Digitalkoot: Electrifying Finnish Cultural Heritage

In this lecture Ville Miettinen will talk about Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers) and its effort to digitise some of Finland's historical documents and archival materials. A joint project between the National Library of Finland and Microtask, Digitalkoot harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to mobilise people to help digitise millions of pages of archival materials.

The project consists of two online games; its online gaming experience provides both entertainment and the opportunity to contribute to the preservation of Finland's cultural heritage, engaging tens of thousands of volunteers in a playful form of digitisation.

Miettinen is an entrepreneur and investor from Finland who takes a keen interest in crowdsourcing, cloud labour, and human computation. A veteran programmer, Miettinen has a background in computer graphics. He co-founded Hybrid Graphics, a company pioneering real-time 3D graphics. Miettinen is the founder and CEO of Microtask, a company specialising in technologies of distributing digital labour. He is also a partner at Lots, a venture capital firm in media technology, as well as an investor and a board member of several high-tech, social media, and games companies in Finland and the USA.