur friends, many of them in new startups (e.g. http://www.appelsiini.com/ and http://www.futuron.com/). Perhaps after finishing the Ph.D. and the OWLA project as a whole, it becomes interesting enough to return to business again.

Interests

Besides the actual work for ISOC and at the university (plus businesses), I’m currently lucky enough (*knocked-on-wood*) to have quite a lot of time to look at things outside own field – to look for new ideas, perhaps, or just to have fun. This includes quite a range of fields, from audiovisual narration and literature theories and philosophy on the humanist side to evolution biology and elementary physics in hard sciences.

Apart from these hard-core (intellectual? i.e. boring : ) wanderings in the virtual, I’m a great fan of real-life embodiment like dancing to music and hanging out with friends, on the streets of cities but also going out to wilderness, organizing parties etc.

I’m also in a semi-professional contemporary dance/performance group called Erä (http://an.org/era/) which is part of the Oulu-based dance production center JoJo, where I’m also a member of the board. On the music side I’m involved in an ambient group called Metsä (stands for forest/woods, see http://an.org/metsa/).

Sometimes we try to combine these (artistic? Well fun! at least : ) activities with the infosoc world we work in: for example, in October 1999 I was coordinating a week-long workshop in the contemporary art museum, Kiasma, in Helsinki as a part of the TEMPorary media lab. Our week was called Linux Land, Nokia Country – the global information and communication technologies from a Finnish point of view (see http://an.org/tmp or directly http://temp.kiasma.fi/ict) – some proceedings (perhaps video, see http://temp.kiasma.fi/ict/realvideo) still in the making. There in the end we had great fun dancing around the hall, wearing TeleTubby costumes and performing to the music created from the disturbance signals of GSM phones or lack of bandwidth in the networks – but only after spending a long week working on the issues quite seriously.

As a trustee?

The possibility for me to become a BOT candidate came as quite a surprise – it was not really something I’d been thinking of, at least yet. I guess for anyone to vote for me (a weird thought to think of) they would be interested to know why I’m going for it in the first place and what would I do if I would be elected – right?

Well, first of all, I don’t know all too much about what the work would be, but do think that it would be such an interesting opportunity to continue the work around the ‘net that it is worth trying. Being involved in quite a bit of activities already, my role as a trustee would undoubtly be shaped by my background, that I’ve tried to write down here a bit.

While not being a notable scholar, involved in leading industry players, or been an internet activist for decades - like many current trustees and presumably new candidates too fortunately are – perhaps I could bring in a different perspective to what ISOC is about.

Remembering the wonderful reactions and feedback we got after the Youth Panel in Geneva, something in that direction would probably be something to work on. For example, at the moment we are trying to get some teenagers here in Oulu to get involved in the Fiesta through their own organizations.

On the other hand, and besides the hard core technical issues discussed in the beginning here, I would like to get involved in bridging the gap between the so-called1^st and 3^rd/4^th worlds with the help of the Internet, continuing the work of George Sadowsky and other’s who’ve made the Developing Country Network Workshops and Symposiums happen, for example. So far, I’ve had some theoretical interest in Internet and Humanitarian Issues (wrote a paper about it once, see http://an.org/humanitarian/) and also practical attempts to e.g. network the war torn areas in former Yugoslavia area (in projects like http://an.org/riks - Reconstructing Internet via Kosov@ Society (also RISK)). The idea that for example our chapter here in Finland would start close co-operation with some chapter in Africa, for example, is quite fascinating and something I believe might do real good for both societies.

I know, despite all optimism and enthusiasm about the net, that the development of the Internet as a whole is also very problematic. Having followed all the difficulties around the DNS administration, for instance, from gTLD-MoU autumn 1996 to the round of US government papers and consequent reactions in EU(rope), Australia and around the world finally to the birth and painful infanthood of ICANN there is not much doubt about that. And WASSENAAR - there's an-other story. But that’s something we definitely have to deal with and ISOC has clearly a key role – not only behind the scenes but also wide open in the public, I hope! Who else will / can?

And finally, before going back home to spend a quiet evening with my girlfriend after this long day at work, let’s not forget the dream and take the net where no net has gone before! (let it be Mars, Orion, the deep forests and seas here on Earth, children, elderly, poor, uneducated, technophobic, mentally/physically handicapped, pets or artificial life forms .. that we can discuss later)

Yours truly,

January 20^th in Oulu, Finland
(some -20 degrees celcius I'm afraid..)

BTW: looking forward to any reactions as usual, antont@an.org or feel free to gsmto://+358.40.7198759/antont-bot/ for potential real-time interaction. See you!

P.S. I might also put this text and updates to http://an.org/isoc as soon as I’ve time..