Where London’s Boris Bikes provide a digital readout of station occupancy in Copenhagen you need to walk around and see which (if any) station still has a bike in it. Late afternoon this turns up empty most of the time because it seems many tourists get one and then camp on their bike for the rest of the day or their stay.

As in any bicycle heavy city, spots for parking your bike are always scarce and underused bike share parking will be quickly appropriated.

After seven or eight empty stations (which when empty are rather hard to spot too) I finally found a somewhat functioning bike to take a tour of the city with. The map affixed to the bike shows the region with bikes and where you can take them (within the lakes and Christianshavn roughly). The bike itself is rather nice and can be made to perform adequately.

Some people also lock the bikes either short term or long term similarly to what happened to the Dutch attempt at White Bicycles for everybody to use pioneered by the Provos. Without accountability enforced by security measures it turns out any such material sharing system quickly falls prey to the tragedy of the commons. I am right now reading Bruce Schneier’s “Liars and Outliers” which treats exactly these kind of dilemma’s between individual benefit and social benefit and how to create systems which create globally optimal outcomes to support our complex societies.

I spent the entire day working on saba and then rushed over to the A.Maze Indie Meetup. It’s always good to see the usual suspects and the games they’ve been working on.

On Tuesday we kicked off the implementation stage for the Playing with Pigs project. In the evening I dropped by at the Upfront UG in the same building as where I work.

On Wednesday I started adding sound to saba. It is amazing how transformative an addition sound effects are to a game. That night at the Maker’s Loft we saw the Netherlands losing from Germany, which was made a little less painful by doing it in the company of a lot of Berlin friends.

On Thursday I took the train to Amsterdam and ran into Wilg and Timan who demoed me the custom heigth maps they are doing for Snowciety. If you’re into winter sports, you should definitely check out their app which looks excellent.

Friday I spent at our Hack de Overheid offices at the Open Coop where I spent the day preparing my lesson in programming for beginners I would give at our hackathon.

That hackathon was the main reason I came back to the Netherlands. We did the annual spring hackathon we do with Hack de Overheid to promote open data, civic applications and be a place where people can go to connect over these causes. The event was a resounding success thanks to the help we got in organizing it and all the people who showed up. The great Michelle Thorn gave a great keynote where she made some good analogous to help structure the activistic work we are doing. A great help to all of us to see the bigger picture and keep firmly in mind the goals we are aiming for.

So much data was opened up again and so many ideas to improve the Netherlands were shared and built upon. The institutions giving away their data is such a stark difference from the attitude I have witnessed in Germany these past months. It is as though both countries are in different world: one in the modern, sharing world where developer mindshare and providing excellent services to your citizens is foremost, and the other in a traditional authoritarian nightmare where permission needs to be asked for everything and is rarely granted by the autocrats. It is probably clear which is which. More information about the hackathon and its follow-ups will be on our blog soon.

My workshop on learning to program was received well, even with the ridiculously short 45 minutes we had to explain algorithmic thinking and rudimentary programming. It can be done. With a bit more time, we could have had everybody do something for themselves too to hammer home the concepts. I will be posting the slides soon and organizing follow-up events in Berlin and Amsterdam to get more people programming. If you are interested, let me know here or on twitter.

Finally we saw the opening of the swinging garden in front of our office, which when the sun is out has turned into a right little piece of heaven. Amsterdam North is seeing a positive development with a speed that I could not have imagined a couple of years ago. It’s affordable, spacious and friendly, totally the opposite to what is normal in city across the water.

Preparations for our Hack de Overheid hackathon are entering their last weeks and things are speeding up. If you want a nice day of civic hacking with friendly people and good food and drinks, I’ll say head on over to our signup page.

Getting some work done and then it was off to Copenhagen with the Tuesday night train. Travelling that way with your own bedroom, going to sleep in one city and waking up in another is by far the most relaxing way to go (except when the train has a two hour delay before your 00:32 departure).

I visited Copenhagen for the European Data Forum to see what the data driven discussions were about on the European level. We got informed about a lot of European programs, a lot of talk about Linked Data and not very much pertaining to the stuff we do from day to day. Some friends from the open data movement were present and the event was quite informative all in all.

The focus on Linked Data in many of the participants is heartening and understandable but ultimately it is a doomed approach. I got into an argument about this during lunch with some developers. There are problems on two levels. On the low level, Linked Data does not solve any actual problems for developers but it does cause many for them because of lack of tooling, learning curves, interoperability costs etc. This is both a problem in proposition and marketing but it is not seen as such by the Linked Data community. Until that is recognized, adoption of Linked Data technologies will remain as dismal as it is right now.

On the higher level, the fact that there is so little interoperation and so much problems standardizing and getting things to work together may be symptoms of the fact that the models of the world being aimed for are too complicated. Engineers will always mistake the map for the territory, but it is curious that they would be able to sell that many other people on it. The engineers’ answer to the fact that things do not work yet is of course: that they need more time/money/resources thrown at the problem. The fact that the cost/benefit ratios have gone completely skewed is not being noticed because it is in no one’s best interest to do so.

Fortunately people on the ground doing real work in open data, such as us and the Open Knowledge Foundation, are encountering these problems and fixing them because in the real world we have no other choice. Rufus Pollock presented about the folly of perfect models and APIs and he’s right on both counts (I presented about this myself before).

Government agencies that can’t release their data on a website properly, are probably not ever going to have APIs that are usable or stable enough for anybody to build something serious on. They would better dump the data and have the developers with a vested interest build their own APIs or whatever they need. Similarly Rufus argued against overmodeling againts a room of European funded academics. I’m not very hopeful but some of it may have changed some hearts and minds.

The same day Berlin celebrated its own open data day, which I unfortunately had to miss. I hear that a lot of people showed up which is good because a lot of work is still to be done in that field. A list has been started to discuss open data in public transit, which should be a high priority. After having gone around Copenhagen for a couple of days with its Google Transit support, not having such a transit facility in a city is such an annoyance and cause of opportunity cost that it should be counted as a criminal offense on part of the transit operators.

After two days of talking about data I also visited the Metropolis Lab at the Overgaden art institute where they were having talks about developing the creative city. It was a nice and cozy event, pretty much the complete opposite of the previous one I had visited where artists, architects and festival curators were discussing their work. Given the description of the event I had expected a bit more about games and other procedural media/systems.

I did see Tor Lindstrand present about architecture and I must say that was an awesome experience.

The rest of the time in Copenhagen I spent eating and drinking quality things. Coming back to Berlin that was one of the most important differences I noticed, the fact that food and drinks in Copenhagen were about three times as expensive but also at least twice as good than I had in Berlin.

The other is that the opulence and organization of a Nordic capital is a stark difference to what we are used to in Berlin. It is nice being in a city that is not destitute for a while though Copenhagen may be too polished to live in for any amount of time.

I also browsed the Avignon festival website which I will be visiting in July and came across this item on the programme by Sévérine Chavrier who is staging a play “Plage ultime” inspired by the works of J.G. Ballard. I will be arriving just too late to see that, but I do wish that more theater makers would take note. My current experience indicates that France is doing well in theater innovation (Gisèle Vienne is another name to watch out for) and Kornél Mundruczó is also showing a work “Disgrace” at Avignon (who I saw before in Rotterdam).

And then it was back to Berlin on Friday night.

End of the week we also got surprised by the all new Foursquare, with a major update to both the mobile client and the website.

I have to say that I absolutely love the new engagement that this view allows. The main timeline that you now see, though noisy can stand up to the best that either Facebook or Path or Instagram have to offer and that showdown is clearly the direction that Foursquare is headed. Engagement around pictures, likes and comments is high and this update may very well increase that.

I have been a bit annoyed by some changes, but then again I may very well be too much of a power user while they are going for a mass market appeal. For most users what they have changed is an improvement.

For some others like myself and Tantek Çelik, the lack of a local friends view is a bit of an annoyance, especially if —like me— most of your friends live somewhere else. I quite like knowing what everybody in Amsterdam has been up to, but it does not have to be front and center to my experience because I can’t act on it (except in virtual ways).

For most users this is unlikely to be an issue because all of their friends will be in the same city anyway. Because I thought complaining is only going to fix that much, I made a single serving view of foursquare with only the people within a 50k radius: Old Fashioned Checkins.

This was very easy to do because of Foursquare’s excellent developer APIs and support. Another feature missing from the mobile client right now is being able to explore for venues that you have not visited yet. If I look around my house now, I almost only get to see places that I have already been to. Not much serendipity in that. These are undoubtedly things that are going to be improved upon on future updates, but this has been one of the first changes in foursquare that has been so jarring.

Then the rest of the week work to finish saba has continued apace as well.

I’ve been working on a personal transit app that has a different take on things than most apps. That has taken quite some time and attention but it is progressing rapidly. The state of open transit data around the world, however, is still disappointing.

I finished the Prince of Networks and published my notes here as wel as excerpts from an interview with Harman.

On the other hand I am also putting the final touches on the game we’re making for saba. That is coming along rapidly and we should be able to submit that to the App Store in the near future. It looks like I’m becoming something of an iOS programmer.

On Wednesday I visited the encampment near my office protesting the liberalization of rents and wrote some thoughts about that. Similar protests are going on where I live.

I also have gotten quite busy arranging stuff for our upcoming Hack de Overheid in Amsterdam on June 16th. I will be holding a workshop demystifying programming for people who don’t know how to program yet. You are very welcome to join us if also want to get your feet wet with code, data journalism or open data.

I also briefly wrote up the launch of Politwoops in the USA with help from our friends from Sunlight.

My bicycle got a second brake which is a requirement in the highly responsible Germany. Talking about bicycles, I started a Tumblr to document the miserably state of cycle paths in Berlin.

Then it was also off to the Campus Party Housewarming Party and the day after the mediaboard of the region organized a Gamersnet summer meeting in a videogame arcade lounge. The Berlin gaming scene is still rather nascent but there may be some potential here. The city is still too artist heavy and engineer thin which will need to change for more stuff to be built.

On Friday everything continued apace with a special anniversary visit to the local Cafe CK who are providing us with the only drinkable coffee within a literal mile.

The coming week it’s off to Copenhagen for a brief visit to the European Data Forum (open data) and to the Metropolis Laboratory (urban games).

Visited Booreiland on Tuesday to discuss collaboration on project culiacán.

Did some stuff on Urbanode and got my shots for my trip to Damascus.

Tuesday night the monthly ARCAM lecture was given by Jurriaan van Stigt, write up: Jurriaan van Stigt ARCAM lecture — “Solving these things in a simple and right way is fun. It is our work.”

Wednesday and most of the rest of the week were spent drafting my presentation for the Club of Amsterdam.

Met up with Tim de Gier of Vrij Nederland on Thursday. Good to hear inside opinions on Dutch media and art. Sparked two blog posts on my part which had been due for a while: Ontwerp en complexiteit als journalistieke kansen, How I Twitter.

Sunday Bits of Freedom organized a salon with Eben Moglen, writeup: Eben Moglen — “Will the net empower the center or the ends?”

Last week was a short one due to a multitude of other engagements and a weekend trip to Malmö-Lund-Copenhagen from which I returned yesterday.

Project mérida which concerns a collaboration with Buro Pony took up some time and we had a meeting on that on Wednesday.

A bunch of updates on PLAY Pilots were also on the roster and my first (and quite succesful) play at the Stereoscoop during the Film Festival.

An opinion piece I’ve been writing for a national daily has been accepted, but the urgency of the topic has been pushed aside a bit by current political developments in the Netherlands. Here’s hoping it gets published sometime soon.

Wednesday was also the office warming for Lev Kaupas new haunts which was a very lively and entertaining event.

• London, and again in September for dConstruct, crashing at Cristiano and Melinda’s place
• Austin, first visit to SxSWi, definitely not the last
• Copenhagen, yearly Reboot, this time crashing at Mark’s awesome place
• Amsterdam, moving house over from Delft finally!
• Casablanca, flying in and out with Air Arabia on this Morrocan holiday
• Rabat
• Marrakech
• Agadir
• Essaouira

I hope to travel more in this coming year. Austin, Copenhagen and Brighton are definitely in again. A new visit to the Middle East is in order and a big trip.

After your fourth time attending such a great and small conference as Reboot, it becomes familiar like a reunion. This year’s action theme meaned the two days were completely packed. There was so much to do and so much going on that the first day was over already before you knew it.

The one thing that struck me as being odd was the fact that many speakers on the large stage weren’t asked any questions (I had one or two for Richard Falkvinge). If anything, Reboot does not strike me as an event where one person can rain down the gospel unquestioned. So for a next time more interactive maybe even adversarial formats may be nice.

It was a great event and a lot of fun cruising around like a local on the Yahoo! bike and crashing at Mark’s place with Anne (his writeup). The opening talk by Matt was great (as always) and the Bruce Sterling’s closing talk was also fantastic ¹. Ton has a great writeup.

But yes it was very awesome. I don’t know many tech conferences that can pull off a street party like this one: Update: And the talk by Bruce Sterling ² just got posted:

• Berlin*
• Amsterdam*
• London
• Copenhagen
• Nantes
• Meppel
• San Francisco*
• Oakland

It could be debated whether Meppel is a city or not, but I’ll let it.

The second day started off with a talk about Free by Jerry Michalski which reminded me a lot of the topics that I had covered the previous day in my talk. Jerry’s talk being in the main hall made this turn out a lot differently than my talk.

David Recordon followed with a talk about the open web and reminded us that not that much has changed in the last six months since I saw him on the same topic in Berlin. The big social conglomerates that have each other in a chokehold make for glacial progress.

I dropped in on the Arduino workshop which was a very nice introduction into building electronic stuff. Because I was already somewhat familiar and I wanted the freedom to bounce around the conference, I hadn’t registered but I did get some questions in to further my own ideas.

Joshua’s talk proved to be one of the best of the conference —with this great quote— marred slightly by the fact that his partner could not make it for a more complete stage presence. His work and vision how technology works towards freedom is very relevant and interesting though we usually stare ourselves blind at Silicon Valley and the likes.

After the conference we made a yearly chaotic meetup somewhere in the city trying to get something to eat more or less succesfully after which we made our way to Vega. The party in the bar was quickly replaced with a party outside with tipping beers and music where everybody had a great time. Even the arrival of police could not really stop our party.

The next day I was going to get some coffee at Kafeplantagen when I remembered that some people were having a post-Reboot brunch at Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus ¹. I was a bit hesitant to join after having already spent two days with these people but I’m glad I went inside. I got to catch up with Chris Messina, Brynn Evans and Janetti Chon and talk about the differences between the USA and Europe.

I’d signed up for a session and got slotted on Thursday morning so I spent a good part of Wednesday preparing and running through the story. Of course after having gotten over my early flight and having eaten something at the Laundromat.

My session on Free Economics was filled over capacity while it was meant to be a cosy conversational session. Fortunately that also meant more than enough people willing to participate and add information, so I think it went well and it proved a good starting point for the rest of the conference. My stress relieved could follow the rest of the sessions.

There were a number of other Dutch presenters most notably: Kars, Ton, Ianus and Iskander. Unfortunately I didn’t see any of them present, but I’ll catch up on that when the video’s are posted. Being programmed against Andy Budd meant that I missed his presentation as well, but maybe I wouldn’t have fitted in the completely full small room anyway.

It was a joy to hear music in the presentation on Tradition by Jeremy Keith. More music is usually a good idea as we would also see in the final party.

On Reboot I never can keep up going to sessions and usually it’s better not to. The interactions in the hallways and the lobby especially during the lull when there are sessions going on are more interesting on a personal level than anything else.

The first day’s talk got concluded by a fun treatment of information by David Weinberger. During dinner it was also very interesting to get a preview of his session from Siert Wijnia about his Fablab and what the commoditization of the production process will do to product design and manufacturing.

Copenhagen has become familiar territory and I’ll be there for only four days. Acclimatizing on Wednesday which kicks off with a boat trip. Thursday and Friday will be conference days during which I hope to see a lot of people and I have been alotted a small session where we’ll talk about Free Economies.

Saturday will be spent recovering, maybe a run along the lakes or a decent brunch or burger and Saturday evening my train will depart for the Netherlands. The train journey back I’m looking forward to a lot more than the plane ride in.

Lomborg is bekend van de controverse die hij ontketende met zijn boek The Skeptical Environmentalist ¹. In dat boek gebruikte hij statistische analyse om vrijwel alle standpunten die door de milieubeweging worden aangedragen onderuit te halen. En toen werden zijn analyses weer onderuit gehaald, maar dat is weer een ander verhaal.

Op TED praat hij daar expres niet over. Hij heeft het over een ander project van hem: the Copenhagen Consensus. Dit is een initiatief om de problemen van de wereld en hun mogelijke oplossingen op een rijtje te zetten en de kosten/baten van de scenario’s af te gaan.

Hij en vele economen en andere mensen die hebben meegeholpen om de consensus vast te stellen komen erop uit dat de klimaatcrisis één van de problemen is die het minste waard is om aan te pakken. Dit omdat de kosten gigantisch zijn en de baten erg ver in de toekomst liggen en erg klein zijn. Zie de presentatie voor overtuigende argumenten. Hij zegt niet dat het geen probleem is. Hij zegt ook niet dat het een onbelangrijk probleem is. Hij zegt alleen maar dat gegeven een beperkte hoeveelheid geld, we meer kwaliteit van leven kunnen verbeteren door ons op andere problemen te richten.

De problemen die we wel zouden moeten aanpakken zijn ²:

4. Malaria 3. Handelsbarrières wegnemen 2. Ondervoeding (gebrek aan sporelementen) 1. AIDS

Deze problemen hebben dramatische effecten op dit moment in de 3e wereld en zijn niet zo moeilijk of duur om te verhelpen (in ieder geval niet zo duur of moeilijk als de andere problemen op de lijst).

AIDS is het grootste probleem op dit moment en het is redelijk makkelijk te voorkomen. Als je dat aanneemt is de paus dus de slechtste mens op aarde, omdat hij nalaat met twee simpele woorden ³ de verspreiding van AIDS te stoppen.

Hier een paar foto’s van Reboot. We zitten nu in de laatste presentatie naar Matt Webb te kijken die zoals altijd fantastisch is.

En, oh ja. Ik heb net een gesprekssessie gehost!

Verder een aardige chaos op het vliegveld van Kopenhagen. Denen kunnen veel dingen goed regelen, maar een vliegveld is daar niet één van.

Kwam een uur geleden thuis en heb een lasagna op van de fijne mensen van Rice & Pasta.

Copenhagen is supertof, maar thuis is toch ook weer fijn. Genoeg ideeën om te verwerken, en genoeg dingen om te doen.

Online zijn, even je mail ophalen en chatten met vrienden is toch wel heel heel fijn. Het zou alleen nog iets fijner zijn als het geen geld hoefde te kosten. Ik betaal toch al?

Wat wel ontzettend aangenaam is, is zitten in de stilte lounge. Mark had er al een foto van. Ik begrijp nu waar hij het over heeft.

Het weer is heerlijk, de mensen zijn er ontzettend vriendelijk en er is heel veel te zien en doen.

Ik za zodirect loungen op een boot met de andere Reboot gasten op de preboot event.

Bloggen en bericht zal afhangen van de WiFi-dekking aldaar.

Deens Ik had hem nog nodig voor mijn reis naar Reboot8 en nu ik er toch was, heb ik maar meteen de Rough Guide Kopenhagen gekocht. De inhoud ziet er goed en handig uit. Ik heb een paar zinnen gelezen over het openbaar vervoer in Denemarken en ik ben er nu al van onder de indruk.

Portugees Mijn zwakke Portugees begon me ondertussen op capoeira een beetje te irriteren. In Donner heb ik voor twee tientjes het boek Colloquial Portuguese op de kop getikt. Een beetje gedateerd maar alle grammatica staat er in en het tempo is goed te noemen.

Ik ben nu bij bladzijde 70 en het meeste komt vrij makkelijk weer terug. Het is fijn om een keer alle werkwoordsvormen op een rijtje te hebben. Lastig wordt wel de termen die in het Spaans heel erg op dingen in het Portugees uit elkaar te houden.

Russisch Ik had vorige week ook van Robbert Jan (gefeliciteerd met zijn bul!) zijn boek Het nieuwe Russisch zonder moeite geleend met het idee om een beetje Russisch te leren. Ik heb nu een beetje door hoe het alfabet werkt en hoe de taal in elkaar zit en ik moet zeggen het valt me alleszins mee. Het is een beetje een rare mengvorm van Grieks, Latijn en Frans, maar moeilijk… nee.

Ik ben alleen wel bang dat Russisch even achter Portugees geschoven gaat worden.

XTECH looks great this year. I think the topics are more interesting than last year and the list of speakers they have lined up is simply incredible. My list of heroes who I am looking forward to see:

• David Baron

• Tom Coates

• Miguel de Icaza

• Paul Graham

• Ryan King

• Håkon Lie

• Simon Willison

• Brendan Eich

• Alex Russell

And after XTECH Barcamp Amsterdam II starts off.

And I heard so much good stuff about Reboot last year and read some blogs of people who are going again this year. It looks fun and I could use a weekend off in beautiful Copenhagen.

You coming?