This few months of Alpacing has been very interesting, lots and lots of new people and thus also new interesting project ideas and conversations.

The end of the year has been amazing. I have had the privilege to work with things around mobile applications, international eLearning website and social media consulting, to mention few. As I established the company these were pretty much all the things I listed I wanted to do start doing with Digital_Alpaca, and I’m more than pleased about this outcome! But of course one shouldn’t ever be too pleased, so the search for new and extraordinary things is already on. :)

Who knows what interesting things the new year will bring along? There are already some projects that are pretty certain.

One of the biggest things of 2010 is the University of Dar es Salaam project. I got more project management responsibility in that one and the project is very challenging. More about it soon when I have something more concrete to write about it. There’s also a certain international project’s website that is going to be finished in the beginning of the year. These are just some things to come.

The most important thing to me is thought that I have had the change to meet so many new interesting people during this year. People from start-ups to business people and to educators, people from Finland to Brazil to Estonia and to Tanzania – from different fields around the world. A warm ‘Hi!’ and Merry Christmas to all of you. Hope to see you again in the near future!

During this past week in Tampere we have visited many interesting places, from meeting the City officials of Tampere to Tampere University of Technology and ProAcademy. Here’s a few words about some of these places we visited this week:

ProAcademy (www.proakatemia.fi/en)

ProAcademy is a special unit in entrepreneurship at TAMK University of Applied Sciences in Tampere, Finland. ProAcademy students begin their BBA studies by starting their own cooperative company. Learning is based on learning-by-doing, reading books, and sharing and generating knowledge with the team.

Thanks to one of the coaches, Jukka Siltanen, for showing us around and giving us a nice speech about ProAcademy’s methods.

Demola (www.demola.fi)

Demola is

• an open innovation environment for the creators of the next generation of digital services, products, and social practices
• an opportunity for students to contribute real-life innovations with end-users and globally connected organizations
• an opportunity for organizations to run agile development projects in exploring novel technology enabled products and services.

Thanks to Mr Ville Kairamo for presenting us Demola projects.

Mediamaisteri (www.mediamaisteri.com – in Finnish)

A company providing e-Learning services and open source solutions. Our host was the company CEO and one of the founders of COSS (Centre for Open Source Software) Timo Väliharju.

Thank you for the presentation and, among other things, for an interesting discussion including what kinds of social media services to use [open source or closed systems] and why. These were many interesting things and points of view that I have to cover here some more later on.

It seems that the guests have really enjoyed their stay in Finland; almost everyone of them experienced snow for the first time and visits to companies and to other places mentioned before have clearly opened up discussion.

Hopefully something really fruitful comes out of this all, and the visit and goals that have been set now make a difference in the future. I really believe that both the Tanzanians and the people who are collaborating here in Finland have learned much from this already, and we’re just starting up.