We are thrilled to announce that our project IoTA: Internet of Things Academy is one of the winners in the Nominet Trust’s Social Tech Social Change challenge. The £1m fund will support ten organisations that use technology to tackle social challenges in the UK and beyond. Each company will receive £50,000 as well as mentorship from some of the world’s leading tech entrepreneurs to develop their early-stage ideas into profitable, scalable social tech ventures.

We are excited to be working with our long term project partners, Forum for the Future to develop the experiment further by building experience prototypes and conducting workshops with a diverse group of people over the next few months. Here’s a film showing early sketches of this web platform.

As members of an increasingly technologically mediated society we need to develop new kinds of critical socio-technical literacies. So making is very important, but also thinking about what we make. As stated earier, IoTA is an experiment and an opportunity for experts, non-experts, curators, challenger seekers, people, and more people to experiment with the technology and data in inventive, playful and ingenious ways. Data, however big and plentiful, that does not necessarily lead to better or more rational decisions. Through IoTA we are not interested so much in how data is made public, but more about how the public make data, build their own hypothesis and make their own decisions.

We would like to thank Nominet Trust for their invaluable support in helping us take this work forward. We would also like to thank Hugh Knowles and Louise Armstrong from the Forum for the Future, who are key partners in this project. And finally we’d like to thank Esther Maughan Mclachlan, Emily Nicoll and Chris Clifton who initiated the Futurescapes project at Sony, which led to the IoTA concept. If you are interested in collaborating or participating please do drop us a line.

(As a note to those who have asked, IoTA or the Internet of Things Academy is a placeholder name, and as the project will evolve and take shape we will think about renaming it appropriately.)