About us
Taneli Heikka
firstname.lastname@gmail.com
tel: +358 40 8411 838
Taneli is Avaja Open’s Managing Director. He is a journalist, author, social commentator who advocates an open and digitalised Finland. He believes in open, interactive communication as a tool to increase organisations’ profitability and quality of service. He expanded on those themes in his successful pamphlet, Quasi-democracy (WSOY, 2009)and in Uusi Kultakausi (WSOY), or The New Golden Age, published in February 2011.
Taneli joined the Tampere daily Aamulehti in 1997, serving as the paper’s India correspondent and working on the ‘Sunnuntai’ supplement at different times, before heading up parent company Alma Media’s Helsinki bureau until he left the firm in 2010. He now indulges his love of political communication with a Finnish-language media criticism columns in the Green Party’s newspaper, Vihreä Lanka.
fi.linkedin.com/in/taneliheikka
Riku Siivonen
firstname.lastname@gmail.com
tel:+358 41 54 888 90
Riku Siivonen is a columnist, writer and journalist who works with images, words and sound. He believes that everyone has something to say, if they are only given the opportunity and if their words are taken seriously. Digitalisation, openness in society and freedom of information can help offer that opportunity.
“Wisdom does not only reside with leaders and journalists.”
Riku has helped to crystallise and communicate ideas for the advancement of Finnish society as a report-writing journalist for the Finnish innovation fund Sitra and the think tank Demos Helsinki.
He has worked as a journalist at Aamulehti, Ylioppilaslehti, Helsingin Sanomat, and as a writer and journalist in television.
fi.linkedin.com/in/rikusiivonen
Books
Riku has worked on Sitra and Demos Helsinki’s report Yksilön ääni – Hyvinvointivaltio yhteisöjen ajalla (2006) (‘The Individual’s voice – the welfare state in the age of communities’), and Demos Helsinki and professor Antti Hautamäki’s Metropolin hyvinvointi (‘Metropolitan welfare’) report. He also wrote together with Jope Ruonansuu ‘Parhaat Jopet’ (Helsinki-kirjat 2006), a treatise exploring Finnish society’s most painful taboos.
Together with Tanja Aitamurto, Matti Posio and Petteri Kilpinen, Taneli wrote Uusi Kultakausi(2011), ‘The New Golden Age’ , aiming to pave the way for a new digital, interactive revolution in Finland. The book took discussion of social media to the next level, arguing that online media channels are now vital infrastructure for the national economy. The authors compared social media to electricity, which led Finland to a previous industrial and cultural golden age in the nineteenth century. The book’s central idea is that a new golden age can be built via an interactive, knowledge-based economy.
A Finnish-language blog exploring the issues raised in the book is at: www.uusikultakausi.com
In 2009 Taneli and Finnish journalist Katja Boxberg wrote Quasi-democracy, one of the decade’s most-discussed social commentary pamphlets. It opened a debate on topics that had hitherto been taboo in Finnish society, including the handling of the 1990s depression, consensus politics, along with welfare, regional and economic policy. An edited English version is available as a pdf here. Hard copies can be ordered free of charge from the Suomen Toivo think tank. The Finnish language version sold around 6,000 copies, and its ideas of authoritarian consensus, the facade of the Finnish welfare state, and the decadence of the political class all made their way into the national debate.
You can read more about Quasi-democracy at Taneli’s personal blog: www.taneliheikka.com
Loading...