This is a re-post of a piece I originally posted on the, soon to be defunct, original Wireless Toronto blog. I thought it was worth saving as it plays right into an interesting conversation about third places in Toronto that is taking place right now.

The Aula community describe themselves as ‘a nonprofit cooperative that encourages professionals and enthusiasts from various fields to develop new projects together — for more innovative art, science, and technology, and for a better world, future, and quality of life.’

I came across them through an article about the Hunaja (Finnish for Honey) project. The Aim of this project is to ‘create an access control system for community spaces that enables users to stay aware of others in the space remotely by using the Web or a mobile phone’

What really interested me about this project is that Aula have actually built a real, interesting physical space [pdf] using some of the principles they are researching. The plan calls for public sitting areas, small private cubes for projects, semi-private meeting spaces, multi-purpose event space and even a sauna (these are from the planning document, I’m coming up light on links to what they actually built).

This struck a particular cord, because I have been thinking about interesting public/semi-public spaces in Toronto in the context of possible locations for Wireless Toronto hotspots - and really there aren’t all that many that I find really compelling. The Aula example seems like a Third Place that I could really get behind. Toronto branch of Aula anyone?