SUMMER IN MAINE

Memorial day is tomorrow and my present voluntary exile – a guesthouse on campus at the University of Maine – is getting into summer. The sky is grey on the framed picture in our sitting room entitled ‘Summer in Maine’: A moose in a wide green meadow with lupines, a blueberry meadow, a small stream meandering, mountains as backdrop. A perfect match to the grey outside, infinite nuances of grey, which you learn to appreciate, since the costal climate sends showers persistently, day and night. Grey is also the news I just read on the Danish news site I follow, about billions of money to be saved by digitizing the forms, which travel between public administration and citizens in need of a passport, a building-a-carport-permit, or a maternity-leave-compensation-application. Dull as it may seem, each little transaction of data-translation in these departments requires transformation, a transformation with political, social and semiotic implications: read Spinuzzi’s ‘Tracing genres through organizations’, or read some of the publications from our just recently concluded research on how to employ interactive technologies (e.g. social media, web 2.0, pervasive and mobile technologies) eGov+ (http://www.egovplus.dk/index.php?id=2234) in the communication between government and citizens. There is no such thing as a transformation free travel of data from one information ecology to the next.
Still, while the moose keeps chewing grass in the meadows of Maine, I keep writing about ‘Information ecology and design of information systems’. The moose and I carry on, just as well, while politicians yell out their blue-sky visions, and maybe get elected for another term.