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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I taught a minor in data visualization at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
I built bespoke cartography for the PvdA and for the AUB.
I presented at /dev/hague, ODEC, CHI sparks, Ignite Amsterdam.
I presented on cities and games for Virtueel Platform.
I gave several radio interviews.
I ran workshops at the ROOSdagen, the RIVM and the NOS.
I taught at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
I published a book review in Vrij Nederland.
I wrote a handful of game reviews in nrc.next.
I visited dConstruct, FOSDEM, the Infographics congress and Playful.
I got an iPhone 4.
I made journalistic visualizations for de Groene Amsterdammer and Sargasso.
I moved house twice, once across the city and the next time across Europe.
I launched a web store with the freshest graphics in the Netherlands.
I judged one app competition and chaired the proceedings of another.
I learned iOS programming.
I participated in a pilot for a interactive design television show.
I went to the Alps for the first time.
I joined the Next Speaker.
I raised funds for Bits of Freedom.
I created a glanceable display for transit in Amsterdam.
I wrote code for a theater play.
I moved studio from Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Coop and got the keys to another.
I taped a video report on the Utrecht game scene.
I was cured from my infatuation with Android.
I participated in a workshop with Manuel DeLanda.
I went to Berlin five times, the last time for good.

We launched the new Hack de Overheid site.
We created a large scale serious game for organizational change called Code 4.
We conceived and ran: Apps for Amsterdam, Apps for Noord-Holland and Apps voor Nederland
We created a bespoke platform for cartographic visualization called Statlas.
We organized five hackathons, among which Hack de Overheid, Nederland van Boven, a hackathon on a historic fortress island, an Open Data Bazaar and Code Camping Amsterdam where hundreds of people came to program dozens of civic applications.
We went to Cognitive Cities and rocked Berlin.
We merged Hack de Ovenheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen into a new entity called the Open State Foundation.

It was a bit of a slow movie year though. I only saw 56, the best of which were: “Drive”, “Melancholia”, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”, “Blue Valentine”, “Norwegian Wood”, “True Grit”, “Almanya”, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Kosmos”.

I went to 32 plays in 2011. The best ones:

• “Die Macht der Finsternis” in die Schaubühne
• “Het meisje dat teveel van lucifers hield” by NTGent in Frascati WG
• “Songs at the End of the World” by Wunderbaum in SSBA
• “De Russen!” by Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Holland Festival
• “This is how you will disappear” by Gisèle Vienne in Stadsschouwburg Utrecht (back at the Kaai in February!)
• “Langs de grote weg” by de Vere in Frascati

I read 21 books in 2011. The most notable of those were:

• “The Life and Death of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs
• “The City & The City” by China Miville
• “De kaart en het gebied” by Michel Houellebecq
• “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart
• “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell
• “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
• “Unit Operations” by Ian Bogost

I started tracking the games I played around halfway through the year, so this is not an exhaustive list, but five games I really enjoyed last year were: “Where is my Heart?”, “Nidhogg”, “Space Alert”, “The Binding of Isaac” and “The Resistance”.

Then it was off to Berlin to finalize things with the appartment and prepare the move.

My review of “Where is my Heart?” was also published in the nrc.next that week (tweet):

Finally my proposal to present on the Apps for Amsterdam project on the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference was aspected and I will be attending and presenting at that conference in Amsterdam. Data commons are a topic that is very near to our practice and I look forward to exchanging ideas with those attending.

This week marked a strategic planning session for the coming year out of which a lot of opportunity flowed. I also finished ‘Where is my Heart?’ for an upcoming nrc.next review. It is a spectacular piece of work and a total mind altering experience. A well deserved five stars.

Next we did some project planning for a fun little thing (saba) we’re going to build in 2012Q1. And then we played Quarriors which I won against all odds.

The rest of the week was spent actually writing the review. A lot of time goes into writing a good review. Too much for the regular press to do much of it as I’ve written here about Cultural Criticism. I was very pleased with Niels’s criticism and how the thing turned out (though it would of course have been better with another week spent on it).

Thursday I went to the Dialogues House to see Yochai Benkler present on his work and books. The clarity with which he presented complex concepts of value and organization was expected but still good to witness. The Dialogues House though situated a bit unluckily is really a vibrant and creative place.

Then on Friday it was tying off some odds and ends (I added a view back and forward for Fast Moving Targets year end project) and preparing for the Open Coop party.

There is a clear need for caution when it comes to algorithms, as has also been expressed by algoworld expert Kevin Slavin in his TED talk ‘How algorithms shape our world’ but there is no need for the undue fear being mongered by Eli Pariser and his pack. Meckel says the following (as also remarked by Basti Hirsch):

Es gäbe keinen kritischen Diskurs mehr, und damit würde unser System auseinanderfallen. Informationen sind der Kitt, der unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. In meinem Buch treibe ich diese Idee auf die Spitze: Die Menschheit schafft sich durch die Perfektionierung der Algorithmen selbst ab.

Bei manchen durch Algorithmen betriebenen Werbeangeboten hingegen bekämen Sie diesen Artikel gar nicht erst zu sehen.

While deploring the extremism prevalent in German discourse on the topic of the internet. She herself now takes an extremist and poorly nuanced position herself. The Filter Bubble argument that is currently in vogue (see this treatment by Alexander) is mostly hollow and it creates understanding on the back of fear. I work for the internet and I am sick of hearing this nonsense time and time again.

The Filter Bubble contrasts a previously filtered situation of redacted mainstream media with the new filtered situation of personalized online content and plays off of people’s fears. There are two main differences in the new situation.

The first difference is that the filters personalize content spheres for each person. I don’t think this is all that problematic. Having trained machine learning algorithms myself, I have seen how coarse they turn out no matter what amount of training. Training which is somewhere between a dark art and trying to hit a subjective target somewhere. Algorithmic filters resemble fractal surfaces more than they do smooth bubbles and personalization will never provide a perfectly sealed off environment. This means that as soon as you get into the technical details the whole thing very quickly falls apart.

The second difference is that filters are being applied by algorithms instead of editors now. Both are enigmatic creatures, but judging from the cold reception algorithms get, it seems that the traditional humanities are better equipped to deal with human entities than they are with the algorithmic variety. There is nothing new under the sun. Large scale social segregation and associated detrimental effects also happened using traditional media with people logging into their own newspaper or radio station. One of the most visibly polarized societies right now is the USA where the ‘debate’ between the right and the left is raging on talk radio, 24 hour news networks and, yes, also online. If anything the filters may help by making the groups of like minded people too small and too busy to be harmful to society.

My second problem is that while complaining about the lack of technical literacy in the general populace, her discipline and her research does not come over as very technically literate. She says:

Unser Land ist tendenziell eher technikfeindlich eingestellt.

The interviewer then adds that she draws from literary and philosophical sources. Those are interesting but hardly enough to thoroughly treat a subject. Deep talk about about information technology should draw from philosophy but it should also bring a literacy of the field itself. That means knowledge of its technical workings and affordances, the design practices inherent in the creation of technical artifacts and the procedurality and interaction that is so key to them.

So yes I very much agree that we need to instill a large scale procedural, data and media literacy in people and we may well need to start with the humanities. That may be the only way to fix their relevance problems when it comes to digital things (see also Ian Bogost’s two part essay ‘Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground’ on that).

So with those skills in hand, we could discuss the filter bubble drawing from applied research. One finding I would like to see is a technical assessment of the feasibility of trapping people in filter bubbles and measurements of the amount of information isolation that can be achieved. Another would be to research real life internet users and see if in fact they shut themselves off more from other influences and how far this affects their world views. Only with a praxis firmly based in reality can we talk about this subject in a way that is not gratuitous.

Update: This review of the Filter Bubble by Olga Goriunova in Computational Culture mostly vindicates my argument and I agree that we need more writing, not less to bridge the gap of literacy that stands ahead of us.

This was prompted a bit by responses are to the new play “Edward II” directed by Ivo van Hove at the Schaubühne here. I am yet to see the play, but I hear it’s pretty good. Judging from the set pictures and the trailer it is one of the more modern pieces at this particular theater. It seems to have been rather poorly received in the papers, which have treated it not really on merit, but with thinly veneered hatchet jobs where critics employed their position to jab at this or that enemy in the German cultural landscape. One particular critic even projected his own frustrations and personal perversions onto the play in a national daily. Germany still seems to be that place where personal gripes are written down and nailed to a door somewhere.

The modern look of the play seemed to draw particular ire and especially the liberal use of video projections on the stage (a staple at Toneelgroep Amsterdam). It seems that German theater viewers cannot deal with mixed media and are either confused on where to look or too closed minded to accept projected images alongside the action happening live on the stage. This is one symptom of a lack in media literacy.

Ivory towered gentlemen with a strangle hold on culture may be one extreme, in the Netherlands we suffer from the other. Reviews of works of culture in the papers are oftentimes as thin as the paper they are printed on. Usually they superficially treat a work and tack on a bit of buyer’s advice. It is painfully obvious that they are written by people who have to write twenty such pieces a day lest they are fired. I write video game reviews in Dutch periodical nrc.next myself, but looking for my piece in the paper one day, I read a review for a movie I’d been to that was so bad, it brought tears to my eyes. Theater reviews have held their own, but they are hit and miss and you’re better off reading only those written by Simon van den Berg.

As I see it a piece in a newspaper treating a work of culture should be some parts of either a review or a critique and probably a bit of both. A review is a brief summary of a piece without giving much away, explaining how it will fulfill the expectations of a prospective audience so they can decide whether to go/buy/use it or not. A critique should be a deep diving treatment of that piece, how it compares to all other works and how it is relevant to society in any subset that the critic deems relevant. Such a critique should contain judicious amounts of post-modern literary theory, internet savvy remix, unit operational analysis and it should bridge clefts of continuity, medium, style and social stratum. Above all both reviews and critiques must be entertaining to read and they must bring something new to the table.

I get to write 80 words or so for the paper and in that little space I try to do the above because we want to further discourse around video games in the Netherlands. As we see it procedural media are busy upending the entire traditional cultural landscape and strict divisions of any kind in culture and art will not be tenable in the future. The institutions are crumbling and that is a good thing. This is unfortunately a radical notion even in the Netherlands, I have no clue how it will hold up in Germany where institutions are even more conservative and society is much more stratified.

In any case we cannot fill the entire newspaper by ourselves, nor should we want to. We can only strive to educate and elucidate by writing and talking about media in this particular way and hope that it catches on. I’m interested to see if my notions are at all true and if the German or Dutch discourse can be inched forward in the coming year with some choice interventions. Help to achieve that or explanations in how I am completely wrong are always welcome.

Germany has not quite recovered from their catastrophical experiment with modernism in the ’30s-’40s. This caused them to fall back and get stuck in a sort of classical romanticism. This stuckness has caused them to skip post-modernism and the developments that came after and is the main reason why its cultural velocity is slow. Some individuals have modernized to a greater or lesser extent and the developments of ’68 have had an effect, but the institutional parts of the country remain firmly entrenched in the past.

As I said, I’m new here and this is two days’ worth of rumination thinly sliced. Comments for amending it are very welcome.

Forgot to post the notes for week 246, so here they are briefly.

Code Camping Amsterdam was featured in the news:

Article text

Then I was off to Berlin to house hunt and visit our friends over at The Makers Loft and Mozilla and I hung out with some Berlin Game Developers.

I flew into Amsterdam on Monday morning (takeoff Schönefeld at 07:20) to a rather broken working day. My locative transgressions leaving at least Peter Robinett confused enough to do something about it. He built me a personal glanceable: Where’s Alper? (write up). That is the best reason to build software: because you need it.

Attended to it by my speaking agent Tessa, I submitted a talk brief to NEXT12 about Love in Time of Gamification. And I registered at Hybrid Plattform in Berlin, looking to see what kind of collaborations come from that.

The rest of Monday and Tuesday were spent preparing a workshop for the Dutch broadcasting corporation the NOS on the topic of data visualization using off the shelf tools. The course was mainly focused on Google’s tools such as Motion Charts, other charts APIs and Fusion Tables but we also managed to touch on some theoretical and ethical questions during the workshop.

For me it was great to see how far Google’s Fusion Tables offering has come since last I looked at it, becoming a proper tool for big data analysis and visualization for those with the right skills and inclination. Though the data import/export as well as the ties to Google are problematic for corporate customers. It is also very promising how a web savvy group of people as those at the NOS can use the data they have at their disposal to create public facing interactive products. That is the aim and I am very curious what comes out of the NOS during the next year when it comes to data.

After the course I got the obligatory television studio tour and despite having foresworn television some years ago, I could not help but be awed by the studios, the proceedings and the massive disconnect between what happens in physical space in Hilversum and how it is experienced throughout the country. The process of media power at play is an impressive thing to behold.

I met with Erik Kroesto talk about the intersection of photography and the internet. And then I went to a lecture in the Facing Forward series by Amber Case and Manuel DeLanda. I had read this piece about Case before and the talk contained not much new and DeLanda who I had got pointed to by Matt Jones very recently took his time to introduce us to genetic algorithms as form finding functions. A laypersons introduction to genetic algorithms for me does not contain anything novel either, but DeLanda delivered it with intelligence and wit, which made it still immensely bearable.

Most surprised I was still at the relative novelty the audience experienced for material that has been old hat in my social sphere for the last couple of years. Tellingly in a room of hundreds there were only a handful of people who had even mentioned the event on Twitter let alone who participated in any kind of discursive backchannel.

I was and still am more interested in DeLanda’s book on simulation. The next day I participated in a workshop in W139 where DeLanda gave me and a bunch of art students an introduction into Realist philosophy as opposed to the other branches.

We ended the week with talking about the communications plan and the merger for Open State (the future foundation into which all of Hack de Overheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen are to be combined).

This was accompanied with a bunch of festivities among which a Coop party on Thursday, constitutionary drinks on Friday and then off to Utrecht for the Hubbub studio warming. Kars Alfrink has crafted himself an ultra fine place of work and I count myself lucky to be allowed to work there from time to time.

On Monday we ran through the day’s schedule for Code Camping Amsterdam and I did a bunch of work on guadalupe.

That night DUS had an evening about re-imagining architecture at the Coop.

Tuesday I worked at the Brainsley offices and went to the Bits of Freedom drinks in the evening.

The Next Speaker now also carries my English profile if you need a speaker on the overlap between technology, design and society.

I submitted a proposal about data commons to the conference on the Social Cities of Tomorrow by the Mobile City.

Friday was for the final preparations for Code Camping Amsterdam (write-up here), our largest Hack de Overheid event to date. We had the entire day hacking at the derelict Shell Tower —I wrote about it before— across the water in Amsterdam with great food and coffee and a party at night for another several hundred people.

It was interesting arranging stuff for Apps voor Nederland from Berlin, but eminently doable thanks to modern communications.

I also went to see the play ‘Einsame Menschen’ at the Schaubühne. Which was an interesting experience all in all.

I also had an experience with Android that probably forever cured me from the platform. What a horrible mess that is. Tuesday evening I took the train back to Amsterdam while making two presentations.

Because on Wednesday I did a project presentation at the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers and after that the same night I did an Ignite on Hack de Overheid at Mediamatic (see this picture of me speaking about transparency and see the picture on the projector). Both presentations went very well.

Mediamatic is currently doing studies in fungus of which this wall is an example:

Thursdays was a bit more of a slow day after the 12 hour ordeal of the day before, starting off with doing e-mails at the Village, my favorite hangout in the Netherlands.

I asked Vlambeer about any indie game developers in Berlin and they came up pretty short on that count. Anytime I inquire about the Berlin game scene I get Wooga and if people really know what they are talking about they mention the great people at Spaces of Play. In any case, the Berlin scene seems thin and ripe for disruption.

After that it was off to Lieke’s viva. A smashing display of science if ever there was one:

Friday we did some business development for Hubbub with Kars Alfrink visiting over at the Coop and we paid a brief visit to the Super Mario Experience.

And oh yeah, on Sunday I moved my office from the Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Cooperatie which has already been my main base of operations for a while now, so I thought I’d make it official.

At the end of this month, on Saturday the 26th, we’ll be holding a Hack de Overheid event like you’re used to with some notable additions that are going to blow everybody’s mind. The event is called Code Camping Amsterdam, it is part of the Apps voor Nederland program in collaboration with Waag Society and you can register on the bottom of the page.

We’ll be having three internationally renowned speakers whose work alone speaks for itself, let alone their presence on our event. Marietje Schaake is our most favourable representation in the European Parliament but as far as I know a politician of her stature has never before spoke in front of an audience of Makers in the Netherlands before. Marius Watz‘s visual art inspires awe and wonder and I have used his software on several occasions in my work for Monster Swell. Matt Biddulph‘s work and shipped products have been used by most of the people I know and inspired me and I think many more programmers to build more and better.

The location in the derelict Toren Overhoeks is a culmination both of convenience and inconvenience. Just across the central train station, but without any facilities left in the building it exemplifies a once and future state of our cities. Remnants of an age gone by where hackers gather with makeshift facilities to create something better.

After the event there is going to be a party by the Eddie the Eagle Museum a formation famous in their own right for holding the most out there awesome parties in the city. It is a privilege working together with people this competent when it comes to fun and so creative when it comes to convention. See their party description:

The future has found us! And its leader is a code. Our digitally hypnotised desire has led to a world without mistakes, governed by spyware and malware. Humanity is an experiment proved inferior. Let’s crack the code to correct it. Enter the Hackathon and exuberantly celebrate a world without errors! With high, low and no-tech, we are the new Trojan Horses marching in, ritually erasing the failings of the past. Let’s roughly and frantic lose our last human bit with a codefest in the Tower of the Shell.

Finally as I have hinted before, the currency for application contests is diminishing along with the consolidation of the open data platforms and the publication of more and more datasets. If after Apps voor Nederland is over, you follow-up with another cookie-cutter competition, that would be missing the point. That also means that this competition is the best moment to get your datasets out and get attention for them in the ecosystem as it is right now. What will be next? We have some ideas, but we don’t know anything for sure yet. The only thing that is certain: you’d better be there next Saturday!

And we are accruing more and more birds:

The start of the week was busy with preparing and presenting at the RIVM, the Dutch institute for public health and the environment about their consumer portal Kies Beter. Kies beter is effectively a public resource for authoritative healthcare information. It will be interesting to see what role it will play in the coming process of opening up such data. It was a great opportunity to talk and work with the team and see how they see their role.

Also the movie I shot for Fast Moving Targets with my quick note from the Dutch Game Garden was published:

I met with Jaap Stronks of Johnny Wonder and with some friendly people from Dutch broadcasting company NCRV all about the open data revolution and how it can work for them.

Apps voor Nederland continues apace and the event is rapidly approaching right now.

I am in the process of liquidating my superfluous effects in the Netherlands as well as my office in the Volkskrantgebouw. It’s an odd coincidence that just with my leaving (and with the announcement of the re-development of the VKG as a hotel in a couple of years) a bunch of friends and esteemed colleagues are landing in the building. I would have loved to have shared the building with them for the past two years but for me it is onwards and upwards!

I had a chat with Casper Koomen who is very active with Pachube’s Dutch development efforts. Among other things with an event this Friday called “Breathe Amsterdam”. And I’m preparing an Ignite presentation for next week.

Also my long form review of Phone Story which had been published in the newspaper before has now been published on Bashers in Dutch: ‘Phone Story – Gamedesign als kritiek op onze gadgetlust’ The comments are predictable but I had wished for a bit more in depth response to the problem I see where platform builders as Apple become governments of the space they created. Which is problematic in this case because they tightly regulate expression within their platform that would be legitimate in any other public space.

The winter sun hitting the backyard of our North office, makes for some striking pictures:

And then it was off to Berlin to make some more arrangements for the move over there come the new year.

We strolled from Neukölln to the South back to Kreuzberg’s Südstern and Bergmannkiez via the former airport of Tempelhof. That part of Neukölln is developing but before there is anything approaching a comfortable urban fabric, it will be another five years.

Tempelhof Airport itself is becoming a great example of how creating a hole in a vibrant urban area can make space for all kinds of impromptu and impermanent use. The urban gardening plots are just one example of that. The business on a Sunday even with winter approaching is massive with al kinds of wheeled and/or wind based activities taking place.

There seem to be plans to build along the airfield, but that would be very bad obscuring the current urban views into the emptiness. If building is necessary, I would propose to put the buildings on stilts so we can still peer into the Loch.

I deleted my Klout account after reading the polemic by Charlie Stross:

Went to the launch of Vice Netherlands’ web strategy. A nice event, but a bit too reminiscent of the nineties. After that I briefly visited the Hackers and Founders event as well.

Preparing my move out of the Volkskrantgebouw as well. My home base in Amsterdam will be our office at the Open Cooperatie for the foreseeable future.

}

Friday, I recorded a message from the Dutch Game Garden for Fast Moving Targets, a Dutch online tech news show. I think the things happening at the DGG deserve to be communicated much wider and if I can contribute to that by doing this, I will.

After that we went for a board game night at the garden with ample games of Space Alert and Nidhogg.

I will be speaking at the next ignite at Mediamatic on the topic of ‘Hacking for Social Justice’ (the thing we do at Hack de Overheid).

Sunday we started what could be a nice tradition: a brunch time serving of Tonkotsu Ramen at one of the best Japanese places in the city with some very smart people. If it’s up to me, that is going to be a regular occurrence.

Talks about open data and data journalism are ongoing at a number of Dutch parties. After last year’s attention, it seems that this year various parties are indeed getting serious about it.

Then I went to a talk by Michael LaFond at ARCAM in Amsterdam about the Berlin co-housing movement that he started in part. All the more interesting because I am moving to Berlin in January of next year and we’re already registered at several projects on Wohnportal Berlin, the site he setup. Several of the projects he showed during the evening also have our attention as prospective Berlin living space. My notes for the evening and a more elaborate write-up of the Q&A are up on this blog.

I built a next iteration for guadalupe that is indeed becoming more playable as we speak. I am very eager to invite more people to that play experience sometime soon.

Wednesday we announced the first speaker for Code Camping Amsterdam: Matt Biddulph. We’re really excited to have Matt come over to Amsterdam again.

Went to Booreiland to work on culiacan.

At long last I posted the pictures I took of people visiting our office with my Yashica medium format camera.

My review of The Binding of Isaac was published in nrc.next.

Sunday we had a marathon meeting for the constitution of the merged foundation that is going to be the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Hack de Overheid and Het Nieuwe Stemmen. I am very excited for the potential of the new organization.

Nice to see that Peter Robinett is running AMStransit in his office on a spare screen:

Hack de Overheid announced Code Camping Amsterdam which is going to be our biggest event yet in a derelict office across the IJ in Amsterdam. Everything is in full effect to organize that.

Playful was great and it’s always nice to be in London for a short stretch. It was a while that I was last in Conway Hall but it was nice to be back. Niels and Kars have written detailed accounts about the day on Hubbub and Bashers.

Then in the same weekend (flying into Schiphol in the morning, directly in the car to Germany) it was off to the Ruhrgebiet in Germany to visit among others the Jahrhunderthallen and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.

awards handed out by its organiser who wants to be seen handing out awards to people who want to be seen receiving them. It’s a simple formulae, but unsustainable in a world where more of the demographic that attends communicates over the back-channel. —Jan Chipchase

Ties shines on this classic laptop shot (the stickers do add a nice touch):

Martijn in a similar stance has a razor sharp glance (and curls):

James’s essence is captured quite nicely in this picture:

Peter came out a bit under-exposed but turned out nicely with some brushing up (and burning):

The tallest of former coworkers Tim comes out nicely too:

All in all, that is five usable frames from twelve shot which is a more than decent score. It looks like I should shoot more portraits. Any volunteers?

I lost my fixie which was something of a blow. Feeling a bit hurt and crippled from this loss. Going to look for a new ride come spring.

I had lunch with Alexander Zeh and Peter Robinett of Mio Giro.

There is some space shortage at the Open Cooperatie but spirits at Hack de Overheid were high:

I participated in a knowledge gathering session organized by Info.nl about the future of the tax system in a fully networked society. There were some very interesting people present but always, talking with people who don’t make anything is a waste of time.

Also conceived of a special event for the playful people of the Netherlands. Stay tuned for updates on that.

Sargasso is very kind to us and says that Hack de Overheid approach is the new way of changing the world. We are very humbled (but would tend to agree).

I was a bit annoyed by voices against the ‘Creative Class’ and wrote a retort: “Stop Kicking the Creative Class”

I put the very modest advice work I did on the new Vrij Nederland site on my portfolio. I am glad I got the right people together, could help out some friends and that the result is so excellent.

I wrote a review of the Binding of Isaac for nrc.next due to be published soon. It is a deceptively deep and addictive game.

I had coffee with our good friend Toine Donk who is doing very interesting things with books. And I worked the rest of the afternoon at the offices of Brainsley. Besides good friends, they are my hope for innovation in Dutch publishing.

Ianus Keller and other friends were at Design by Fire (which seems to have been very good) and they give me hope with the following tweet:

Brainsley had their office warming party on Saturday which was a fantastic convention of internet, fashion and assorted other people:

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.

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.

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.

Last week’s weeknotes were still due. I built a small public transportation exploration called: AMStransit which is a dynamic glanceable display for nearby public transit in Amsterdam: example.

Work on Apps voor Nederland and culiacan continues apace.

Visited Gamelab to see contributions by all-stars Karel Millenaar, Niels ‘t Hooft and David Nieborg.

Also an interview I gave about Hack de Overheid was published under the great title “How to Make the Skunk Work With Open Data” (tweet).

Finally I went to /dev/haag to present about the current state of Hack de Overheid (which is really pretty good).

Software is what we write to extract information from data. The worse your data model is, the more software you have to write.

The fact that we will not enter a Golden Age of Reading because of corporate control, may be the greatest loss (in opportunity cost) the digitization of books will bring us.

I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to hack with that kind of data. What could you build around community reading groups, formal education, adult literacy? At the very least it would save me the chore of ticking homework diaries. But I doubt we’ll get that chance.

The following is one of the reasons that privacy is not going to be salvagable in the future.

The most important issue for user experience people to grapple with is informed consent. More and more web services are dependent on user contributed content and data. Every time you make a contribution (explicit or implicit) you’re trading convenience for privacy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s something we do everyday in real life from mobile phones to loyalty cards. But as the web moves out of the browser and into smart objects, the trade-offs we’re making need to be made explicit so people can make informed choices about when to get involved and when to back away.

Because Amazon are light years ahead of the game we think we’re playing.

With the digitization of everything and the scale required, we are becoming the victims of Extremistan or rather of its overlords: Apple, Google and Amazon.

@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:

The organization I’m involved with, Hack de Overheid will be organizing two events end of this year with the first one being an open hacking event on October 4th and the second being a Code Camp in Amsterdam end of November.

The message I am promoting is that this is the time to get on board and get your data out and start building civic apps. This is the last moment in the cycle that any of this is going to be at all special, innovative or unboundedly fun. After we’re done with this event most of the ground will be covered, hearts will be won and anybody talking about open data will be hailed with a ‘Been there, done that!’

Of course there will still be a dozen years of hard work for a great many people to change our institutions, build businesses on top of usable humane applications and educate a populace. There may even be fun to be had here and there, but you would be a fool not to get on board right here right now and help us kick this off.

See you October 4th.

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.

During that day I was interviewed by Netwerk Democratie about open data and digital democracy. The resulting video is here below:

On Monday busy finishing a bunch of stuff and exercising my bureaucracy muscle by writing different varieties of administrativa.

Got started using Amen which is a ridiculous amount of fun. Any such service that relies on human input will need to be fun to start with to garner any amount of critical mass. I have some invites left for those that want them.

Also saw this zombie themed ARG running in Amsterdam throughout the week:

Tuesday saw the happy celebration of the Eid al Fitr (in our language called the şeker bayramı) along with work on culiacan.

This video regarding the internet and physical shutdowns of the SF BART is not to be missed:

Note the concept of a common carrier which is something we should have in Europe as well.

Also found this fab produced bike fender the “Fendor Bendor” (by Wit Industries) at the other office sitting in a rack:

Wednesday saw a day in Utrecht preparing for the trip to dConstruct to see Kars Alfrink speak about the Transformers.

Regarding the discussion that came back again: I do think that designers should code, but that answer should be a bit obvious seeing as I am a creative technologist. It does deserve a blogpost of its own.

Thursday saw travel to the UK with a direct transfer to the Moo party taking place in Shoreditch. The expected group of hipsters and old friends had congregated on a parking lot (which was more fun than I make it sound right now). Met some interesting people doing similar things in the UK as we are over here (such as the organizer of the Mozilla festival).

Also read the shocking announcement that the prices for Google App Engine are going to increase some 30 times when the service goes out of preview (they call it a ‘new pricing model’). It was a formidable place for quickly developed applications that need to run solidly with little attention. I even gave a presentation how it is *better* than Django for a certain class of developer needs. Now I do feel forced to cancel any subscription I have running there and to stop investing in that particular platform because running any serious application would be unsustainable at current pricing.

Bashers launched a linklog Beat for everything game related, which is worth browsing through on occasion.

On recommendations from highly regarded friends I bought The Information by James Gleick though I already get the feeling that I am not going to read a lot of new things in there (seeing as our history of informatics, science philosophy and information theory classes in university were pretty thorough):

Upon entering the UK I was hit by some encounters still reminiscent of the social problems that just recently plagued London. That and the general grittiness of the parts of London we went through gave me a lot of misgivings about the city. I am pretty sure I’m not going to go to London ‘for fun’ anytime soon and I found myself very glad to be living in Amsterdam.

dConstruct contained some gems and some platitudinous talks as was expected. Me and my friends appreciate a different talk than the agency based web people that also attend which must put conference organizers in something of a bind when programming.

It was a lot of fun to hang around with my crew of Iskander Smit, Taco Ekkel and Kars Alfrink (who gave a terrific and hard hitting presentation) and to meet people such as Ben Bashford, Sjors Timmer, Marrije Schaake, Albert de Klein and many others I forget to name.

Saturday was spent recuperating from the trip and on Sunday more of the same. I celebrated my fifth Twitterversary and both of the offices I keep in Amsterdam (the Volkskrantgebouw and the Open Coop) were featured in the Parool magazine:

I think it’s still pretty fun, so I’m archiving it here as a quote:

Alper Çuğun is an engineer of the user experience specialized in cutting edge web technology, data viualization, physical interaction, game design and location based services.

Incredibly well connected within the tech scene but also always looking beyond the edges. He is known and respected among his peers, the most innovative web denizens, both locally and abroad and is responsible for startups, high quality writing, business innovation and winning numerous competitions.

Education

He graduated from Delft, University of Technology —a no nonsense engineering university colloquially known as the school of Getting Things Done— on the topic of crowd-sourcing avant-la-lettre. His curriculum of Media and Knowledge Engineering was comprised of a thorough foundation of computer science, signal processing, compression, computer graphics, data visualization, statistics, data mining, information retrieval, 3d programming and assorted other courses along with a solid minor of business courses in Management of Technology.

This solid grounding at one of the most respected technical universities of the world and the manner of thought acquired there have continued to serve Alper well throughout his professional and personal endeavours.

Early career

Already being well situated in the local and European web scenes after finishing university Alper went straight into freelancing for Aardverschuiving Media without an intermediate period of corporate mind numbing. Trying to find a good position to innovate the web from Delft, he also opened a coworking office for a year that became a hub for the local freelance community —he also started Dutch coworking map Coworker.nl together with Robert Gaal— shortly after which he moved to the greener pastures of Amsterdam.

Alper is also a founding member of Dutch finance startup Tipit.to a small corporation that has transformed thinking on crowdsourced micropayments and despite struggles with Paypal has financed Wikileaks among other public initiatives.

Thought leadership

Alper regularly exchanges ideas with industry thought leaders both in and out of Europe by visiting the best conferences and meeting up with the acest of web people.

The blog Alper writes on this site is a long running mainstay of the Dutch blogosphere and it continues to be a widely respected peripatetic rumination on the intersection of design, technology and society in the broadest sense.

Alper and Robert Gaal‘s nose for up and coming web trends enabled them to scout the fresh startup Foursquare and bring it to its first international outing in Amsterdam shortly after its 2009 SxSWi launch. They both remain set to this day both on founding, finding and befriending the web’s next hottest startups.

Alper’s newest foray is Monster Swell an agency to aid people, corporations and governments in making sense of vast quantities of data using statistical analysis, user experience design and data visualization. Never content to settle for yesterday’s status quo Alper is determined to stay at the forefront of the technological wave.

Extra curriculum

An avid cultural consumer of the most eclectic of offerings as well as a longtime runner, capoeirista and occasional surfer, Alper Çuğun is a modern day renaissance man in both mind and body.

Alper is also well represented on the following web properties: Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Anobii, Dopplr, last.fm and Delicious.

Nice to get recognition for writing from long long in the past. James linked to an old piece I wrote about getting stories from your database.

Apps for Noord Holland (saltillo) is this coming Saturday and signups are shaping up nicely. How could they be otherwise for the opportunity to spend a day programming and learning together on a fortress from the defense works of Amsterdam. There are still some spots open, so sign up if you want to make it an awesome experience.

I was over at Utrecht last week just to escape the many meetings plaguing me in Amsterdam. A new rule which I will try to adhere to: I will participate in a maximum of one hour of meetings every week.

My review of the Cat and the Coup (a documentary game) was published over at Bashers and I wrote a short Jane Jacobs inspired piece lamenting the narrow sidewalks of the area I live in.

These are too narrow to accomodate people walking along them side by side, let alone when the sidewalk is obstructed by plants, bikes, scooters, furniture and other things.

“Sidewalk width is invariable sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.” —Jane Jacobs

Add to that the fact that Amsterdam city politics is hostage to the car and you get this.

The first week after the holiday and therefore somewhat slow. Some work on Code 4, Choke Point Project and our own internal game project guadalupe.

It was fun to help our friends from Hubbub move into their new offices. A bit bare at first, but shaping up nicely.

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.

The experience is a warm bath unlike any other. Reading the first part on ‘The Peculiar Nature of Cities’ I could not help notice the urban fabric everywhere around me realized by the people that make up the streets here in Westerpark, Amsterdam.

Then reading the second part ‘The Conditions for City Diversity’ brought home how and where those conditions are lacking currently in Amsterdam.

Reading this book was long overdue for me. So many of my own ideas about city planning and urbanism are mirrored, most probably from the osmosis and inspiration I have gotten from friends over the years. It is quite uncanny. But there is still a lot to learn from Jacobs’s book and it should be compulsory reading for all council members of Amsterdam and other cities.

Two issues that are particularly striking right now:

1.

In chapter 13, ‘The Self-destruction of Diversity’, Jacobs talks about how when an area becomes diverse enough that it starts to attract people, the attraction and the increasing prices that generates may price out the very factors that made it attractive in the first place.

This is taking place right now in the central areas of Amsterdam. Most apartments are affordable only for the high double incomes or they are split up into rooms and let out to students and young professionals at a high markup. Along with the pressure that tourism puts on the city center and the lack of attractive areas outside of the A10 perimeter, this makes for high pressure on real estate prices. Where house prices are on the decline pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands, they are sharply on the increase in Amsterdam.

The issue as it is identified by Jacobs is that there is a high influx of people looking to live in Amsterdam but there are not enough attractive quarters for those people to choose from. This puts all the pressure on the city center, whereas vast spaces outside of the A10 perimeter are (rightly) considered unattractive. This is a blatant failing of city government to create a supply of attractive living quarters to service demand.

2.

Jacobs talks about ‘the need for primary mixed uses’ and ‘the need for aged buildings’ to create diversity. Those two needs make it abundantly clear why a city development such as IJburg cannot be a worthwhile place to settle for the next thirty years.

First IJburg contains no necessity for people to go there except to leave the island for work in the morning and to go back home in the evening. Footfall is near zero. I myself have only been there three times maybe in the last two years (and that still is three times more often than most people in Amsterdam). That makes it dead and unattractive for stores and other facilities to open. Those that try, cannot make ends meet and usually close down again quickly making for a rapid succession of tenants and lots of empty storefronts.

Secondly, because it is all new development, rents are too high for many essential neighborhood facilities to take root. IJburg will not have a Turkish grocer or a coffee house because those kind of stores need older, more run down (and therefore cheaper) buildings to settle in. Moving there means giving up access to those tiny neighborhood stores and in fact on lively neighborhood life altogether.

One has to wonder, what were the architects, the council and the developers thinking (if at all)?

Update: Read more playful reflections on the pertinence of Jane Jacobs to the Dutch urban fabric over at Hubbub: New ideas must use old buildings

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.

Tuesday I coworked at Hack de Overheid’s offices in the Open Coop in the newly fangled hip(ster)ness of Amsterdam North. Williamsburg it ain’t, but it is a place where one can breathe and build pyramids:

And then it was off to our friends over at Booreiland also in North to finalize work on a fun project we’re doing. See a pattern here?

Wednesday we kicked off an exciting new project that we’re running over the Summer break with Hack de Overheid. Look for some beach side entertainment announced soon.

Thursday it was off to the Open Data Experiences Conference in Rotterdam to serve as a milestone for open data development in the city of Rotterdam. I presented there on a track to supplement the heroic presences of both Toby Barnes and Tom Steinberg over from the UK to witness the great progress that is being made here.

I strayed a bit from the brief to give a hard technical talk and talked more about the open problems that we technologists should be solving. The technologists (developers/designers) I think are our only hope to break open things with functional interventions. I have had my fill of seeing people talk and do nothing much more than talk. There are more than enough thorny interesting problems for us to solve still, so we should be doing that.

On the highest level I identified three moral issues which I think is something of a nice niche on events such as these. I very much hope people took something away from these:

1. The rationale for opening up data is usually stated in terms of efficiency and effectivity. This may be necessary to sell open data to bean counters, but it is too inhuman a formulation of why we are doing this. We are doing this to see if we can improve the lives of normal humans a bit, to make sure that the uses that open data is being put to create experiences that are interesting, useful and beautiful.
2. We should make sure that the data that is being opened up and its uses are inclusive in a broad sense. If we manage to open up all of the data we want to and the smartest/fastest/evilest people take off with it and manage to build stuff for their own ends to the (partial) exclusion of others, we will have managed to switch out one power structure (an archaic but institutional one) for a new power structure of cowboys and parvenus. We will seem to have won, but we will have failed.
3. Finally, the main point that Michal Migurski made at a panel at EYEO about the book Seeing Like a State. That the reductionism inherent in recording data (and the subsequent opening it up) manages to lose the essence of things and creates the high-modernist idea that that view of things is the right view (see also: “All Watched Over: on Foo, Cybernetics and Big Data”). Michal says:
   

   My response to all this is something to the effect that people should help other people to see and represent their world usefully and accurately.

   Which I paraphrased to say that we should make tools to help every person see as a state of their own and be able to decide better for themselves and others how to organize their lives, to in effect become better states themselves.

The next day (Friday) we did a big stint in Utrecht to plan things for project SABA and another secret project that is more on our own brief to unite games and television in an interesting way. Look forward to the first playable prototypes for that hitting this week.

As always proceedings in Utrecht are supported by superb coffee (four shots to start the day!) from the fine lads at the Village. Here we’re taking care of their pies:

And as usual Sunday nights are closed off at the kitchen table catching up with the week to come and doing some iOS development:

Tuesday was another day spent in Utrecht and in between things I pushed out the releases for Statlas with posts in Dutch and English.

Also I managed to bait (thread) Dutch member of parliament Jeanine Hennis on the topic of her party’s (the VVD) entanglement with large corporate interest when it comes to copyright law (or any internet related law). There is a lot more to be said about this topic and I don’t know how effective this is as a strategy, but somebody should do this.

Thursday there was a meeting about game journalism at the Waag (and a flurry of coverage of the topic this week), by Niels and David:

That and other engagements however did mean that I had to miss the Cognitive Cities Salon (though I heard it was most ace).

Friday was spent doing iPhone tutorials all day and night to get up to speed on this medium and to create some interesting interface experiments in the near future.

The entire weekend was spent working unfortunately. Saturday we talked about the potential merger of Hack de Overheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen to formalize an already ongoing collaboration and create a more robust organization.

Sunday I acted as the jury member in a pilot for an interaction design television programme. It’s not clear yet whether it will be produced, but it would be a good step forward popularizing the more functional design disciplines.

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.

We also submitted the final version of the paper that we are presenting on Chi Sparks next week in the Games and play track.

Friday a brief review I wrote the week before of Inside a Star-filled Sky was published in nrc.next. This may become a more regular fixture.

The afternoon was spent together with Lex at the Waag concepting the tentatively titled ‘Apps on the Beach’ event.

Hack de Overheid made an overwhelming presence at the Spring Break of the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers to promote the cause of data-journalism in the Netherlands.

Real estate-wise we arranged to add two adjacent rooms in the Volkskrantgebouw. One of the rooms will be occupied by the lovely chaps of Bottlenose and the other one will be used as a meeting/project room.

Adding additional region sets to Statlas was succesful with some extra work. Projection conversion for Shapefiles is a rather difficult affair even with the EPSG Registry and the Spatial Reference.

Also visited the Djangocon EU, home of the faithful Django programmes. Django is still a venerable workhorse for many many of our projects.

Attended a lecture by Alain de Botton and his new book has a stance of using the cognitive psychology inherent in religion to improve secular life. Something which also the most ambitious design pieces do.

Friday was an interesting day and it was closed off by us having drinks at Ouroffice:

Here about privacy and how it should be a forward thinking discipline instead of a reactionary one:

“I don’t like privacy. It tends to be too closely associated with fear, and it always seems like a rear-guard action against technology.” Instead, we should work on the architecture of the public space and ensuring we architect for private space. —Charlie Nesson and a new vision of the public domain

Some choice quotes, though we should just hope that he finishes that essay:

Reality is augmented not when it looks different but when it feels different.

Maybe the aspiration to 3D optical AR starts to feel a little bit like pornography. Like a thin veneer of the actual experience that is flattened for the eye, that’s rendered for the eye which is the one sense most easily fooled to begin with.

Nobody knew better than me and the other people in that room that this was just computer code but it felt like a spirit had moved through the room and knocked all these phones off the table.

For pilots there is no reality except the one right in front of them.

Singular focus in which the eye is looking at rather than around. It diminishes reality. It closes it down. Because as it turns out for the driver as for most everybody here, reality is understood to be the whole world around us, not just that thing in front of us.

They’re inventing new ways to see, rather than new things to look at. And rather than inventing new places to go, they are inventing kind of new ways to travel. Because the whole thing is there’s no shortage of stuff in the world and things to see and enjoy. Reality is plenty, thanks.

p.34 A mature designer respects and embraces the often ill-structured nature of the process and —because he knows to expect messiness during the act of creation— he promptly forgets about it completely. Process becomes innate, and the phenomenon of design intuition takes over.

p.37 This view might be informed by an understanding of culture, or an intricate care and love of society.

p.55 When viewed under the guise of language, these products become the fabric of society and allow people to express themselves, to communicate with others, and tho shape their environment in unique ways.

p.57 designers must both realize and control the rhetoric of their designs.

p.72 Some have become wise to the farce, and no amount of decoration can lure these consumers into the trap. They select only handcrafted objects of beauty, and they’ve learned to judge good design and honest labor.

p.73 Consider, then, that designers can focus on supporting authentic human experiences with their work in a less forceful, controlling manner. Rather than striving to control every aspect of a time-based set of interactions, and rather tan attempting to shepherd people through a contrived set of experience gates, designers can support the authenticity that occurs naturally in life by producing incomplete or partially produced design artifacts.

p.77 A poetic interaction can generally be characterized as having or encouraging, three main elements: honesty, mindfulness, and a vivid refined attention to sensory detail.

p.83 Yet if designers focus only on the low-hanging fruit of functionalism or usability, the human experience with designed objects is destined to a level of banality.

p.88 The pursuit of a creative solution is not an easy activity, yet the difficulty —the sense of accomplishment that occurs when completing a difficult task— can be thought of as one of the main attractors to participants in the design process.

p.88 There is more to life than usability.

Monday was spent at the Dutch Game Garden doing maintenance on PLAY Pilots and brainstorming for a pitch.

Tuesday I spent the day coaching students of the HvA develop their concepts for the course City Discourse. In this course students think about how information technology and open data can enrich the urban experience.

Wednesday was the Apps for Amsterdam awards ceremony. I wrote about the proceedings leading up to that event. The event was packed with a great vibe of appreciation for developers and a celebration of open data. We should do it more often if only for that and we probably are. Bigger and better things are forthcoming.

Thursday was wholly spent making presentations for firstly a Virtueel Platform expert meeting on Cities, Games and Data and for a break-out session at the What Design Can Do conference on data driven design. Both presentations were well received and with some added polish they may see wider dissemination.

Finally Friday was closed having drinks over at our friends from Bits of Freedom celebrating their new office space.

Update: A great write-up of the City_Play_Data expert meeting was posted at The Mobile City.

This is the one not of this week, but of the one before (starting May 16th with me being sick for a day). A lot of stuff happened but most if it wasn’t directly work pertaining or publicly relatable.

Alice Taylor’s lecture at the HKU faculty in Hilversum was inspiring stuff. I don’t think many students get it, but as an entrepreneur in the same area her work resonates profoundly and she looks poised to pull it off.

Friday we had a launch meeting for Statlas at the Fluxility offices. Statlas should be in public beta by June 6th.

In Utrecht studio proceedings are supported by the Village which may quite well pour the best coffee in the Netherlands. This is how they do it:

Some findings:

The fitbit as a hardware device is very well designed. It works, it’s polite and you don’t have to do anything really. It’s quite easy to get into a habit with it. The website has some glitches and takes a whiles to fully propagate updates here and there, but I have the feeling that’s improving. Everybody I show one wants to get one.

On a negative bent: the entire premise of the devise is offensively US-centric. Everybody here in the Netherlands is somewhat peeved that it does not ‘do’ biking. This is of course understandable when a device has the cultural assumption in it that you take your car to a mall, you plod through said mall and then get back into your car. For genuine global appeal these devices need to be more adaptable still.

Finally: my fitbit was already showing some tears in the plastic and it’s far too easy to lose. I’m too wrapped up in my day to day activities to ‘take care’ of yet another device. It’s all I can do to keep my iPhone in one piece as it is. Also it being so easy to lose or break, needing to get another one at $99 is too convenient a profit strategy. I think I’ll pass.

Real estate wise it looks like our space in the Volkskrantgebouw may double and we will be able to expand our own activities and invite in friends. That will be awesome and add greatly to the dynamic of the studio. Stay tuned!

Tuesday saw the long expected completion of the Dufarge web store, a favor to our kind friends —nay! design superheroes— over at Buro Pony. Quite pleased that we managed to pull that one off in the in between hours.

Wednesday we had a Foursquare meetup here in Amsterdam with Naveen of Foursquare fame and a bunch of local enthousiasts. Lots of ideas still to do cool stuff with Foursquare but not much time.

Thursday we gave an interview about the upcoming Statlas launch due soon to be online over at our friends of the Stimuleringsfonds. After that it was an open night at many venues for Creative Amsterdam and I went on a tour d’Amsterdam with Edial and we hit: Grrr, Foam and steim among other venues.

Also some robots, just for good measure:

I have done some effort to try to raise discourse about games in such publications as Bashers, nrc.next and VN with mixed results and many frustrations.

I have a (multi-media focused) computer science degree, I develop games at Hubbub, I have played games on and off for the past 20 years, I am a self-taught designer practicing interaction design and product management and I dabble in media philosophy/theory. In short I think I may be somewhat qualified to write about the subject.

This is also what Dan says:

We need writers who are more deeply educated in the art, craft and science of games.

I also think I have something to say about the relationship between reality and games, how games should draw more from reality (not the other way around), about the potential of games to become a more potent expressive medium than anything we have ever seen before and about society’s role to welcome and channel this development correctly.

Quoting Dan again:

Goal: Advance the art and science of games. Simply looking at what exists is not enough. Instead, we leverage what exists in order to to ask what is next and create the conceptual language and tools that get us there.

Dilemmas

My biggest dilemma in pursuing writing is that my time is limited and I may want to spend most of that time making games not writing about them. There is a large class of people (writers, journalists, academics) whose work actually is just writing but most of them have no experience with the craft which Dan identifies as a weakness. Whether it is because that lack of experience or because of the lowest common denominator approach dominant in Dutch publishing, most writing on games in the Netherlands makes me cringe.

My second dilemma is that any writing for a major periodical needs to dumb the content down to a level that it kills the possibility for any meaningful discourse. Some publications welcome pieces full of expletives to appeal to a younger audience, others reduce any thought to a sound byte to cater to the shortest of attention spans.

Another dilemma is that writing properly such that I myself would like to read it and doing the necessary contextual research for a piece takes an inordinate amount of time. Time (days upon days really) I could spend developing a game that has more substance, relevance and value than a piece of writing that will be in the litter the next day.

And finally there is the dilemma what kind of medium has the largest impact, whether to write in Dutch or English, to aim for print or online or forego writing for other ways of making a point such as debates and presentations.

Way forward

I talked about this with friends in media and publishing on and off to see whether writing has benefits that make it worth the effort. Everybody agrees that writing in and of itself is definitely not worth it, but reaching a wider audience can have benefits that make it worthwhile.

I am going to keep at it because that is the responsibility of an engaged developer: making sure that any work you produce falls upon fertile soil and that your future work is appreciated not only on its merits but also on its and your contributions to the wider discourse.

Now remains the task of seeing what it is I should write about first and where it will have the largest punch. Your suggestions welcome.

1. There is no public space online. There are expectations of public space by people using online services, but each service is very strictly controlled either by a company with a bottom line or by a (semi-)government agency that is difficult to make accountable.

2. Online is permeating the offline world. The built environment is getting digital. Our behaviours are increasingly controlled by systems and structures built out of information and code.

3. Through that mechanism the values that are inherent in online services (such as corporate control, chokeable infrastructures) impose themselves upon the offline world and upon the public space that we were accustomed to.

4. Public space came about through public discourse around behaviour, expectations, rights and justice in our environments and was codified in social practice and law. A similar codification is taking place in the digital realm, but now in code which is often arbitrarily drafted and rigidly applied.

5. Discourse on this subject is ill-informed and superficial both in policy makers, the public and in whatever remains of the fourth estate. Discussions are easily hijacked to ends that serve particular interests but not any overall good.

So how do we fix this trend? How do we inform people at scale? Your ideas welcome.

Last week got off to a good start with victory dinner by team maguro. Good times were had. Plans for world domination were forged.

Wrote up the project we did for the Amsterdam UIT Bureau: Foursquare map display for Amsterdam nightlife. We are very happy to have been able to do this project and we look forward to its debut in the ticket shop.

I also published the slides for my talk at /dev/haag: Slides for ‘Fixing reality with data visualization’

And the week was closed off with @ouroffice drinks on the roof terrace. Odds are good that we may be expanding our floor surface within the building, parts of which are already spoken for, but others still open. If you have an idea or would like to join us, do get in touch.

That Friday however did not conclude the week. Saturday we had a workshop as internet experts with VOLUME architecture magazine (co-organized by our friends from VURB). They are planning to do an issue on ‘Internet of Things’ though the internet’s ramifications for architecture go much much further than that most practical layer.

Blogged about project potosi: Interactive Infographic for de Groene Amsterdammer also blogged about hermosillo: Mapping voter sentiment in the Netherlands

We did a bunch of writing among which some proposals for academic conferences where we are going to drop some knowledge & praxis.

Culiacan and Statlas are moving forward at a steady pace.

A large part of last week was spent preparing the presentation for /dev/haag ambitiously titled “Fixing Reality with Data Visualization”. The slides of which are forthcoming in long form.

This week we will be at Mediamatic’s Data Visualization Barcampt, probably presenting some new work and also at a workshop hosted by VURB and VOLUME with architects and programmers. If you see us at either, do say hi!

I spent a day working on potosi on site at de Groene Amsterdammer at their swanky new pad on the Singel which went live that very same day.

Merida went into its final sprint and is almost ready for prime time.

Also talks about studio++ began to coalesce and the real estate search is about to start in earnest as soon as I tie up the last loose ends of my own move.

Blogged one piece about the open data victory over the Dutch Railways: “Dutch Train Times are open”

Also posted my obligatory iPhone trail of the past half year:

This month the NS opened up their data via an official API. And one of the first applications is this live train map of the Netherlands which is just wonderful. It simply exposes something that we knew implicitly and displays it very fluently.

This is just one of the many open data dominoes falling this year, but a very nice one and yes it looks like victory is within our grasp.

Then did some setup work on culiacan. The rest of the week was filled with notable progress on Statlas and the rounding up and finishing of maguro.

Also inbetween all of this, I painted a room and moved house. Notifications of the new address and inaugural drinks forthcoming.

There is a vibe floating around at the office about studio++. I have had lots of ideas, visions, hopes and ambitions for the future studio, but most importantly: it should be similarly (de)central, be about twice as big and we should have a full kitchen to our disposal. Too much to ask for in Amsterdam’s slumping professional real estate market? I think not. The search starts in earnest sometime after I move house this weekend.

Finalizing maguro, doing onsite work with Kilian Valkhof on Statlas, talking with old school publishers, putting the final touches on mérida.

And in between all of this, trying to produce some original writing on the subject of games.

Also I cannot stress how instrumental the lovely guys at the Village in Utrecht are for keeping us caffeinated (and by extension sanely productive):

Lots of work this week on Statlas also a bunch for the Groene Amsterdammer. Maguro got finished with a large scale finale event which they tell me was all the rage. Also our work on acapulco got finished, pictures for which are due soon.

Visited Mobile Monday. Prepared various proposals to do work on the border between computer science and architecture.

Also our friends from the Village in Utrecht opened their coffee store. Needless to say a lot of the work we do over there is fueled by quality caffeine and we will be paying them more than regular visits. I suggest you do the same.

Friday we of course also had our regular drinks at @ouroffice. You are welcome for any of our next installations.

And as if the week was not filled enough with highlights, I also got to play my role as the Design Misanthrope:

Updated maguro and setup new branches and development environments. Finished the latest bits of acapulco.

Tuesday went to our friends at Adaptive Path to listen to a lecture by Andrew Devigal.

Spent a day working at Buro PONY. The guys who also made this very nice avatar for Monster Swell:

Wrote a post on Nicholas Carr “Carr’s self-interest” and another one on Color.

Fixed up my fixie and worked a day at the friendly people of Booreiland.

Also managed to finish Reality is Broken to start directly in Players Unleashed!

Sunday migrated hermosillo to ep.io because djangy despite having promised to run until the end of this month started flaking out already.

I so wish that the icons in the app made more sense and that the flow between states was clearer, but my wishes really don’t matter that much.

Color has flow. You can just keep doing stuff and you go fluidly from one screen to the other even though it may not be clear what every screen is for or why the various elements on the screens are where they are. You can do a lot, it all moves and feels rather magical. It’s more like a game than anything else.

Better yet, the spatial dislocation forces you not to be anal about organizing or sharing or any of the other features photo sharing apps would normally bother you with (and force you to learn). Indeed that is the promise they make: don’t find/add your friends, don’t organize your pictures, just snap away as you will and Colour will take care of all the rest.

This is smart, gutsy, well executed, it promises to Not Make Me Think and I’m almost ready to let go. Almost.

That clinging of the moribund is however just a side-effect.

Carr’s argument is wholly one of self-preservation. If you are an old media and old academia educated intellectual, you will be passed by left and right by those that are able to strike the right balance between the old and the new. Those that use Twitter and Wikipedia to their full extents while still reflecting on their relative merits, those that can process megatons of information every day while doing their best jobs and retreat from time to time still to read a book or write a piece.

In short: Carr has nothing on us and he knows it. The Shallows is a desperate attempt by the older generation to remain relevant in a new world. Ultimately futile of course, but it should still provide Mr. Carr with some temporary currency.

Update:
Or as James Bridle puts it in part one of his seven part futurist tome (better than I can, but I hope I may be excused):

I am paying attention, but I am paying attention to everything, and even if my knowledge is fragmented and hard to synthesise it is wider, and it plays in a vaster sphere, than any knowledge that has gone before. —“Stop Lying About What You Do”, James Bridle

I met an old friend from Delft to talk about aiding him in his architectural PhD doing information architecture and visualization of the concepts in his research. This looks like a great opportunity to bring into practice my thinking and engagement in the field of architecture.

Finally, I rushed over to the TMG building to give an interview for Dutch Radio 1 during WNL’s Avondspits show. I ripped and uploaded the interview (in Dutch) to Soundcloud. You can listen to it below:
WNL Avondspits – Hack de Overheid by alper

Those that know me may be surprised by my parliamentary tone (which is a discipline that comes in handy from time to time).

I also put the last touches to the article on Hack de Overheid recapping our event and its success.

Maguro is running strong during its pilot, though small inbalances forced us to do some run-time tweaks. All in a day’s work.

Wednesday, I made my way out to Ermelo to give a workshop for the journalists of the regional broadcasting corporations, the ROOS-dagen. My subject matter —data journalism and visualization— is rather edgy for this crowd which was visible in the turnout. Those few who are willing to run with it, may find though that at the local and hyperlocal levels, a little data goes a long way.

Made it back just in time to congratulate Alexander Klöpping on the book he wrote “Wikileaks: Alles wat je niet mocht weten”.

Thursday we celebrated our friends’ achievement in organizing the tenth This Happened Utrecht. Organizing ten editions of any event is a feat in and of itself, organizing ten This Happened Utrecht events to the consistent high quality standard of curation, facilitation and audience that Kars, Alexander and Ianus have, is nothing less than formidable.

Through Kars’s curation there are also a number of very nice interactive installations on display to play with on the Neude square for the Tweetakt theatre festival. I encourage you to drop by (free!) and try them out.

Worked a bit more on acapulco, some projects should receive more attention (and this one certainly will). Frideay we also received our soon to be new office mate Joris Machielse.

Statlas is running up to its first public release. Very soon now.

1. Monday saw my last official lecture at WdKA. Students will present their work next week which I’m looking forward to greatly.

2. Worked the entire week for maguro which is going into a pilot run as I am typing this.

3. Acapulco saw an initial release but needs a bit more touching up.

4. Hack de Overheid: Apps for Amsterdam edition was this Saturday. I was the host of this event we had been preparing for a long time was every bit the succes we had hoped it would be. We had lots of friends come over and useful applications were created.

I visited the Virtueel Platform book presentation and the Big Brother Awards on Wednesday. Both e-culture and privacy in the narrow sense remain difficult but relevant concepts for me.

‘PvdA — Altijd in de buurt’ (hermosillo) was put live just before the elections and was announced here and there.

I got called an ‘open data goeroe’ by the VPRO on their hackday report, which I don’t know what to think about.

The rest of the week was spent finalizing maguro functionally and Friday I briefly visited the Infographics congress which was ahem revealing in all its traditional glory. Let’s keep it at that.

I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed Cognitive Cities. It was crammed with beautifully designed views onto the city and a chance to catchup with old friends from all over Europe. The Copenhagen crew were present, Rebooters came back from withdrawal and we could congratulate Your Neighbours and Third Wave with their tremendous success in organizing such a conference.

But in the abstraction a lot of the reality was lost, I’m afraid. We are all of course striving to make our ghost boxes better but design cannot be a sterile, clean handed affair. Kars writes a fuller more balanced recounting of the conference, but my feelings are the same.

Walking around in the real cognitive city of Berlin and seeing the street kids in Neukölln and the party-goers in Berghain, I feel they are not within the myopic view of our design chique clique nor we in theirs. The street is a very messy and creative affair and it must not be disconnected from our digital cognition of it. At least not if we want to have any relevance and create real meaning for a significant number of people.

Ideas how to do this in quality and at scale are forthcoming, but like everything it should of course start with awareness.

Monday as a fixture was the third session of my course over at WdeKA concerning itself with the basics of information and visualisation design.

Statlas development kicked into gear.

The rest of the week was spent working on hermosillo and maguro. The first was launched as http://www.pvda-altijdindebuurt.nl just before the elections of yesterday as the first version of an electoral monitoring platform. A full write-up on which is forthcoming at Monster Swell.

Then with everything done it was off to Berlin with partners in crime Kars Alfrink and Alexander Zeh for a weekend of Cognitive Cities and leveling up our skills at that particular city. The conference was ace as was the weekend.

On Monday I gave week 2 of my course and then went on to fourcehub to prepare the maguro playtest. Which playtest took place on Tuesday and was totally awesome.

I sent some talking points to Dutch politics about open data. Here they are reproduced in Dutch:

- Het parlementaire informatie aanbod
De informatievoorziening van ons parlement is om te janken zo slecht. Voor een klaagzang hierover kun je terecht bij @steeph. Stemmingen, stukken etc. zijn allemaal nauwelijks op te vragen en zeker niet machine-leesbaar op te vragen (vaak allemaal suffe PDFs).

- Overheid als platform
Al genoemd. De overheid verzamelt al heel veel informatie om haar eigen taken uit te voeren. Er is geen enkele reden dat anderen dan ook moeite zouden moeten doen om diezelfde informatie te verzamelen. Het verzamelen is ook al betaald dus het vrijgeven (van bijv. de BAG of de NDW, NDOV) móet gratis zijn. Anders kunnen zoveel mensen die potentieel waarde kunnen toevoegen bij voorbaat al niet meedoen en krijg je zeker weten wat je altijd al kreeg.

- Overheid als startup
De kosten van productie zowel online als offline zijn gigantisch gedaald. Dit zorgt ervoor dat het bouwen van een boeiende dienst met wereldwijde impact bijna niks meer kost (mits met de juiste sturing). De overheid zou dezelfde drivers die de kosten omlaag brengen en de effectiviteit en flexibiliteit moeten omarmen. Er is geen enkele reden dat een simpele overheids-site tonnen moet kosten en dan alsnog kwalitatief slecht moet zijn. In Amerika zie je met de overheidswebsites en de open data portals dat ze daar al een heel eind mee zijn.

- Datawijsheid
Bij alle besluitnemers mist diepe kennis over internet, data, wat je ermee kunt bereiken en hoe je het moet doen. Geld is niet het probleem maar kennis. We kunnen niet tot den treure de vraag beantwoorden: welke data wil je dan vrijgeven, welke voordelen zijn er dan, wat is de business case? Op een gegeven moment moet de bewustwording er zijn en moeten we uit deze catch-22 komen.

On Wednesday I gave a brief presentation on open data and the value of fake APIs on the VPRO App in a Day event.

There was a tremendous amount of interest and presence of capable geo-hackers. That is a great victory for the open data movement. Also it is very interesting to see a traditional media company like the VPRO open up the production process of a show they are making. Definitely not standard issue in Hilversum.

Also I had an interesting experience with an automatic bike dispenser.

Then we went to the kickoff for the Apps for Amsterdam contest. See also this blog by Thijs. I happen to be in the jury for that contest as the official representative of Hack de Overheid.

It was a good day for three members of Hack de Overheid to be out in full swing. There’s no telling what we’ll achieve if all six of us are firing at the same time.

Thursday was spent entirely on maguro.

At the end of the week we had a meeting at the NVJ (Dutch Reporters Association) and we finalized the program for the Hack de Overheid March 12th devcamp event.

The weekend was spent doing some catchup on acapulco and starting work in earnest on hermosillo.

Gave my first lecture on data visualization at the Willem de Kooning. That was fun.

Then after I went straight to This Happened Utrecht #9.

Met with the people behind IAmsterdam and updated on Statlas with Kilian Valkhof.

Found this permalink:

Finalized the rules for maguro and codified them.

Spent a day at Buro Pony working on a very aesthetic affair.

After that it’s mostly a blur of hustling at maguro. Staying in at the studio ’till midnight day after day. Hard hours but good work and company. So no biggie.

Quoting Jack Schulze: “It’s brilliant to have these people around.”

And finally the version was finished and we went off boozing.

In the weekend it was mostly doing catchup on other projects. Did the briefing and wireframes for hermosillo. Updated the event page for March 12th’s Hack de Overheid.

Then closed off the day with an architectural dinner.

Touched up some stuff on Sunday and prepared my WdKA lecture of the following day.

Train station Maarssen is such a marginal place that the entire OV-fiets check-out/in process has been automated.

My first block was at the key locker where after holding your OV-chipcard to the RFID point below, you have to enter your OV-fiets code (which is a barcode + number on the backside) and then your PIN.

I had forgotten my PIN, so an alternative option was provided to call a number where with an automated response after entering my OV-fiets code I was read out my PIN. Having obtained the PIN, I could then get a key (video of the reverse process of returning a key to the automated locker below).

After that the next step was getting through the dual human/bicycle gate. The bike has the be placed with its wheels in the cranny.

The RFID key chain has an automatic extension cord so you can touch it to the RFID point on this terminal. This terminal doubles as a payment point for people who store their own bikes in this storage area.

Then returning a similar procedure enables you to put your key back in the locker and nicely also indicate whether the bicycle is still in good order or not after which the locker flashes red and closes.

All in all a somewhat confusing but very doable process that felt like I was participating in an Alternate Reality Game (telephone numbers, secret codes, rush etc.).

Most people using OV-fiets currently are very well intentioned, but the systems look fairly foolproof and it remains to be seen how it holds up under wider exposure.

Made a lot of progress on Statlas during the course of the week. The domain should be live this week and we should see tangible results this month.

Maguro got updated and deployed again.

Planned the ineraction and design for acapulco and briefed designer Martijn Broekman. Finally finished those wireframes in a café in Brussels and sent them in.

Made a tentative start on hermosillo.

Mony dropped by for a crash course in Django and he promptly ported his entire Layar project TUdarover.

We setup a Github organization for Hack de Overheid to get the code conversation flowing before the event and give our code a place to live after. Also got a ton of communication things done for the event on March 12th.

Teaching

I also had a meeting to draft the road map for the small minor in data visualization I will be giving at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. Also I prepared the first lesson during the weekend (lesson day: Monday).

Writing

Got my review of “Zero History” by William Gibson published on de Republiek der Letteren (the Republic of Literature). I had spent quite some time writing and polishing it and I was quite pleased with having it published.

That also went into print that same Thursday, so yeah pretty cool:

I also published my review of the iPad episode “Money & Speed” of the Tegenlicht documentary I got a preview of.

The site for the Apps for Amsterdam application contest went live. Thanks to the Waag Society for putting that online so quick. We of Hack de Overheid are going to work with them to make it one hell of an open data wave this year.

Events

I attended Mobile Monday mainly to see Ville Vesterinen present about their pervasive magic game Shadow Cities.

On Saturday I made a quick trip to Brussels to attend FOSDEM which I had never attended before. It was a fun chance to sit in the DataDevroom and watch presentations about open source data processing and graph visualizations. It was good to meet fabricator Rejon again too (who I had last said goodbye to in Damascus).
What I noticed though at FOSDEM was the nearly complete absence of web development and assorted technologies. Also that while you cannot go to a technology conference these days without being hit by  ethics and politics, that engagement was strangely absent at FOSDEM (except probably in the keynote by Eben Moglen).

I also registered for the Infographics congress on March 4th though I find the focus on print media and infographics archaic and distasteful. Let’s see if we can change that.

Hardware

Got myself an iPhone4 because the old 3G wasn’t pulling it anymore after the countless iOS upgrades it had seen.

Also got an iPad keyboard dock from the bargain bin. Thanks Maarten den Braber for picking that up for me. Seems I have turned into that Apple completionist:

In meetings

Met with the guys from Amstel Media and had a chat over at Sanoma Media. Met up with Ton Zijlstra after way too long and Henk Jan Bouwmeester.

In work

Project Statlas made solid progress on both the renderer and the interaction framework. The map is looking pretty spanking on Polymaps, but no screenshots yet.

For Maguro I modelled the entire game in the database and made a beat scheduler using celery. Using that I created a fully playable prototype.

In writing

Wrote about how the process of government contracting ICT projects could be made more transparent in Dutch: “Transparantie in ICT-aanbestedingen”

In events

We announced the next Hack de Overheid for March 12th. Then we started scouting locations and drafting the program for that event. It’s looking good!

I was at the VPRO launch of their iPad documentary and I got an advance copy to play with. Together with Iskander we coined the term Sensor Parkour: “in an ubicomp surveillance world, ‘sensor parkour’ could become a novel situationist exercise.”

Then I went to another event about the end of the publishing industry. Funnily enough most book publishers in the Netherlands have no clue about the consequences the internet is going to have for their business.

Friday we had impromptu drinks at @ouroffice along with an attempt to hack the OV-chipkaart which was a lot of fun and got a bunch of people to come out. Expect more of that and probably also a dataviz ignite somewhere in April.

I did a call on Monster Swell to collaborate more with designers at any and all levels and got some response to that. More are welcome.

For project Maguro I started prototyping the game’s data model and the message queue using Celery. Thursday I went on to make a playable barebones version of the game in django. The team was pretty psyched about that turned out.

Administration wise started the new year with a new sheet of books.

Socially, I went to the Django meetup. The Djangocon in Amsterdam is going to be awesome. Also the ISOC had their New Year’s Drink on Thursday.

Lastly on Friday I had a meeting with the city of Amsterdam and the Waag for Hack de Overheid to talk about the series of open data events this spring and an app contest for the city.

Monday I built a quick javascript mashup with the new API by NOS called ‘Ons Nieuws’ (Our News): http://monsterswell.com/projects/onsnieuws/ inspired by the trend in glanceable display websites. The write-up is here: “Glanceable news using the new NOS API”

Blogged about the catch-22 in Dutch open data: “Bloggers, transparency and our Catch-22”

Hack de Overheid is also busy bringing a whole lot of awesome to open data in 2011. Stay tuned and look over there for announcements.

Started setup for the next iteration of Dutchstats. Kicked off the technical part of Dutchstats (the renderer) with Kilian Valkhof, drafted a set of functional and non-functional requirements and setup a project repository.

Did a bunch of deployment stuff to create a rather complex django site for mérida which is a relief to get up and running.

Switched prototyping maguro from twisted to Django because that is still the technology I’m most familiar with (prototyping should not be about technology acquaintance). We had a meeting with the team and after some discussion we played a game concept that was pretty fun.

Friday we had a geek breakfast with Peter and Taco having a full English at Greenwoods. The food was good as was the conversation. We should really do this regularly.

Then I spent the rest of the day with James Burke working on the new version of the Hack de Overheid site.

In the weekend I picked up a second hand Grote Bosatlas 51e editie for a real bargain. It still is a fantastic cornucopia of maps and infographics. Leafing through it made me all nostalgic like I used to do back in school exploring far away places on the map.

Wrote a bunch of stuff that was due among which a report on the demise of TipiT.

Was busy doing planning for Dutchstats with a week0 briefing.

Also did some stuff for Hack de Overheid a new website for which should be ready soonish.

My business cards for Monster Swell have also arrived, more about those in a separate post: Information Compression on Paper

Started writing a document describing the end of life of TipiT for our investors. Nothing new there but still interesting to reflect.

Took in Dutchstats and starting planning that in earnest. Subsequently spent most of the day in Numbers. The phrase: “Project management is hard, let’s go shopping.” did come to mind…

I had been increasingly frustrated with Dutch media’s treatment of the Wikileaks affaire but also was somewhat too busy to write anything better. Inbetween business Jaap and I posted a ‘drive-by essay’ on a week old nrc.next blog post.

Wednesday was a kickoff on prototyping for Maguro which needs to leave the ephemeral stage sometime quick. That night there also was a very well curated Ignite at Mediamatic about games. Fifteen presentations is a bit on the long side, but none were really boring or bad due to the Utrecht gaming scene having come out in force.

The rest of the week was filled with more of the same and tying up loose ends for the end of the year.

Our office also said farewell to one of its members, typographic hero Gustavo:

A new addition is already eager to get started in the new year.

Some notable stuff did happen, however.

We kicked off project Maguro which is going to cause our all star team a lot of work —and a lot of fun— in the new year (see Kars’s Week 182).

Tuesday night we had the fourth UX Book Club Amsterdam discussing the book Game Design Workshop. eBuddy hosted us and it was a lot of fun both talking about game design, how it pertains to interaction design and reminiscing about old games.

Wednesday Urbanode was launched officially, my write-up: Urbanode: first steps in environmental control

Friday I met as part of a delegation by Hack de Overheid with people from the city of Amsterdam and the Waag. Lots of stuff going to happen with regards to open data and apps in Amsterdam in 2011.

I’m quite proud to have been part of the local systems integration crew of Urbanode with the steps we made on controlling environments using web technology. The movie above shows my laptop connected to a lighting panel in the Melkweg running an OLAD (Open Lighting Architecture) server talking ARTNET/DMX to talk with the panel and the urbsville NodeJS application that exposes the available lights as an interface on a webpage for the Android phone.

So the flow is as follows:

• Android phone (or other), goes to a webpage on the local network
• The webpage is served by urbsville using NodeJS which means everything is live and can be kept consistent across clients
• Any device setting is mirrored using an internal mapping by updating the DMX values of the corresponding device on the ARTNET output
• OLAD sends its current state to the lighting panel
• The lighting panel updates (merges) the values into its universe and when they are hooked up the lights change their behaviour —or colour in this case— accordingly.

So starting with colours and intensities of lights, the next step is being able to hookup arbitrary properties of any kind of device and making it all work solidly so application developers, lighting specialists and game designers can get ahold of this technology.

A lot of this is still quite abstract and the technology setup is pretty cutting edge but this is an essential building block for moving forward. Being able to control physical devices using Javascript has already been possible as has service discovery in spaces (tons of demos by Philips, Sun and the likes). Urbanode breaks out of the local application cul-de-sac and exposes everything straight to the web using the web’s most native control language: Javascript. This is a big step in totally commoditizing device control and normalizing and expanding the scale of operation.

This has been blogged about already by the Urbanode team “Prototypes for discoverable services in public space”, “Alpha Release: Urbanode” and picked up by Bruce Sterling on Wired. I would encourage you to go to github and clone the code and tell us what you think.

I saw the movie Catfish which seems to have garnered a significant amount of attention and is in many ways the *real* Facebook movie because it actually takes place on facebook and addresses real issues we have all dealt with instead of the dealings of ultra-rich privileged kids at elite-universities.

The setting is an internet relationship as we have seen described many times before and probably have experienced ourselves. Who hasn’t met up with somebody they met on the internet? The premise is given a twist because it adds in elements of a standard internet hoax.

Some thoughts about the movie.

Because it features the web and real elements from that web (instead of a fictionalized computer network as seen in many other movies), it gains a level of authenticity and also is a great example of what James Bridle coined ‘network realism’. This movie could not be made without the (social) network it portrays and a large part of the story take place on it.

Jon Taplin reported that according to Fincher & Sorkin The Social Network is a movie about class in modern day America. The class differences in that movie are relatively minute compared to those in Catfish. On the one hand there’s the young, handsome, rich, metropolitan Nev who is employed in a creative profession and who can pretty much do whatever he wants. On the other hand there’s a poor, rural family who are ill and relatively older and not very attractive.

That part of America is mostly unseen but very real. A vast rural expanse filled with the shattered dreams of the American working class (see also Bubble and this piece on food and class in America).

Another theme is how people with enough time and/or knowledge can turn around Facebook’s mechanisms to regain a feeling of privacy. Kids deactivate their profiles when they are not using the site, others falsify their names so as not to be findable and in the movie somebody constructs an elaborate false identity and backstory for herself.

Privacy is not so much the right to hold secrets about your most private things, it is much more an issue of control and being able to both control and shape the information about yourself that you disseminate. Real and false signals that we send out and the flexibility with which we navigate the waters of sociality are what makes us human, not the strictly defined checkboxes of Facebook’s arcane privacy system.

It is not Assange who has ever said he wants to make everything public, Zuckerberg however has (that would not be a good idea says Dalrymple).

Angela employs the means given to her to live the life she wants to even though it is not real. The way that it falls apart and resolves into a better mutual understanding between her and Nev is a valid outcome, but in a different world, they perhaps would not have needed to find out the truth about each other at all and that would have been an equally valid outcome.

In any case in the end I am more touched by the plight of Angela who’s life as portrayed is a harrowing ordeal of bleakness, whereas for Nev besides some juvenile embarrassment the consequences do not seem at all as serious and maybe even net positive.

Whether the movie is a real documentary or parts of it are fictionalized or whether the whole movie itself is an elaborate hoax (though then exceptionally well meta-written and acted) in the end does not really matter to me. I would like to believe that the events transpiring in the movie and what they say about us and about facebook are true —at least to some extent.

One big ticket was finishing and launching the Bandjesland addition to PLAY Pilots.

Hung this poster on the studio:

Unfortunately lost the other half on the subway (don’t ask…).

Some more nice additions to the office:

I got an iPad thanks to Peerz a new professional rating and recommendation startup.

Had a bunch of meetings with people: Utrechts UIT Bureau, Vrij Nederland and de Groene Amsterdammer.

Friday Bandjesland was launched and I worked a bit on the new Hack de Overheid site and went into a wonderful work-free weekend.

Monday

Work on PLAY Pilots and preparations for Urbanode (actually all week long). Some development on aguascalientes.

Tuesday

Meeting with Amsterdams UITbureau. They are doing some very cool things to promote the city.

Got the business card comps by Bureau Pony which are going to be utterly smashing.

Did a big Urbanode test with James and Peter. Got everything back up and running and talking with each other. Also got the mobile version to work with something of a workaround.

Then worked deep into the night for a release of querétaro.

Wednesday

Did a demo of Urbanode for Kennisland at Melkweg with everything working at base level. An incredible refutation of Murhpy’s Law.

Then went out to a strategic dinner with Hubbub after congratulating Sjoerd Wennekes with his MBA (!).

I could use some interns for Monster Swell. There’s more than enough work to be done in programming, cartography, journalism, writing, design and assorted. If you think you qualify for an internship send me a sample of your solid work and have your people contact my people.

Thursday

Coffee with Johnny Wonder. A bunch more work on PLAY Pilots: Bandjesland and preparations for presenting at Open Innovation Festival.

Friday

Gave my presentation for Open Innovation Festival at the plenary meeting room in City Hall. That was fun.

Had lunch with front-end superstar Kilian Valkhof with some more than decent coffee.

End of the afternoon I gave a brown bag presentation at Adaptive Path Amsterdam. It was a more informal and updated version of my Civic Duty in a Hyper-Connected World.

Saturday

Saturday we had Open Data Day at @ouroffice. Turnout was not that large due to a snow storm and Sinterklaas, but we did an in-depth analysis of a soon to be opened dataset.

The rest of the weekend I played around with installing OpenCV but could not manage to get the python bindings to install on my OS X so I gave up on that, the Java Processing library also flaked out.

“Secrets,” said the Bigend beside her, “are the very root of cool.”

Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.”

“Angelina says he’s utterly amoral in the service of his own curiosity.”

Open Bookmarks is a good idea. And off into atemporal London I go.

Ianus

Then we will have those infamous drinks sponsored by Microsoft.

Helma

Five minutes later she forgot that it all happened and she was all nice to me.

Something that really makes these people happy is cake, because they think it’s somebody’s birthday or there’s a party.

Everybody is in a different timezone and they have difficulty connecting to each other.

They had the need but they couldn’t really interact with each other.

They should be able to show off to others what they can do.

There were people falling asleep and during our user test only one person fell asleep.

What you can provide is some fun during the day, that they’re not just sitting there and staring.

Even when the phone is ringing the caregiver has to direct them what to do.

The caretakers really like to have more control.

Rainer

The term generative has been used too broad lately.

Usually when you talk about generative methods, they result in visual complexity.

I could talk about my interest in noise for hours.

I always use random parameters and noise functions that transform my images.

After we got commissioned we found out that the opening of the room was in two weeks.

This emerged from the idea that we wanted to work with the architecture in the room.

At first sight it’s not clear what’s projected and what’s fixed.

Somehow it always resulted in noisy visuals.

I started to bring back the analog aesthetic.

Lotte

I was working in New York and I was mildly bored.

It wasn’t very attractive.

Let’s ask her to make a WordPress skin.

We just had all this content on the site and we needed a place to put it.

Aren’t there periods? They said: yeah there are periods.

Minor details but really part of the process of figuring out where you’re going.

I did all this in Illustrator because I didn’t know there were other tools to do this.

Wanted to find a visual way of dragging people in.

We want to provide an alternative to the really expensive art history books.

If you send out a survey you never get good answers.

We’re just five art historians and an information architect.

I know it gets more audience than the Boijmans website. And it gets less than MoMA.

Adriaan

It’s also my first keynote so I went a bit overboard with the transitions.

They really try to make the most of exposing themselves.

We decided to visit the location. This was very good.

Once you’re standing there and you see the area, you really see the potential of the area.

It would be really absurd.

There were all these connotations of playfulness from your childhood.

We modeled it using lego. It has nice affordances.

Here’s a man staring at something he built with his own hands.

It’s as if his face is about to break from smiling so hard.

We didn’t imagine that two people wanted to sit on the thing at the same time. Which was quite erotic actually.

Two girls one chick.

There were definitely people coming back for more.

On Twitter I was reading: I think I broke my arm. It’s quite a strenuous exercise.

Last week was a busy one (are there any other?). A bunch of PLAY Pilots integration work getting ready for the release of Bandjesland and some work getting back up to speed with Urbanode.

Monday marked work for PLAY Pilots and Urbanode and finished with another This Happened Utrecht. The fourcelabs guys really swung it out of the park with their presentation on Wip ‘n’ Kip. I also wrote up some soundbytes for This Happened.

Tuesday I went to Hilversum to meet with the friendly people from the VPRO in their awesome headquarters. That night there was the opening of the installations of Mediamatic’s Sensorfest (sort of the Dutch version of ITP) and I did a bunch of data journalism work on project querétaro.

Wednesday I worked all day in Rotterdam at Buro Pony’s offices on mérida and finished the first version deliverable for querétaro. Also announced the third edition of the Dutch Data Drinks.

Thursday I got interviewed by Reimer Meulenbeek for Johnny Wonder about serious gaming (which is getting very serious indeed). We had a strategy meeting with the journalism track of Hack de Overheid and finished the day with a great dinner with professional friends.

Friday I met at the Amsterdam department of Economic Affairs to talk about interfacing with the city and about our presentation for the Open Innovation Festival this week (Friday morning at 11.00 in City Hall). There was a bunch more roundup integration for Bandjesland before heading to Utrecht to go to the opening in Tivoli at Le Guess Who?

It is hard to describe just how much the Bandjesland experience rocked if you weren’t there, but we are going to do our best by at least putting the full tracks and all the recorded samples on PLAY Pilots. Stay tuned for that, it is bound to be hilarious.

Friday also the outcome of the press innovation subsidies were announced and a project we submitted made the cut and we got featured on a large Dutch blog. I am still to formally plan the project and write-up our plans and aims what to do with the money, but rest assured that we will be open, we will deliver quality and that we will take things to a higher level.

Sunday played around with cablegate.wikileaks.org till deep into the night as anybody with an interest in data and journalism is wont to do.

Worked on the integration of Bandjesland for PLAY Pilots.

Gave a presentation Wednesday at Social Media Club 030 which was pretty well received giving an overview of the Location Based Services landscape both in breadth and in history with some hints towards the future. I think this screenshot of Plazes from early 2006 was pretty telling.

Got the idea for project toluca and did some initial research and work on that. More of a self-itch relevance thing, but should cause a bunch of attention when it launches.

Mobile Monday Amsterdam posted the video of my presentation at their event. Thanks for that.

I also did a planning session on culiacán at Booreiland, research can start though production should be more of a 2011 thing.

Project querétaro is a hugely relevant data-journalism thing which got the in-depth brief and coding kick-off.

Friday the expedition to the VVOJ congres in Ghent started where with a group of people from Hack de Overheid we held a data ‘genius bar’ where journalists could ask their questions and Saturday we did our best to assess and resolve their issues. Interest at our desk was large (and only partially because they thought we were real hackers) and we managed to resolve pretty much all of the issues to some degree.

Also it’s not on the site yet —it is on the new one—, but I joined Hack de Overheid due to synergies we couldn’t ignore any longer.

Also Saturday in two weeks we will have the Open Data Day and Dutch Data Drinks #3.

Monday I presented an introduction on data for Mobile Monday, roundup post here: “The Rising Tide of Data on Mobile Monday”

Tuesday we picked up development of PLAY Pilots for the next live game: Bandjesland. And that night an open data proposal we helped author was adopted by Amsterdam, write-up: “Open Data in Amsterdam Center Adopted”

Wednesday and Thursday were spent doing roundup on data related issues (lots of stuff brewing) and further work on PLAY Pilots.

Friday I did a bit of consultancy for a next generation dating startup being spearheaded by three very nice friends.

And part of the weekend was spent preparing the presentation for Social Media Club Utrecht.

The only way to be a Post Digital business is to be a thoroughly, deeply, massively digital one. To be digital in culture not just in capabilities. To know how to iterate in public, to do experiments not research, to recognise that it’s quicker and better to code something than it is to describe it in meetings. You need to be part of the wider digital culture, to have good sharing habits, to give credit where it’s due, and at the very least to know how to do ellipses in Processing. (post digital – an apology)

All Dutch agencies who think they qualify kindly to leave a comment below.

Great design does not come from a great designer or a great department. It comes from a culture.

Mos people who talk about the importance of design do not know who makes the design decisions. Most people who are making design decisions do not know they are doing so, or have the competence to do so.

If you cannot toss your ideas out, you will go nowhere.

Agility of mind and humor to come to great solutions. Play is fundamental to creative thinking and design.

To go from invention to maturity (billion dollar industry) takes 20 years on average. You don’t have to predict the future, you just need to know the last ten years.

The ideas are lying right in front of us. They are waiting to be picked up by people who see them. We need people who serve as a Geiger counter.

Think of a musician, cinematographer, artist who does not know the history of their discipline. Now find a designer.

The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to live in it yesterday.

Smart home already exists in cars. People don’t think about this as architecture.

They see the world through different eyes and in different ways. Because they are trained to do so and they try really hard at it.

If you do not have the broadest base of experience to bing to the question, why do you expect to be better than the competition?

The Renaissance man is dead long live the Renaissance organization.

Competent designers have theory and technique not only vision. You don’t need inspiration. This is not art, this is business. Creativity can be learned and improved upon. You need to practice.