LeaD team paid a visit to Gemilo company. Our plan was to learn more about the Gemilo Social tool, how it is used and how it could be used in LeaD. Currently Gemilo Social platform is used in Kaarina municipality (some 5000 users) and soon there will be Gemilo schools also in Ireland and London. By the end of the spring term the users overseas will be in the thousands. Also University of Tampere and Tampere University of Applied Sciences are currently experimenting the tool. All of these cases present opportunities to gather data by LeaD-research groups.
The Gemilo Social is a social media based education and collaboration tools for companies and educational institutions which works for example as an ideation tool, school project task management software and social media based communication platform. However, much depends on how the end-users use it as there are always unexpected uses to be found.
The expertise in LeaD ranges from social sciences to programming. To ensure success in adapting the Gemilo Social to a given context we advertised that such ideas as participatory design and the sharing of best practices in adapting new ICT in school environment could be interesting considering the LeaD. We felt that especially the future trends of open online platform development is something to keep an eye on. Currently Gemilo Social applies Web 2.0 technologies but upcoming HTML5 could be interesting.
In LeaD the TRIM research group aspires to find key community factors hindering or ensuring success in adoption. Observational and survey findings we come up with during the project are of high interest to any platform service company. On our side the communication is the key issue so providing early updates and the sharing of research paper drafts is the way to go. We got a good feel of collaboration with Gemilo but the communication needs to be constant in order to develop meaningful joint activities. We promised also the lookout for “silver bullet” articles on issues that companies absolutely need to be aware of but we will restrain ourselves from the usual dumping of literature review articles.