Inside View from Ireland: Connected Limerick

I SPENT PART OF this afternoon listening to several people at a session chaired by Gabriela Avram (pictured) explain how the city plans to better connect to its citizens and to the extended online community.

The Limerick City Council's Open Data initiative deserves to be given more impetus. Citizens will benefit through its sharing of data points.

Several community initiatives could be a catalyst to deeper engagement in various ways. I like the ideas the Hunt Museum staff shared in bringing physical artefacts into the digital realm. Along with a group of EGF-Dell students, I watched how elements of Limerick's past could be brought into the present. Some of that work is supporting Historic Graves as it expands parish by parish.

Professor Liam Bannon from the University of Limerick (UL) cautioned about over-emphasizing the virtual when we start to mix the physical world and digital world.

As a Foursqaure power user, I enjoyed the instantiation of place as explained by Luigina Ciolfi from the Interaction Design Centre at UL. She dove deep into "Game versus Peer Information Sharing" and took me into academic material I use in the Games Development curriculum at the Limerick Institute of Technology.

I presented a five-minute snapshot of Limerick Open Coffee, showing how we can connect people over coffee in a Limerick hotel to the energy and courage needed to start new business. Like many of the topics shared today, these Open Coffee sessions in the Absolute Hotel connect positive energy in a way I think personify some of the best examples of Connected Limerick.