Last week featured some taxes, and a write-up of our gamejam efforts in nrc.next post-published on Bashers: The Making of Nakatomi Rider.

On Tuesday I went to c-base for Hack and Tell which featured some rather interesting hacks, a low douchebag count and some nice pizza.

On Wednesday I did the last work on a project from last year. Then I went to see a shared office in Kreuzkölln before going to the Games Culture Circle (sort of similar to Gamelab in Amsterdam).

On Friday I went to see Agora based on a tip by Peter Bihr and I decided to setup shop there for the time being. Having a studio increases my productivity some four times. The rest of the day and weekend was spent getting back into XCode and into the iOS deployment process.

I also blogged about the 2012 Q1 events schedule both personally and professionally.

On Saturday I did make it out to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt to get a taste of the Transmediale, but I was a bit overwhelmed by the quantity and unclarity of the program so I didn’t do more than take a look around. I think the entire obscurantist tendency surrounding net art is highly problematic and negates any relevance the field may have. I did catch the Graham Harman keynote on the live stream which would have been worth admission by itself.

Last week started with recuperating from the second massive move we did getting massive wood furniture from Saxony. That was spent with a long overdue first visit to the Barn here.

The next day I peeked in a bit with the game design process at Hubbub.

Then I went to the Django meetup in Berlin organized by Jannis Leidel over at The Maker’s Loft.

I was also pleased with this write-up by Kevin Slavin of the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference over on his Tumblr (which is pure gold by the way).

The event Social Cities of Tomorrow is also intended as an alternative to the increasingly popular idea of ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ cities.

It is good to see our friends from the Mobile City to be so well attuned with the international cutting edge when it comes to smart city rhetoric.

Wednesday I visited the Daten & Journalisten meetup at the taz headquarters here in Berlin and I presented some of the data journalism projects we did both with Hack de Overheid and with Monster Swell.

On Thursday I dropped by Praxis, the office of Rainer Kohlberger and worked there for a bit. That day also marked the awards ceremony for the Apps voor Nederland contest and the success allowed us to get our minister of economic affairs to side with open data on television.

On Friday I was off to Friedrichshain to receive my team for the gamejam and that ended the week. Results of the gamejam are in this event write-up.

The year has started nicely and the event line-up is already brimful.

Thursday a week ago saw the iBestuur Congress in the Netherlands where the winners of the Apps voor Nederland competition were announced. I’m happy to see this last app competition to a succesful end and I look forward to what more we can bring. See a write-up of them over at the Hack de Overheid site.

Last weekend I was joined here by fellow game makers from the Netherlands to participate in the Berlin Global Game Jam. We fought hard and managed to crank out the unparalleled Nakatomi Rider. Niels wrote it up for the papers (available over at Bashers).

This week in Berlin the Transmediale takes place to which I hope to go in the following days. I have a difficult relationship with art, especially when it is in the domain of media, but watching the Graham Harman lecture tonight and the introduction to it, it was clear to me that Transmediale is as on top of current developments and artistic relevance as they can be.

Upcoming

There will be a night in Pakhuis de Zwijger to celebrate the Nederland van Boven television series that the VPRO produced in the Netherlands. I will be joining the esteemed panel there as a board member of Hack de Overheid to talk about issues of democracy, participation and truth in cartography.

With Martijn de Waal happily having gotten his PhD, it’s now full steam ahead for the conference he is organizing together with Michiel de Lange called “Social Cities of Tomorrow”. I will be speaking in a brief time slot about Apps for Amsterdam and how data commons happen.

I will probably be attending LIFT to see a certain person speak.

Finally in the near future there is also an undisclosed Berlin event for which I will be speaking which will be my first abroad since I left the Netherlands.

I’m revising my working theory for Germany based on experiences from last week and other things that have happened. My old one on Germany’s attitude towards modernity still holds, but talking with open government activists and my experiences with government here, have prompted the following.

One of the biggest mysteries for me is why Germany is so far behind when it comes to open government compared to the Netherlands. With Hack de Overheid we have been on a roll last year with nearly every institution coming forward and pushing towards more openness. We even got Minister Verhagen on television to pledge to our goal. All of this does not mean we have won yet, but it does show a momentum into the right direction.

The German situation in comparison beggars belief. The very fact that it is a good thing for government to open up their data in a machine-readable fashion, still seems to be up for debate in many circles. The open government movement itself is denied outright and not heard in official proceedings even when it would be total common sense to take their input.

I have no clue how in this day and age such an opinion is tenable, but I will wager two possible explanations:

1. German goverment is hideously complex. There are tons of layers of government because of the federal system and the scale of the country. There are also parallel governments and institutions that are similarly layered, so for each and every query you have, you may be pointed any way up, down or sideways into the hierarchy. This is a very easy way to get sent in endless loops and for the entire system to hold itself in gridlock.
2. This one is more subtle: German government is very bureaucratical. The promise of open data and open government is ultimately to replace well defined bureaucratic systems with automation. At a point it no longer matters whether you send a physical form into government for human processing or whether you fill something in online and a computer performs the same operation.
   Whether they realize it or not, by filibustering openness in government, the civil servants are ensuring that they will still have a job in twenty years’ time.

And before you say the above is an unfair characterization of the ruling elites in Germany, you only have to read this recent missive by CDU Bundestag member Heveling (outtakes by Peter Bihr here) to confirm the ruling class’s difficult relation with the internet. Heveling has caused quite the uproar here. Though I wonder if the German twittersphere may let themselves be baited too easily. If we in the Netherlands went batshit crazy every time somebody from the CDA said something stupid about the internet, we would get nary a thing done.

Last week we got the DSL at home to work (in two tries). It feels good to have that after something of a month of bureaucracy and false starts to deal with.

Then I went to PROGRAM’s last event on German/Turkish Material Exchange. An inspiring and eclectic evening and a shame to see the venue being wrapped up.

I met Peter Wollring, a videographer who has made the crossing to Berlin a long time ago, Peter Tegelaar, a startup veteran from Amsterdam and with Third Wave.

Finally I got the correct form te become self-employed today from the Finanzamt:

The studio is still elusive, so the kitchen table is where it is at.

I’m reading up on German tax and trade rules because I’m going to incorporate here this month and most of the things I read do not make me very happy. They look like they are more suited to a 19th century gentry than to creative workers in the multipolar 21st.

One such thing is being a Freiberufler. The Freiberuflich status, which means you work in a free profession, strikes me as an archaic oddity.

In the Netherlands we had the same for doctors, engineers and other learned individuals which meant you did not need to register at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. You could just apply for a VAT number at the tax service and be in business. In the Netherlands this status got abolished and everybody was forced to register at that terrible excuse for an institution: the KvK.

In Germany being Freiberuflich rests on the same foundations but it also means you get a special tax cut (you don’t pay Gewerbesteuer) that other self-employed don’t get. This would seem to be along the division between people who create stuff from their knowledge and people who work in manufacture/trade.

That tax cut means that the Finanzamt examines your status a bit more stringently, because more people try to apply for the Freiberuflich status. There are a bunch of bizarrely outdated catalogue professions for which the decision has already been made. These number: blood type tester, ship compass rejiggerer and various other untranslatable things. In the digital professions the divisions are not very clear. A designer (in most cases) seems to be free, but a programmer (called by the humorous EDV —Elektronische Datenverarbeitung— term) usually not.

There are mainly two things wrong here.

The tax cut and the mostly arbitrary divisions that it entails seem unnecessary to me. For any enterprise, the difference between the cost you incur and the amount of money you can turn your time into, is your value add for which you already pay a VAT. Why then complicate matters with another tax designed especially to hurt the lower educated?

More principally, the division between being a free profession and not, at its core rests on whether somebody has undertaken higher education. Something you do for which you have been educated may be a free profession, while if you don’t have the education for it, this may become an issue. While in most cases, upon examination it won’t be an issue at all, the fact that this division exists and could have repercussions for your tax status, potentially has a chilling effect. It implies that your tax system and in effect most of your society is not based on merit, but on if you managed to pass this or that (university) gate. That strikes me as a very unhealthy signal.

Last week was a week in Amsterdam (and what a week it was!).

Monday I was in the train, which seems to take shorter and shorter because of the worklfow achieved there. I dropped in straight to the Open Coop to push the stuff I had created online (among which a professional summary of 2011) and then went off to the Mediamatic Schommelclub where I saw most of the regulars and a great performance:

Tuesday I hung out with my friends from the Village before heading to Hubbub central for a bit of metagaming (arguing pro) and the kickoff for project saba. I also blogged about our Berlin plans on Hubbub and installed Unity on my laptop for some heavy duty game development.

The project is going to be great if only judging from the concept art that was produced during that afternoon.

Wednesday was filled wit back to back meetings with Justus Bruns, hanging out at the awesome Brainsley offices, having lunch with lovely Tim de Gier, talking game design shop with Christine Fountain and then having dinner and going to a play with Oliver Verver.

Thursday I spent cooped up at the Open Coop all day working on various Open State stuff and then it was off to the annual ISOC Chairperson’s Dinner and New Year’s Drinks. I discussed the option to change your date of birth with some of the more privacy minded attendees and that sparked this post.

And Friday it was a brief bit at the Coop to pack up my office and then jump on the train back to Berlin. I am now also a part of the Iron Blogger Berlin network to insure blog frequency.

Talking to two young theater makers yesterday, I remarked that the majority of the Dutch plays I see don’t deliver the relevant and socially engaged experiences I would want them to. To which they asked why I still bothered going to the theater, a question I hear regularly from those in the more modern performing arts. They themselves hardly ever go and they make participatory theater, not the stage dramas that first come to mind. That is a response I get more often: that theater is boring, irrelevant and really ‘Why would anybody want to go?’

I often think the same on my obligatory trips to the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam and other venues. What I need in theater is a visceral quality, acute social relevance and deep street savvy. One of those is hard enough to find most of the time, let alone all three. I went to 33 plays last year and only a handful of them delivered. The few that did, redeemed the boring, too long, too simple plays I’ve been to, but I think that there are irresolvable obstacles preventing the quality of theater from increasing.

On most of my visits I’m struck by how narrow a demographic (by age and social-economic status) frequents most theaters. This cannot but influence the performances to cater to the audience. The audience’s wishes notwithstanding, artistic autonomy would require boundaries to be pushed, but that too doesn’t happen all too often (see also ‘De studio uit, de wereld in’).

Having said that, the theater makers I would go to blindly in the Netherlands are:

• Theu Boermans
• Thibaud Delpeut
• Eric de Vroedt
• Ivo van Hove

Now having just moved to Berlin, I’ve seen a bunch of plays at die Schaubühne but nothing very titillating yet. That may be in part because I am yet to see something by Thomas Ostermeier, but it does beg the question why a theater would stage such wildly varying material and why the room still is full most of the nights. Answers to those questions are forthcoming after a more thorough sampling.

Last week was my first week in Berlin in earnest and I was more than a bit eager to get back on the horse. On Monday I visited four coworking spaces, on Tuesday I met Marguerite Joly from the Hybrid Plattform and on Wednesday I visited a bunch more. Like I write over at Hubbub, I am looking for a studio space and much much more here in Berlin.

On Thursday I booked a spot at the beta breakfast at Betahaus through Gidsy where I met old friends and some interesting new people.

On Friday I had lunch with Rainer Kohlberger and then worked at betahaus for the rest of the day. I ended the week with drinks with the Gidsy and Third Wave crews.

Going over the list of services that the municipality of Amsterdam offers this week, I couldn’t help but notice this:

the option to change your date of birth (without a foreign certificate)

This is a very interesting option. I am not aware of the reasons one could assert to change their date of birth, but the fact that the option is listed, says something. In any case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a reason that fulfills official requirements.

Why would you want to do this?

I am reasonably sure that most statistical inference methods on databases are pinned fairly rigidly on the fact that somebody’s date of birth never changes. The various parts of your name can be mismatched, but if you do not have an id for somebody (like a social security number), the date of birth is your best bet to reduce the number of possible matches.

If you manage to change your date of birth if only by a day and re-register with that everywhere, you will have shed your privacy tail and can start anew. That by itself, struck me as a hopeful thought. Now just to have somebody try it out.

Post scriptum: I talked about this with Rejo and he suggested I FOIA the number of times this occurs and the reasons why it happens. I put that on my list, for some time in the future.