Finnish Information Society delegation visits the Hub

The sustainable development of the Information Society, together with related research practices and modelling, came under the spotlight at a workshop in the Eastern Cape at the end of March this year. Hosted by the Sustainable Information Society (sInfoSoc) Development Programme, which is funded by the Embassy of Finland in Pretoria, the workshop was coordinated by the Meraka Institute and CSIR.

Members of the Finnish Information Society delegation seen here during their visit to the Hub, with Hub managers and maxum tenants. Ltr Jill Sawers, Dr Neville Comins, Dr Bob Day, Markku Joutsenoja: Knowledge Specialist of the University of Oulu, Tsietsi Maleho, Olli Hietanen of the Finland Futures Research institute, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Satu Helin: Director, Open University of Jyvaskyla, Pasi Silander of the Häme e-learning Centre at the Häme Polytechnic in Finland, Dave Lockwood of the Naledi3d Factory, Martin Manmohan, and Heikki Hallantie from the Lifelong Learning Institute at the Helsinki University of Technology.

sInfoSoc began in March 2005 with the aim of establishing a long-lasting, mutually beneficial, scientific network of relationships between Finnish and Southern African tertiary and research institutions. The intention is to use a multi-disciplinary approach in combining Futures Research and the study of Information Society concepts, applications and case study examples as tools for promoting sustainable development.

Within this programme, the Finnish-South African research collaboration will be aligned with the a number of national priorities, such as addressing the digital divide, e-learning, accessing open content, enabling innovation and foresight, identifying Information Society opportunities for young people, as well as dealing with SME issues, health care applications and e-governance.

After the workshop, on Friday 31 March, the Finnish Information Society delegation visited the Hub, accompanied by Dr Bob Day of locally-based Non-Zero Sum Development. The delegation was hosted by Hub CEO, Dr Neville Comins and joined members of the Hub's management team, including Jill Sawers, maxum Business Incubator manager, Martin Manmohan, Operations Manager of maxum Business Incubator and Tsietsi Maleho, Corporate Affairs Manager.

After visiting the Naledi3d Factory and Mohwiti Technologies, two of the tenant companies in the Incubator, the visitors had a chance to interact with the Hub's CoachLab students. The model for the CoachLab, namely a partnership between the Hub, industry and tertiary education institutions, proved to be of particular interest to the delegation plans seem to be afoot to learn more about this model and implement it in Science Parks in Finland.

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