I was at an event organized by ARCAM tonight concerning co-operative housing projects which are already very popular in Berlin but are rapidly expanding to other cities. Amsterdam is busy launching its own initiative and Michael LaFond from Berlin presented their experiences with this way of building.

It was an interesting evening to attend. The slides were poorly visible from the back, but I managed to jot down a large part of the Q&A where most of the action was. It is interesting to see how eager for knowledge the Amsterdam crowd is. It strikes me as odd that building a house yourself would be novel, but given the market as it is, it is. Also: the Dutch with their capacity for trade and organization should be pretty good at this thing. If that will be so, remains to be seen.

Notes first quoted:

Muni of Amsterdam is going to emit a bunch of self building plots

There’s going to be an event this weekend in Houthaven for the first batch of plots.

Michael LaFond, American Architect living and working in Berlin
id22, Institute for Creative Sustainability

started Wohnportal-Berlin

focus on co-housing, community organized housing projects

daz – köpenickerstraße

local innovation, community
baugemeinschaften, hausvereine

emphasizes participation in cooperative and community oriented designs
organize Wohnportal, platform for architects and housing activists to get their project out there

last year: started working with people in other European cities

organizing a tour of the creative sustainability projects around the city

An increased demand even in participation.

Berlin:
1.9M housing units / 3.5M residents
1.82 person/unit
70m2/unit
40m2/person
Weak presence of corporations on the market though everybody leases.

Since 2009 Berlin offers land to Baugemeinschaften at fixed prices.
The best concept and not the highest bidder wins.
Criteria:
1. Neighborhood and community orientation
2. Architecture and urban design
3. Sustainability and ecology
4. Financing

Change in economy and demography forces Berlin like Amsterdam to look at the concept of building houses yourself.

Baugemeinschaften started in Tübingen and Freiburg

List of examples among which:
* Möckernkiez, public access
* Spreefeld Berlin, secured a road to the land and got the land cheap from the Federal Government, some of the best architects in Berlin
* AH+, outside of the city center, buildings will produce more energy than they consume

Baugemeinschäfte are growing larger to the 100 and more houses per project

Co Housing Cultures book due to be out

blok0.nl
amsterdam.nl/zelfbouw

Manifestation this weekend with the release of 300 plots.

Initiator of the Vrijburg Project, landscape architect also present.
Vrijburg has failed in collaborating with Nuon to create sustainable energy projects.

Now the questions as much as I could transcribe them:

Q: How do you manage people who want to rent? Or people with unequal incomes.
LaFond: 3 of the projects are affordable housing, some in re-adapting existing buildings. People pay €5-6/m2. There are examples of non-profit cooperations. People that really don’t have any money, can’t live there.

Q: The real-estate market in Amsterdam is rather transparent. Transactions are being done between housing corporations, developers and the city. Can co-housing create more transparency in the housing market? So that fairer pricing of land becomes a possibility?
LaFond: By making the scale of projects smaller that becomes easier. For democracy, the equal distribution of land is very important.

Q: The self-build aspect? Who carries the risk if the plan fails?
LaFond: You can have affordable houses from non-self-organized projects and vice versa. People that do have money: a core group forms and they look for a piece of land with or without an architect, or they apply to a city land auction, with a group facilitator. They identify the concept and organize a Baugemeinschaft. People bring their own money and they need to go to the bank themselves for credit. The ones without money need to get support from a foundation or other organization. The main reason that projects don’t succeed is because they can’t find any affordable land.

Q: How important is the role of the architect?
LaFond: If you want to emphasize the group or community, the focus should be with them. There’s always the combination of the future inhabitants, the architect and the moderator. The most important thing in Berlin is that people adhere more strictly to the division of roles and don’t try to play multiple parts.

Q: Do the architects design the energy systems?
LaFond: Almost always there will somebody extra working on that.

Q: How do people find it?
LaFond: There’s the website. The events where people come together and word of mouth about the project. Some architecture firms have their own waiting lists for people who want to be on the next project.

Q: What’s the role of the moderators?
LaFond: There’s no investor/developer for these projects, that’s why they are more affordable. Btu that’s also why it demands more intensive participation. They need to understand people and organize them. Manage relations. Sometimes have to protect participants from the architects. There are not that many people who can do this and want to do this. Most architects can’t or don’t want to do this. (There seem to be companies specialized in this.)

Bob van der Zande (stad Amsterdam, Zelfbouw) also present.

Q: Is the municipality thinking about social housing in the next 10 years?
Van der Zande: We are hoping that there are so many different houses being planned that the option of social housing will materialize.

LaFond: Some of the co-operative projects will give people the money they invested back but they cannot sell or speculate on the house themselves. This changes the house from a property on the market into something that is there to use. More projects like that are needed to guarantee affordable housing in a city on the long term. If people can make money on their property and there’s nothing to prevent it, it is not odd that they will do so.

Q: How is the other obstacle (that of financing) being tackled?
LaFond: Constructions take some time to develop. Umweltbank and GLS bank are very important for these projects. They make less money from the interest and they have a greater desire to support ecological and social projects. It happens that people can collectively apply for money to get credit so not everybody needs to have the same amout of money. GLS is the best example in Germany. They offer different kinds of Burgschaften, you need to have a combination of money, income, property, or a relative who has money. Now also Kleinburgschaften: 25 people can all risk €3000 to join together and cover the risk. Das Miethäusersyndicat (started in Freiburg) exists to help housing groups to buy their buildings and renovate them. Because they have so many buildings now they can get credit to do more buildings. These structures took 20 some years to develop.
Stiftung Trias and Edith Marien Stiftung don’t like private ownership much. They work to take land away from the market. Community land trusts.

Vrijburg architect: In Amsterdam one bank is interested in these projects: the Rabobank. All the other banks are running away.

Ik was twee weken geleden op een bijeenkomst van de STT over serious games en ik was een beetje teleurgesteld dat de enige kritische reflectie op het onderwerp van de dag —kansen in serious games en gamification— kwam van super-filosoof Jos de Mul. Hoe goed zijn kritiek dan ook was, kritiek van een filosoof is te gemakkelijk weg te wuiven door mensen uit de praktijk. Nederland blijf een land van handelaars en nering is hier de makkelijkste manier om de handen op elkaar te krijgen.

Wij blijven serieuze reserveringen houden bij het klakkeloos doorvoeren van gamification. We denken dat een fijnzinnigere aanpak wenselijk is omdat de problemen ingewikkeld zijn en deze spellen dagelijks door echte mensen gebruikt worden. In onze praktijk bij Hubbub maken we serious games en dat doen we tot tevredenheid van klanten en spelers al zeg ik het zelf. Waar het gamification betreft ben ik één van de eerste aanjagers van Foursquare in Nederland. Ik ben me dus terdege bewust van de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van deze aanpak.

Ik wil mensen en organisaties die iets willen doen hiermee oproepen om professionele hulp in de arm te nemen. Je wilt mensen die een track record hebben in het maken van spellen die werken voor de mensen die ze spelen én voor de bedrijven die ze inzetten. Dat betekent in dit geval Hubbub of andere bedrijven die werken met echte spelontwerpers. Wij zitten niet exact te springen om meer te doen, maar we zien tegelijk wel een acute behoefte aan ervaring uit de praktijk.

Communicatie- en interactieve bureau’s doen nu een paar slides over gamificatie in hun strategie-pitches om het concept ‘meegenomen te hebben’ maar ze zijn zich vrijwel nooit bewust van de complexiteit en nuances van games en systemen.

Het zijn goedbedoelde pogingen, maar ze slaan bijna altijd de plank mis. Als je echt duurzame waarde wilt creëren kun je beter direct bij een goede partij aankloppen.

Another piece on an interesting game published in nrc.next. This week a critical review of the selective enforcement of the App Store guidelines in the case of Phone Story a game that is itself a critique of the iPhones it runs on. An indictment of Apple makes for an easy piece to write.

Geodata hero, Simeon Nedkov at the Open Data Bazaar with a very appropriate t-shirt:

Tuesday saw the Hack de Overheid event called the Open Data Bazaar. It was a massive success with well over a hundred people from all over the Netherlands. Lots of students were present and lots of hacking went on throughout the day. There was also a brimful workshop program where birds of a feather discussed the current state of open data in the Netherlands.

During the bazaar I worked together with Dirk van Oosterbosch to make an Arduino driven matrix display that shows the departure time of the next bus from the venue. It doesn’t get more situated than that and I’m glad we can whip something like that up in a couple of hours. It shows that we have come quite a way since first we started with this stuff.

Wednesday I visited OTB at Delft, University of Technology. OTB is the research institute for the built environment, the theoretical backing for the faculty of Engineering, Policy and Management (at which I got a minor in Management of Technology during my studies). I will be consulting with geodata experts in the Netherlands on developer relations so the data and standards they are working on are such that they will be easy to develop with.

I also visited my old faculty which has been taken over by architecture students after their building burnt down. I must say I have never seen our buildings in better order.

In the afternoon we paid a site visit to what is to be the location of the next Hack de Overheid event “Code Camping Amsterdam”. Some of you may already have surmised where it is going to be. Announcements are due next week but suffice it to say that it is going to be massive. We are going to be coinciding with a massive Eddie the Eagle Museum party on the same venue after our event. Something of a departure from previous years but one which should prove to be very fun.

Thursday I spent all day at Bits of Freedom to help them with the #doyourbit fundraiser. Being an independent organization BoF are more dependent on private donations. We love them to death and Hack de Overheid is more than a bit complementary so I try to help them out whenever I can. That Thursday I spent all day at their offices and tweeted like wildfire with a bunch of other volunteers to reach the Dutch internet and get them to donate.

That same night there was an event about games in the Stedelijk Museum. It was somewhat problematic testified to by these pieces written by Arjen and Niels. Arjen’s piece quite precisely mirrors my qualms about the evening (see also my comment).

Friday was something of a write-off due to the volume of activities that had happened during the week. Fortunately the symposium of the STT. The day was a nice get-together with most people in the Netherlands active in the field of gaming.

Gamification interlude

What was disappointing though not very surprising was the fact that all of the critical reflection on the day’s topic —opportunities in serious games and gamification— came from philosopher-hero Jos de Mul. Which solid as it was, coming from a philosopher, may be too easy to dismiss. The rest was profiteering. The Dutch remain a merchant nation at heart and anything that generates income will be applauded however morally dubious it may be.

The issues that we have with both of these concepts are real and they need a considered and nuanced approach. In our practice we make serious games and we seem to be doing quite ok if I may say so myself. When it comes to gamification, I am one of the principal instigators of Foursquare in the Netherlands so I am intimately aware with both the methods and their shortcomings.

Given that, I would urge people and organizations who want to do something in this field to seek professional help. That means get in touch with us or with other organizations that employ bona fide game designers. We are not exactly shy for more things to do but there is a clear need for guidance in this field. In any case make sure to work with people who have a track record in designing playful experiences that cater both to the wishes of the humans playing them and to the goals of the businesses commissioning them.

Agencies are currently including gamification as a slide in their strategy deck, paying lip service to the concept to make a quick buck. If you want to enable them doing that, you are free to do so. But if you want to create real value, why take the long way round?

Interlude over. That Saturday I went to the movie night at Filmhuis Cavia organized by the guys from Popup City. I wrote about that on this blog at: Stop Kicking the Creative Class.

And I also procured a Huawei X5 to play around with. This seems to be the first Chinese manufacturer that has found a low price point for a device that is still highly capable. The Kenyan market has been flooded with the €99 little brother of this phone, the X3.

I was at a meeting this weekend by the Pop-up City and the documentary displayed about urban development fits into a wider recent trend where people kick the creative class and blame them for society’s ills. Usually the dreaded specter of gentrification is pulled out to show how apathetic and different and outright bad the Creative Class are.

The documentary shown last weekend “Creativity and the Capitalist City” by Tino Buchholz actually showed an interesting and nuanced picture of urban development. Unfortunately this was marred by the rabid and insubstantial left-wing outings of the movie maker afterwards. That discussion did oust a lot of resentment that I think needs to be addressed more openly and more honestly than it currently is.

As was remarked in die Zeit recently about the same issue in Berlin: the only thing worse than gentrification is no gentrification. The debate is a lot more heated over there because of the massive influx of hipsters and their friends from all over the world into an impoverished city. A trust fund takes you a lot further in Neukölln than it does in Bushwick, but it also sparks xenofobic pamflets and immolation of vehicles.

I am a part of that same creative class —if you want to use a blanket term— and probably also a cause of gentrification. But I am sick of apologizing for our success. We picked a profession, we worked hard, we created value (we are not bankers) and now we are winning. Well I can tell you: it feels good to be winning.

It is perverse to rest the blame of society’s ills on those people actually doing something with their lives. I have had this problem before. If you’re a successful migrant in the messed up social debate in the Netherlands, you were nearly forced to apologize for your own success to the rest who were not. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do that. The only solution is to ignore the naysayers. It always is of course.

I can do what I am doing because of a lot of hard work and perseverance. The field of study I got a Masters in is definitely not one of the easier ones at my university but it does guarantee you a job in a wide number of techno-creative fields. For some strange reason people still are not lining up to go to technical universities, and most that do go do not finish it. Complaining to somebody else must be easier than actually working to secure your own future.

It is hard enough already in the attention starved world to stay up to date with your close ones without having to take into account every other person. Even more so if your outlook is international and you want to participate and compete on a trans-national level. A rare enough thing as it is. Should we do stuff for our neighborhood? Sure, but who should bear the onus? Shouldn’t the people who want to do stuff, maybe start something themselves and see where it goes?

Working in a creative profession is subject to taste but it is in many ways also highly meritocratic. Those with affluent parents and large networks will divide a larger piece of pie among themselves. But if you work hard and put in the effort with just a spark of vision, it will most certainly amount to something in the long run. If it doesn’t, change yourself and try something else. Keep trying until you find something that works. Is that difficult? Maybe, but it is also the only way.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.” —Thomas Edison

There are a ton of jobs in technology right now. Amsterdam cannot find itself enough interaction designers, interface designers, front-end engineers and programmers to fill current jobs. The shortage is large enough that a lot of growth opportunities are being hampered by it. Literally all comers will be able to get a job. So get at it. Teach yourself something, find a course and persevere for a couple of years. You may strike gold.

“You can tell yourself anything is too difficult, or you can just do it.
You just need to be hungry.” — http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/i-went-back-to-the-land-to-feed-my-family.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

We, the employed, already pay taxes. As a base that should be enough. If anybody out there is failing to keep up their end of the bargain, it’s the government we are paying the taxes to. They are bailing out the rich and keeping the poor ignorant with well meant institutional schemes that rarely amount to anything (just look at the Wire). Government should change and if the recent occupy movements serve as a wake-up call to do that, all for the better. Though experience does not make me very optimistic on that front.

If there is anything we shouldn’t do in the Netherlands, it is to pretend that things here are as bad as in the US or anywhere in Europe. We have the lowest unemployment in the Eurozone. We have an egalitarian society, cheap education, social security and mobility. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous and self-serving. You can do pretty much everything you want in this country and I say that not being white, not being privileged. I sincerely believe all it takes is for you to get out and make something. So do it.

Monday

@polledemaagt An account manager is the clearest sign that you are paying too much. —@alper

Thinking of stuff to do while in Berlin and underemployed (in the beginning maybe).

Last week’s Pirate Party victory in Berlin where they got 10% of the vote should serve as a wake-up call to left-ish political parties that are paying lip service to the internet. There is a massive untapped populace who are completely disillusioned with the out of touch politics of today. GroenLinks and D’66′s only luck right now is that the Dutch Pirate Party is so incompetent for now.

And it seems that time travel maps are still popular while we still don’t have access to the data. Here’s a project being executed by my office mate Arjan Scherpenisse:

Skimmed this book by the Council for Social Development (RMO) about the public debate in the age of the internet:

Tuesday

Our friends at Two for Joy Coffee Roasters have opened their second store in Amsterdam. It’s a new favorite place to work and meet:

Kars put the slides for his dconstruct talk on the Transformers online. Well worth a read for a realistic view on the city and games.

Work on Apps voor Nederland and culiacan working at pace. I’m very proud of the community that is coming together.

Wednesday

I dropped by Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Ward Wijndelts who are settling in their new offices for their startup:

I concluded the day by chairing the jury deliberations for Apps for Noord-Holland. The day was concluded with the award ceremony and festivities.

Thursday

Finished reading The City & The City by China Miéville. A poignant book. The science-fiction book for this year. I read it on Readmill which is a pleasant enough reading experience but I don’t know yet if it will be the home of my future library.

Dropped by the great design team at Buro Pony in Rotterdam to discuss the future of the specialty design store: Dufarge.

Met with Christian Friedrich at Rotterdam’s new espresso bar Hopper.

Caught up a bit on the Fyra back with Yuri van Geest. A pleasure as always.

Friday

Friday was concluded in Utrecht with more writing and working at the Hubbub studio.

We had a great time playing The Resistance a mashup between Mastermind and Werewolf.

Yes, that is the best we have found thusfar for a Microsoft Surface Table.

Catching up on the news of the week in die Zeit, here a profile of all the elected Pirates:

Most of them have either studied sciences or work in IT (or both). Politicians who can do maths. That may be an actual solution to the economic crisis we are in.

And an editorial about the lack of responsibility in society both on the macro as in the microscale:

On Monday I let go a bunch of stalling side projects which were not going anywhere.

Blogged about the Foursquare screen we made with a video which finally wrapped up that project (try to find a slot between 12:00 and 17:00 to make it to Leidseplein on a workday).

Interesting bit of news that TfL is implementing systems to prevent Oyster overcharging. This is where the transit card in the Netherlands is used as a way to surreptitiously draw money from unsuspecting travelers.

Found this random shirt design site: Zufallsshirt.de

Wrote a small review in Dutch of the theater experience De Club we went to last week. It aims to be an engine for social change instead of a traditional play, but in that respect it is somewhat lacking still. We are somewhat interested because this —creating systems that yield interesting experiences— is our work.

Tuesday I finally got to see this video from our visit to the fortress:

We are quite busy planning the next events for Hack de Overheid.

Wednesday was spent working in Utrecht and I got featured in an interview where I called out gamification for the bullshit it is at Virtueel Platform: “De keerzijde van gamification”

Thursday my profile got featured on The Next Speaker where you can now hire me to present at your event.

Amsterdam is also increasingly getting more machine readable:

We are also very glad with the funding of Venus Patrol a publication that we hope can shed a new light on the relation of games and culture.

I was present at the launch of a new Dutch Literature Magazine: Das Magazin (yes, German name…).

Friday after breakfast with Dirk van Oosterbosch en Alexander Zeh, I helped out with painting the Open Cooperatie.

A new experiment, extended weeknotes combined with assorted reading and outtakes. I think this may be more fun for me to write and more fun for you to read.

Had a meeting for tlaquepaque to finalize the starting details of what is going to be an exciting roller coaster for Hack de Overheid. Also did some sketching on tlalnepantla.

The increased activity on Hack de Overheid also means that we will be working together more tightly and on location more often. The fact that we have a brilliant office space in the Open Coop in beautiful Amsterdam Noord does help.

Culiacan is moving forward steadily.

Met with Tessa from the Next Speaker and whipped my /about and /speaking pages into shape to be a bit more representative.

We had Hack de Overheid drinks near the office for people that have made an app in one of our contests before and after that was dinner with Chris Taggart.

The friendly people from DUS architects that we are sharing an office with won the most important Amsterdam art award and held a party to celebrate:

And then finally on Saturday we celebrated Apps for Noord Holland or we could better say: ‘Apps on a Fortress’. It was a great event on a superb location with a full roster of people present. Solid progress was made on hacking civic applications and we are curious to see what the final entries in the contest will be.

I made two small sketches for Monster Swell visualizing some of the released data sets and chaired the demos of the days hacks.

A visualization of vacant office spaces in and around Amsterdam:
NDW measurements files we got (this is a very obtuse goldmine):

Elsewhere on the internet:

Talking about app contests, I came upon this old piece by Andy Oram about the sustainability of app contests: “App outreach and sustainability” to which I wrote a reply “Hackathons as gateways to more and better open data” without knowing that it had already been replied to at Radar by Alex Howard: “Everybody jumped on the app contest bandwagon. Now what?”

The same issue was touched upon here in Londen as well. People are wondering what sustainable results have ever resulted from a hackday/unconference other than some incidental learning. The learning itself may already be a good thing, but the expectations that are raised are somewhat higher. There are at least movements going to merge several initiatives to try to get at least some programmers working together with designers and product manager type people to create a viable offering. On the other hand we are working with Hack de Overheid to persuade government to be more open to adopting these initiatives.

The issues of gentrification and how a city’s development can work to stifle itself was touched upon in several pieces last week. The Times article “Revelers See a Dimming in a Capital’s Night Life” tells how the nightlife of Paris is being banished by its new affluent class of complainers. A similar movement is going on in Amsterdam now again under the moniker ‘Jordaanoproer’ where people who have bought dearly into one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods expect some peace and quiet at night (to little avail). And there’s a story in Taz “Das Leben ist kein Ponyschlecken!” that counterbalances the current gentrification panic by calling the people writing those stories ‘hormone guided journalist moms and dads who want to raise their children in a Bullerby idyll.’ A large city will inevitable have some rough edges that should not be exaggerated (and Berlin is producing some nice stuff).

Adam Greenfield wrote the great: ‘Perilous asymmetries: Playing with trust in the “smart city”’ which is well worth reading:

Our wager with Farevalue is that a relatively minuscule informational intervention — amounting to a single line of copy, presented in the right voice, in the right place and time — has disproportionate power to transform our encounters with the pervasive networked infrastructure that now undergirds so much of urban life.

I saw the new movie by Nuri Bilge Ceylan: “Once upon a time in Anatolia” and wrote a small review about it.

Ian Bogost writes an interesting reflection on the digital humanities: Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground part 1: The Humanities in Public:

Humanist intellectuals like to think of themselves as secular saviors working tirelessly in the shadows. But too often, they’re just vampires who can’t remember the warmth of daylight.

And part 2: The Digital Humanities:

The digital humanities must decide if they are potting their digital plants in order to prettify the office, or to nurture saplings for later transfer into the great outdoors. Out there, in the messy, humid world of people and machines, it’s better to cast off elbow patches for shirt-sleeves.

Bogost’s thinking is I think also highly applicable to the Dutch culture scenes and recent protests against the cutbacks. As with the humanists all too often you get a sense that they bear active disdain for their audiences or the general public and that they are far too little oriented towards the public and active participation in the world:

The humanities should orient toward the world at large, toward things of all kinds and at all scales. The subject matter for the humanities is not just the letters and arts themselves, but every other worldly practice as well. Any humanistic discipline can orient itself toward the world fruitfully, but most choose to orient inward instead, toward themselves only.

Just like Bogost says that humanists should be private educators and public spies, the arts should be critics of the human condition both in the small and in the large. To do that, they need to be a bit more relevant and inclusive than they have been thusfar. Both pieces are well worth reading and its staggering how far the analogy keeps.

The article about plastic surgery in Brazil is not to be missed: “A ‘Necessary Vanity’”:

This notion of a right points to a potential problem with rights during a period when consumers are becoming a more powerful political force.  When a good life is defined through the ability to buy goods then rights may be reinterpreted to mean not equality before the law, but equality in the market.

It’s interesting to see how in the run-up to hurricane Irene the NYC government’s site buckled but the office had enough web savvy to switch to proven scalable websites such as Dropbox and Facebook to be able to continue spreading disaster information to the general public. Government should have its information services in order but being able to switch flexibly in the face of adversity is definitely a bonus.

This API to the displays on Times Square is hugely exciting from an interactive displays point of view. If you want to learn how to program for such a thing, you could do worse than start off at the courses from Codecademy.com.

De Club (we do not talk about the club) is doing a run of performances these weeks in Amsterdam. I don’t know what it is about yet, but still I think you should go if you’re into gripping theatrical experiences.

Monday I went off exploring a fort for an upcoming Hack de Overheid event. The industrial scenery and weather at the sea locks of IJmuiden was positively apocalyptic that day.

The week was spent a bit catching up from a cold and ticking off stuff before a week of Berlin (staying at Your Neighbours) and a week of off the grid R&R in the Alps. So a frantic pace here and there.

Tuesday we went for a technical house call in the Hague:

Kilian wrote up his work on Statlas. Expect more on that after the Summer lull.

My presentation on CHI Sparks 2011 was put online (thanks Yohan Creemers) and quite pleased with how that turned out:

Chi Sparks 2011: Code 4 – A large scale game for organizational change from Chi Nederland on Vimeo.

There seems to be a VOLUME magazine out in which are incorporated our contributions about how architecture and the ‘internet of things’ should mesh. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m curious as to the results.

James Burke and I made plans about the Chokepoint Project and an upcoming visit to the CCC Camp in Finowfurt.

A review I wrote for nrc.next about the documentary game: The Cat and the Coup (about the British/American coup d’état in Iran) saw print in a strongly reduced form. Expect a more elaborate version of that to hit Bashers in the next month.

I wrote a brief thing about how my ideas about Amsterdam urban development are supported by Jane Jacobs seminal work: “Jane Jacobs and the city of Amsterdam” and also wrote a small something over at Monster Swell to commemorate the 10e6 Foursquare users milestone and Amsterdam’s small role in that.

With all of that done, it was into the night train to Berlin for a Friday very early morning arrival.

Last week a bunch of visual progress was made on culiacán. Expect an August release on that.

Also a longer version of my review of Inside a Star-filled Sky was posted to Bashers. Seemingly any post that does not contain meta-criticism has a hard time attracting comments over there (maybe everywhere). More stuff was published also about Jason Rohrer, especially of note the Wired piece about Chain World.

Mid-week marked the first deployed iteration of guadalupe. If development on that goes the way we want it, expect private alpha invites to become available also in August.

End of the week we spent a bunch of time doing a submission to SxSWi to talk about the Heist Model. It’s an edgy philosophy and a fun way of working, which we look forward to expound in Austin accompanied by friends, margaritas and BBQ.

Friday there was Ball Invasion (with friends):

After which I managed to get stuck with a car and drive it up North to the Appsterdam HQ for the iOS Devcamp that was in progress.

The weekend was marked by rainy misery and a short piece of writing about open data becoming a normal practice of Amsterdam City-Center.

Monday I did some support and then went off to the UvA to present on data journalism together with Stef.

Tuesday I was in Utrecht to work on the Code 4 presentation for CHI Sparks. Working at the garden again was a very enjoyable experience made more so by the unexpected visit of Christine who’s making forays into game design herself.

A lot of the rest of the week was occupied with testing and preparing Statlas for a launch this week, which it did, so you can check it out and read more about that in next week’s notes.

Mr. Morozov visited the Netherlands which made for an interesting night out along with a very unexpected meetup with Babak and Ulla.

My takeaway from Evgeny Morozov can be summarized in this tweet:

Conclusion of a night with @evgenymorozov: government meddling on the internet doesn’t do us any good and can only hurt us in the long run.

Government control of the internet’s technologies seldom nets anything and is usually implemented on the back of scare tactics about terrorism or child pornography. When things turn sour, the systems that were deployed can be used to a very great effect against the entire population without much effort. This means it is imperative to maintain a free and open internet to safeguard freedom.

Thursday it was off to Arnhem to present at the CHI Sparks conference. The place where all seriously academic HCI people get together to present their findings. I presented on a serious game we made with Hubbub in the Games and Play track. Thanks to the organization for giving us the stage and thanks for the kind support from friends in the audience. I hope our presentation was worth your while.

And that was that, like I said, this week is even more exciting and with the return of Kars from the Land of the Rising Sun, it promises to become a hot Summer.