Both analyses signal the dominance of corporate actors in a big data world and both suggest new methods of taxation as a potential solution to the problem. An article over at Forbes explains the commission’s proposal by Nicolas Colin and makes a lot of sense.

The French report has been received with predictable knee-jerk responses across the tech world. It is true that governments have not been very good at regulating the internet. But not regulating the internet is not a solution. We could hope for representation that is competent when it comes to the digital world.

The companies that create the internet should not cry foul. They have a track record of evading taxes more than contributing their fair share back to society.

I’ll tackle Lanier’s position in another post. I just watched the conversation he had with James Bridle in Conway Hall and noticed some errors in Lanier’s ideas: they require a fully functional semantic web, they seem overly informed by private copyright practice and complementarily they take a weak government for granted ¹.

How you would enforce such a law is another question entirely, but it cannot go further off the mark than how large companies manage to evade taxes right now. It may in fact be a lot fairer to tax data at the point of collection/use.

If you don’t bother to read the article above, I can sum it up in two key points below:

Data is hazardous waste material and as such its production and storage should be discouraged (the CO2 tax was given as an example in the Forbes article). Cory Doctorow compared personal data breaches to nuclear disasters, because the fallout is so tremendously hard to contain and control. Whoever collects large amounts of personal data treats the privacy damage caused by breaches as an externality. As such the storage of such data should be discouraged with a tax.

Data is capital and should be taxed as all capital is. Storage, mining and arbitrage using data can generate revenue for sophisticated market actors (those that Lanier terms as those with ‘the biggest computer on the network’). Data is a value adding asset that generates wealth and more data for those who already have it. If we don’t want a situation where a small group of people get richer at the expense of everybody else, we should tax it.

So data is both capital and hazardous. We tax many things with either of those properties so we should definitely tax something that has both.

The week was off to a smashing smart with the irregular Iron Blogger Berlin drinks. For some people it is an expensive drinking club, for me with my iron blogging resolve it is more an expensed drinking club.

Berlin weather has been crazy last week. Also again we did tons of stuff for Hubbub, see it over there on Week 183.

Over at Open State we are still recruiting a managing director to take over operations and lead us up onto the next level of open government and civic innovation. If you are reading this and you are inclined towards getting things done and civic responsibility, do get in touch with us: http://twitter.com/alper/status/304548937942069248

I was preparing to write a book about the way we’ve come to work for a while now, but as most books go this was not really happening. So I decided to convert it to a format that is easier to get started on and write it as a series of blog posts right here.

At the end of the week we threw together an impromptu Friday’s at Seven here in the neighborhood to end the week and tap into the scenius that is coalescing. We’ll definitely do that again and try out various other event formats to see which is the most fun in the long run.

And Saturday I finally finished Infinite Jest after having received the hardcopy version of it over four years ago. I was quite happy with that if only because I now have time again to read other things (just started the Quantum Thief).

Anyway, I tried to dial into a conference call while there was a massive demonstration happening over at Wienerstraße #Lausitzer8. Having the riot police and the anarchists play tag below your window creates something of a racket: [flickr video=8472216913 secret=0f08479af8 w=400 h=225]

This corner of Kreuzberg is becoming more and more interesting and I’m running into people randomly in various lunch places. Last week I had the pleasure to meet both Chris Eidhof (who we should see more of in this part of town) and Jannis Leidel.

Niels posted the second Recess! which was as awesome as I’d expected it to be.

On Thursday I went to the TPB AFK screening in c-base which was organized by Michelle Thorne after a conversation in a cafe here. I look forward to meeting lots more interesting people around the area and conspiring to do awesome things with them.

I wrote up the watersnake app I wrote over here. Expect to see us meddle more into these kind of systems from a game design point of view.

And on the weekend I played two new board games (Cosmic Encounter and King of Tokyo) and had dinner with Tim de Gier and the Dekker brothers.

Tuesday I went to the Netzpolitische Abend here in c-base where Janneke Slöetjes of Bits of Freedom was one of the speakers. It was great fun catching up with what they’ve been busy with and the activist’s life.

And on Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I organized the first Swhack Berlin, a commemorative hackathon to do the things that we would normally only talk about. A round-up of the things we did is still forthcoming, but everybody is super-busy of course. It was a lot of fun and I was pleasantly surprised even by the 10+ people who showed up and got busy. We’ll do another one sometime in the near future.

TORREON is more or less finished with the client accepting the work into their own repository now.

Tuesday we had an board meeting with Open State. I added my thoughts to Emma Mulqueeny’s post about social entrepreneurship and the long game. We are struggling with the same issues but optimistic.

I had a meeting over at Netzpolitik for our upcoming joint venture with Open State as well.

I wrote this blog post about real thinkers anywhere on the continent ¹: “Who still thinks in Germany?”

Finally I had a nice coffee with recent Berlin arrival Jurriaan who I think is a great addition to the local tech scene.

On Saturday I dropped by the extra Apps and the City hackday and turned my python hack into a javascript version for better distribution and graphical presentation. The javascript community disappointed me because there wasn’t a graph based A* solver available anywhere, so I was forced to write my own version using the Wikipedia pseudocode and underscore.js. That now lives on Github. It still needs a bunch of work.

Further I also updated my Thinkup installation to the most recent beta and my Dreamhost account to a VPS but still haven’t gotten it to work properly. I’m hoping that outage does not take too long.

I published my piece about the Protocoletariat. I hope to be able to do more stuff in that field and tie in my professional endeavours in games, open government and computer science.

I can very much recommend following both @Dymaxion and @justinpickard for the interesting anarcho-futurist trends their interactions hint at.

http://twitter.com/justinpickard/status/292793712390594561

I had a more than welcome catchup with Martin Spindler.

Then I started the procedures to finish the administrative year here in Germany and on to the next one.

I updated my Thinkup which proved to be something of a mixed bag now forcing me to upgrade my hosting package.

Wednesday I had my first class of my language course at the Goethe Institute which proved to be a bit too easy for my taste (which is probably always the case if you already know a bunch of languages). The practice will be good for me in any case and I hope to apply the practical parts more and more in German professional life.

Having started everything in Berlin —to my chagrin— on Thursday I went to Amsterdam for the Open State board dinner and some other odds and ends that needed seeing to. That day I also fasted for my friend Bassel who is jailed in Syria just for being a free software activist.

The board dinner that night at the new restaurant my brother runs Fa. Speijkervet was a lot of fun. There are a lot of changes coming up and almost all of them are for the better.

Friday I hung out at Koko in Amsterdam. A nice new coffee place run by two girls who are totally into coffee and fashion. A big recommendation if you want to escape the hectic Amsterdam city center. After I did our meeting at De Gids (again see the Hubbub weeknote), we did a run of the town with Kars and Alexander Zeh.

Saturday I learned about the suicide of Aaron Swartz an immensely respected figure in freedom and/of information. He was one of the rare people both whose software I used and whose thoughts resonated with me. He got so much done in that short time he was here that his passing places a big burden on the rest of us to continue that work.

I then ended my theater going life by seeing the final Mightysociety show in Frascati. More on that when there is time.

Sunday was another Hubbub workday —yes we have a lot to do— with ample visits to the Village which is really an even funner place then than it is during the week.

Everything only got into gear again on by Thursday when I got my copy of Gun Machine (and finished it two days after) and caught up studio flows with Hubbub Utrecht. I did my work on TORREON and had lunch with the vvvv guys.

Friday it was more TORREON going on through the weekend and some consulting on KAIGARA.

I also caught up with some talks at the CCC this year (along with all of the other issues the event had this year). Best of show is this one by Eleanor Saitta and Smári McCarthy about the advantages and disadvantages of networks and institutions:

http://twitter.com/Dymaxion/status/287634115807805440

A short week that one too, but more to come.

I messed around a bit with it and managed to produce this bit of media art. It is very interesting to have the power of DirectX9 under your fingers without having to program at all, though the whole fact of non-programming feels a bit strange to me. [flickr video=8281500739 secret=e80d6a27c3 w=400 h=225]

Also there was this bit about the journalistic climate in the Netherlands:

https://twitter.com/alper/status/280658121272217600

I would recommend anybody interfacing with journalists to be wholly guarded and keep clearly in mind what’s in it for them in the interaction. The way it is played by most actors, it hasn’t been about the uncovering of the truth for a long time.

Tuesday was my travel day to Amsterdam where I wrote a bunch of stuff in the train and had an Open State board meeting that evening.

I spent most of Wednesday in Utrecht at the Hubbub studio. That night I had dinner with Tim de Gier, Loeki Westerveld and Justus Bruns partially by plan, partially by coincidence.

Thursday was also spent at Hubbub discussing business and getting work done. That night I had drinks with Kars and Lieke in a smashing new Utrecht establishment.

On Friday I met Edo van Royen at Studyflow, had lunch with Peter Robinett, coffee with Justus Bruns, dropped by at my accountant, had a beer with Thijs Niks and then drinks at the Open Coop with Lex and Alexander. Having said that: these visits to the Netherlands always tend to devolve into a flurry of errands that barely leave any time to think. That is going to change for the next one.

I did some more work on the small secret project ¹. Also going forward with work on TORREON.

Chris Eidhof dropped by briefly at Praxis and told me about his plans to organize an iOS conference in Berlin.

http://twitter.com/chriseidhof/status/278462418835881984

I bit the bullet and got myself a monthly ticket for the U-Bahn along with a ticket for my bike. This has made a huge different in getting around the city. Many trips which would take half an hour by bike are a lot easier now and especially with the snow the combination of transit+bike makes a lot more stuff possible.

I enrolled in a conversational German course at the Goethe Institute to up my German to a professional level. We are going to get a new collaborator over at Praxis. And I went to my first ever CrossFit training session on the recommendation by Mustafa Isik.

I finally bit the bullet and changed my T-Mobile Netherlands plan to something a bit more minimal because I don’t spend much more than a week a month in the Netherlands anyway. On Thursday I sent a new proposal for TORREON. I did more stuff on REYNOSA.

I got the funny (for Berlin’s reputation, see this Times piece) sticker for the new play Sommergäste by the Schaubühne written by Maxim Gorki. The previous play by that same director, Eugen Onegin, was absurdly boring so hopes for this adaptation of a Russian master should not be too high. Another Schaubühne play we almost went to, The Black Rider ², seems to be by all accounts also really rather terrible.

Theater is a hopeless moribund discipline but Fabian Hinrichs may prove a notable exception in Berlin this week (which I’ll be missing because of travel to Amsterdam).

This week was also the week of the brilliant eulogy for occupy by Quinn Norton. Intentional or not, it confirmed my cynicism about the movement. What little sparks of brilliance and hope were to be found in the USA versions were almost totally absent from the Dutch camps. Around the studio here in Kreuzberg there are still some remnants of the movement active:

Friday I started initial work on TORREON and after that I went to the VVVV 10th anniversary event over at Letters are my friends.

Twitter announced the general availability of your own tweets for download in archive form. I had done some preliminary work on this when this option was available to Europeans and now ThinkUp is busy building a full-fledged importer.

Sunday morning I finished reading The Invisibles, a brilliant mind bending comic by Grant Morrison. It may not seem like it is relevant to my work, but it very much is in a multitude of strange ways.

On Monday morning I flew to Moscow to participate in a panel at the Moscow Urban Forum. A gathering of experts on the subject of the city and policy who would shed some light on the development of a megacity such as Moscow. On the day I flew in, I got an opportunity to stroll a bit through the city.

I was impressed by the incredible amount of traffic that didn’t leave a lot of room for a person on foot. An experience I haven’t had since Beirut. And as underwhelmed as I was by the Red Square itself, the church at the end (Saint Basil’s Cathedral) was jarring in its familiarity. It had made a heavy impression on me when I was a small child and television commentary on the Soviet Union would feature it as a backdrop. An experience to finally see it in real life.

Surprisingly the one coffee chain in Moscow I visited Кофеин (Caffeine, I’m guessing) served a very smooth coffee and Foursquare is rather positive about the other chain (Кофемания) too.

That night I had a long overdue couple of drinks with Olaf Koens, an old friend who works as a Dutch correspondent in Moscow and writes a smashing travel book as well. A native guide is really recommended to ease acclimatization into Moscow. Without Olaf my impression of the city may have been a different one. As the night progressed we almost naturally wound up at Жан-Жак (Jean Jacques). A pleasant surprise as I had wanted to visit it ever since I read the piece about Russia’s New Decembrists last year.

One more thing we in the Netherlands and Germany especially could learn from Moscow: there is open WiFi almost everywhere. No bullshit passwords to mess with, just open.

On Tuesday I was in a panel to present our extra-governmental/developer approach to open data which we have built up with Hack de Overheid over the past years. It is a complex story to tell and to translate across the cultural divide to practitioners over there, but I think the things we have achieved speak for themselves. Right now we are slowly figuring what parts of our practice can be exported and what parts are too specific for the Dutch case.

There are the answers to the obvious questions (‘Should you charge for data?’, ‘In what format should you supply data?’ etc.) that we have mostly figured out already but that seem to be difficult to explain and supply as shortcuts. And after that there are the very subtle nuances of what data means, what it says about the world, what it excludes and how you can create a process that guarantees maximal inclusion and all of its benefits. Answering those issues requires a far more in depth look at everything, a look for which there is hardly any market or audience unfortunately.

The next day before flying out I managed to get my first ice skating of the season in at Gorki Park.

And then as a bit of infrastructure enthusiasm I went on a lightning tour of the various Moscow underground stations which are regularly quite stunning. The Russian metro system seems to be mostly at capacity with trains arriving every couple of minutes, covering the full length of the platform and many of which being jam-packed during peak hours. Fortunately if ever the city wants to create a tram/light-rail system to complement its public transportation, there is ample space still at street level.

I got some more work in and then after a two hour drive to the airport I was in a plane back to Berlin. I had gained three hours of time with which I managed to visit the Game Developers meetup in Berlin.

Then it was back full speed on development for SAKE and I visited the new offices of the esteemed Peter Bihr and Matt Patterson, just two doors down the street from where I’m at now. It is brilliant to further increase the concentration of internet nous in the same couple of streets.

I took the opportunity to relax a bit on Friday and have lunch with Igor Schwarzmann and then we presented our current release version of SAKE to the Gids. I was telepresent at that meeting which is a fun but also odd way to end a Friday, I must say.

As a side note: if you’re reading this you are probably a good candidate to be in the advice commission for the Dutch subsidy fund (Stimuleringsfonds) for either e-culture or architecture. What these commissions can use more than anything is a solid group of practitioners advising on proposals and people who set the bar high.

Sake started up in earnest and team participation started to ramp up. Just now I piped the git commits into our communal chatroom, something I should have done a lot earlier because it so nicely shows the active heartbeat of a project.

I installed two applications I had been holding out on. I’m trying to backup my files to Amazon Glacier using arq but Berlin bandwidths are not very conducive to sending 192GB to the internet. Also I installed Flux to modulate my screen temperature into something a bit warmer for these cold winter days.

I think this bears sharing regularly:

https://twitter.com/mattur/status/272745213611622401

The rest of the week sake kept up. On Tuesday I picked up my visa from the Russian consulate for the trip to Moscow. I’m on the plane back to Berlin as I’m typing this.

Wednesday I had a coffee with Niels van der Linden, a Dutch national who’s living in Istanbul and is active in the startup scene over there. Lots of interesting parallels and things to learn from each other in that one. We had a nice lunch with Praxis and then I went to the Iron Blogger Berlin meetup.

A sizable part of the week was spent finalizing paperwork both for my German bookkeeper and for various institutions back in the Netherlands. After making my rounds through the city I dropped by at the ÖPNV hackday Apps and the City at Supermarkt.

I couldn’t hack as much as I wanted because I needed to send my slides to Moscow for the following week, but once I finished those I still managed to get two small things in:

Firstly I uploaded the sample file of the various POIs for Berlin’s S-Bahn stations to Google Fusion Tables to be able to get a quick feel for the data. What’s in it, what’s not and how accurate it is.

Sadly, there is a full dataset available with the points for all stations in Berlin, but that is geocoded in some obscure German datum and therefore cannot be readily loaded into Fusion Tables. Ready usability is key for many hackday datasets, even if other participants had more time to do a possible conversion than I did. For a data provider: you show knowledge of the outside world by supplying GPS.

The issue to be solved with this dataset would be: finding your ideal way around a station for a transfer or your ideal exit for your final destination and based on that information to chain back and guide you into the optimal carriage of the underground train.

The first approach, to brute force the problem by tabulating all possible entries and exits, turned out to quickly balloon into something horribly large. After some thinking I thought up a graph representation of a subway station and demonstrated with a proof of concept “Stationsrouter” that you can route through that using the well-known A* algorithm. ¹

This can be easily extended for for instance wheelchair access by using a weighted graph and setting the weights of stairs to infinity for those users. I posted the algorithm and a rough graph coding online, I need to find the time to make the interface more attractive (probably by porting it to Javascript) and to transcode a couple more stations. To figure out where an arriving train lands on a platform and therefore which graph segment that corresponds to wouldn’t be too difficult.

On Friday I was supposed to take an introductory German language course, but the hackday shenanigans made sure I missed that early appointment. Trying to reschedule something for the new year to level up my Deutsch. We did a capacity planning session with Hubbub and I ended the afternoon by watching a bit of TEDxAmsterdam waiting for the new talk by Kevin Slavin.

On Sunday I met with Peter Bihr, Matt Patterson and Daniela Augenstein to talk about open government in Berlin and then the next day it was off to Moscow!

I spent the first three days of the week wrapped up mostly in visa procedures because I’ll be participating in the Moscow Urban Forum next week. I did manage to have some good chats in between, but attention was too scattered to get anything solid done (also this being the first week back from a reasonably long trip). Lunch with Fabian Mürmann, a board meeting for Open State.

I did discover a very nice coffee place around the corner and went there for just about every day since (I think this is love).

Add to that two visits to the dentist as well on subsequent days and I was more or less done.

Friday was the first day where I could finally catchup with most things. I dropped by Gidsy and had lunch with Matt Patterson and then lunch again with my office mates. And the evening I prepped a session for the students from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences to tell them more or less everything I could about data visualization in 90 slides.

And on Sunday I finished my first book by James C. Scott which was fantastic (more on which later) and managed to finally get a secret little project underway that had been lying for far too long.

The Genius there was less than helpful. Determining that it was my hard drive, he tried without avail to erase it and then load up a new version of the OS. I am more or less pleased that he wasn’t successful in doing that. In Amsterdam I tried another couple of things but finally handed it in at Maccare.nl who without touching it said ‘it was probably the cable’ and the very same day had replaced it for me. Since the Genius hadn’t even managed to erase my disk, I could incredulously resume working from where I was a week ago.

Not having a laptop I did manage to finish The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoete and a Monocle on the flights from Sydney to Guangzhou to Amsterdam and the layover.

Thursday morning I got my Macbook Pro back and spent most of the day working at Brainsley’s offices which are small but rather cozy. I dropped by the Open Coop to chat with Lex and pick up my Open State business cards. And that night I met up with some old friends who work now mostly as hired guns in the Amsterdam startup scene for cocktails at the famed Door 74.

Friday I dropped by the Village (again!) and then got onto the train to Berlin where I am typing this right now.

Last week was mostly spent with a scattered brain working on my ignite an various proposals. We had a studio meeting at Praxis to discuss recent developments and issues.

Thursday night I gave the Ignite to a packed Supermarkt Berlin. Thanks everybody for attending and listen to me rave about games for five minutes. Also fantastic to meet everybody in Berlin who I hadn’t caught up with for ages.

On Friday I finished off most of my paperwork before the trip. That night we went to see Werner Herzog read with the studio.

The next morning I got up at seven to see the market build up and watch the GSL Code S final together with Mustafa Işık and a colleague of his. You are either mildly serious about watching this or you are not. I’d already set up and tested the GOM Player before. That’s the bit of KPop you see above.

It was rather exhilarating to see a GSL event streamed live and I’m glad my light season ticket entitled me to view it. I’ve recently gotten into Star Craft because of Frank Lantz’s excellent “Drinking Man’s Guide to Watching Star Craft” and am greatly enjoying it as a highly complex, dense and therefore less boring alternative to most spectator sports.

Brief weeknotes for last week: closed off Pig Chase with the prototype test in the stables. I got to start building a playable prototype for sake, more on that later.

A large part of the rest of the week I spent in various states of bureaucracy trying to get everything in order to be able to request a visa for China. I think I’ve spent about as much time getting the requested papers as I will be in Beijing proper.

During the off hours of this week I started a small project to check the Dutch laws into github over at Staten Generaal (write-up).

Some nice responses to that: https://twitter.com/steeph/status/254579913183596544 https://twitter.com/thijsniks/status/254581291545141248 https://twitter.com/opendatanl/status/254581990827913216 https://twitter.com/alexandernl/status/254586159701831680

But the real work has only just begun and we need to figure where the project should actually go to.

The Beestenbende project page went online, an iPhone game I coded: http://whatsthehubbub.nl/projects/beestenbende/

And I got added to the Praxis Berlin website which is the web presence of my current studio.

And I spent quite a bit of the weekend at the JSConf parties. It was fun to meet lots of people I hadn’t seen in quite a while and the conference was quite excellently organized.

Spent some time writing proposals. Setup my own personal tent at: https://alper.tent.is/ for whatever good that may be.

I also managed to catch the last day of PIVOT at leap and wrote something brief about it.

Also because it was the end of the month I finally moved all of my stuff out at the old office. Friday night there was another digital salon at the HIIG offices. I don’t think people like us are the target audience of these events. The discussion focused mostly on the incredibly mundane aspects of digital technology.

https://twitter.com/alper/status/251732138322440193

https://twitter.com/alper/status/251734369587326976

Friday night was also the opening of work by Casey Reas at [DAM] Berlin. And after that a birthday party at Panke which for me felt like a more accessible/steampunk version of cbase. Anyway.

I started doing some game design of myself. And built an election game using Game-o-Matic: The Emile Game.

Monday I was given a Clever coffee maker and a Hario grinder to be able to make slow coffees at the office. Thanks Kars and Lea for being so attentive. I also made a start moving my books over but more and more having a professional ¹ physical library is feeling like a huge dead weight.

I would like to have these books in digital form but I’m sure as hell not going to pay for them all again at ebook markups. No way in hell. Bittorrent seems like a better option.

We’re very proud of Beestende being a game that actually does what it promises and we submitted it to the Dutch Game Awards.

A trailer for a reality show that I participated in about a year ago was released under the title Heetsel. Doing anything for tv or tv-like media feels intensely surreal and judging from the final edit that surreality is conveyed quite well by the delivered product.

I published the video and brief write-up of my NEXT Berlin talk about love and gamification over at Hubbub.

On Wednesday I did random administrative stuff and prepped my visit to Munich the next day.

On Friday I had coffee with Chris Eidhof at the new Barn which is a stunning large venue with a roaster and a very large coffee desk. The coffee is the same quality we’re used to but it’s policies are a bit more restrictive. I won’t talk about the online tumult caused by this, but I hope they can sort it out quickly and then focus again on what they do best: brewing awesome coffee.

And finally I had a cup with Mustafa at the Five Elephant. Mustafa is an all-star programmer who has recently moved to Berlin to build a startup. Another too little publicized —soon to be— success story in the local scene.

https://twitter.com/codesurgeon/status/249182833111867393

On Tuesday I took the train to Amsterdam and landed at our Amsterdam offices to catchup with Lex Slaghuis and friends about the current state of Open State and upcoming events.

Tuesday was also my sixth twitterversary: https://twitter.com/clclt/status/242982186037411840

Wednesday I had planned to give a programming lesson. I dropped by at Johan Schaap’s offices to prepare some stuff and also managed to finally make it to the Stadsbranderij Noord (in our office building) where Kees Kraakman has been brewing the finest coffees of Amsterdam for the past couple of months.

I pulled something together based on my presentation at the last Hack de Overheid and the tutoring I’ve been doing in Berlin at Open Tech School. The event I made on Gidsy for that sold out pretty quickly and Peer Reach (thanks Zlatan!) offered to let me use their offices, so that came together rather rapidly. On a side note: big data and semantics related startups seem to be statistically overrepresented in Amsterdam right now.

The evening itself went by in a flurry of code and learning. I decided to use Javascript because that runs in everybody’s browsers and there is a readily available graphical environment to work with: Processing.js. There were quite some snags, but everybody managed to work through the exercises and claimed to have learned a lot.

https://twitter.com/erwblo/status/243393487825952768

https://twitter.com/erwblo/status/243448305923813377

https://twitter.com/jerryvermanen/status/243447862527135744

https://twitter.com/kooistra/status/243442967061356544

I really enjoyed giving the class and I mostly wanted to know how much interest there would be for something like that in Amsterdam. Seeing as it sold out rather quickly and that everybody I mention this to says that they too would like to participate, it seems that interest is about as high as in other European countries, but that nobody is doing something yet. I’m strongly considering pursuing this further and create something more sustainable. If that is something you would be interested in, get in touch with me.

Thursday was spent in Utrecht where the awesome people of the Village smothered me with great coffee and merchandise. Always a pleasure to hang out in their store and see their enterprise maturing. Kars and I spent the day discussing strategies past and future for Hubbub and we managed to get the entire team together to celebrate the delivery of Beestenbende with a glass of champagne.

That same night I had the pleasure to catchup with most of the rest of Amsterdam’s hackers at the Hackers and Founders meetup.

On Friday I caught up with my agent Tessa Sterkenburg of the Next Speaker about digital things and where the current attention of the market is focused. It seems that our thinking is —as always— a bit ahead of the curve which may make it somewhat difficult to market, but we would not want to be anywhere else.

I quickly visited the Humans next door who are working on their own very nice health tracking app. Then it was another visit to the Open Coop, a visit to my accountant, some work at my old office and then off to the Hague to celebrate the graduation of up and coming GIS engineer Simeon Nedkov.

Then on Saturday we were in the Hague to do a hackathon in Dutch parliament. More on that in a separate post. And Sunday it was back in the train to Berlin.

I also booked my ticket to Australia for the end of October. I’m flying in on Melbourne via Beijing and flying out of Sydney some three weeks later. I always thought I had to see the economic miracle of China for myself, so I’ll be stopping over there for a couple of days before going on serious surfing/hiking/diving in Oz.

I also launched an activity on Gidsy to teach programming to absolute beginners which —I am glad to say— has been fully booked by now. Strangely enough this is a topic that is massively underrepresented in the Netherlands while in other countries there are groups popping up left and right. I hope to play some part in spreading knowledge of programming, but I cannot do this by myself and it should spread out to be a wider movement.

Thursday afternoon I spent two and a half hours outputting two and a half thousand words for the book I’m planning to write on the future of client based creative work. I believe this is a topic that does not get enough attention or love from the people who are active in this conversation. There are still a lot of people who have not made the transition from client work into product work and that kind of work will probably always exist. I think it is time to redeem working for clients and show a way to do it that maintains both dignity and fun.

That same night I went to the iOS meetup in Berlin and presented a sneak peek of Beestenbende to my colleagues iOS programmers. I was glad to see that our app was well received by those present.

And Friday finally we had a full on integration of the Pig Chase game running remotely from the Berlin studio to Utrecht. That was a pretty difficult nut to crack and very nice to finally have working. You don’t see a lot of games doing stuff with real-time video and remote real-time action because it’s pretty damn difficult. Fortunately that is our recipe for broad succes: pick difficult problems and solve them properly.

Then I dropped by at my friends over at HIIG where they were taping yet another radio show about the internet:

And finally I rode with the Berlin Critical Mass on Friday night. Quite the experience and I’ll be looking to repeat that soon again.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon tutoring Python as part of the Open Tech School workshop to get people into programming. That was very fun and utterly draining.

Then after spending the day teaching people to program with a dangerously low blood sugar level I moved over most of my stuff from Adalbertstraße to Oranienstraße proper. Notifications of address changes and invitations for office warming drinks are forthcoming.

Then for the rest of the weekend I did a lot of nothing during the day and lots of programming during the night which resulted in the first private release of kohi. Get in touch with me if you want to be a part of the initial group of users and I’ll include you as soon as we have something more substantial to share.

On Tuesday I attended the django meetup organized by my good friends from Gidsy. It’s always a pleasure to touch base with the current technological state of the art and best practices in web development, though I am not a web developer pur sang anymore.

On Wednesday I dropped by at the Campus Party venue which at the vast Tempelhof area was as impressive as expected and spent the rest of the time preparing my workshop.

On Thursday evening I presented the points of view we have on the topic as the last entry on a full Free Software Stage. The idea is that programmers and other makers can use their skills to make things and by doing so create a free world (necessary for free software).

https://twitter.com/karstenkneese/statuses/238701118513893376

https://twitter.com/FrauLea/statuses/238700483097808896

A picture by Gulius Caesar:

On Friday it was back to the Campus Party to see the presentation by the Rails Girls Berlin. On the whole Campus Party was a great event with so much interesting stuff happening (a bit too much at times), but with also a lot of odd kinks in the organization which are neatly summarized over at Silicon Allee.

And after that to see a bunch of pro gaming going on at the arena where I saw a bunch of interesting Star Craft II cast by Kaelaris and witnessed my first bit of League of Legends ¹. Witnessing the high level sc2 players up close and seeing their actual APM is rather bizarre.

I have already been watching a bit of sc2 by Husky after which Frank Lantz started writing his Drinking Man’s Guide to Watching Starcraft, which I can recommend to everybody wanting to get into the sport.

Some of my writing got some renewed attention. The play Ten Billion was picked up by a Dutch daily and my review got a wholly forgettable comment, which did force me to clarify some points myself. But I’m afraid that most of the abstract thought I’m riffing off these days from Ribbonfarm does not translate well to the continental European context both in terms of culture and complexity.

https://twitter.com/dannie/status/235373465295798273

I also finished my piece about the BMW Guggenheim Lab that took place in Berlin this summer. The event was well done, the program had something for everybody and some of the web components I got to play with were really nice. Though there was still a lack of real engagement and therefore a lack of real change.

ci·ty·jerk (noun, portmanteau of city and circlejerk): high modernist gathering of architects and designers talking about urban experiences from which they are wholly detached

Lots of work this week on Pig Chase getting the iPad client version to work for initial prototyping.

I visited the Berlin Google offices to attend a lecture by Ben Scott about the potential of the internet. An absurdly self-serving piece of rhetoric that briefly summarized said: Germans are stupid to be wary of the internet and it is in fact holding them back. If they manage to trust the web and open up to its promise, everything will be fine and dandy.

Friday I had beers over at Praxis which will be my new offices from September onwards.

I’m also working on a proposal and subsequent script for a privacy based Nordic LARP. It’s going to be interesting and uncompromising and I could use help.

Last Monday was the end of the holiday with a leisurely train ride from Munich to Berlin during which I managed to chew through a lot of e-mails and revise a bunch of maths.

The rest of the week was spent mostly working through e-mails, meetings and social calls. Netzpolitik celebrated their birthday in C-Base with some nice drinks.

And rather quickly Kars Alfrink arrived in Berlin for the Play Publik festival. You’ll notice some similarities between my personal weeknotes and the general Hubbub weeknotes for last week.

Virtueel Platform published the videos of our talks in Helsinki, so there you have me talking about open data:

With our Hubbub strength over at the Berlin studio doubled on Wednesday we finished saba. After that it was straight on working on buta all the while playing games at the festival.

On Friday I had another additional studio guest with Sebastian Deterding. That was also the day that I experienced the beautiful Our Broken Voice at Ostbahnhof.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on buta and playing games at Play Publik with nary a moment’s rest in between. It was nice to be finally able to play Starry Heavens by Eric Zimmerman. I and a lot of people had a lot of fun with Hit Me.

The final day there was a presentation by Kevin Slavin and we closed off the event with a massive game of Charge of the Rubber Ball Brigade. There are many awesome pictures online over at Facebook (which is a shame).

The last two weeks, after the brief trip to present in Helsinki were mostly spent on holiday in Avignon and the Alps (with some short stops in La Ciotat and Finale Ligure).

Fun was had. Relaxation not so much, but nevertheless, normal service has continued here again this week.

During my stay in Ghent there was so much rain, I managed to do some work on kohi in the hotel room. This being a self-commissioned project, it can hardly be named work in any of the regular meanings of the word.

Tuesday I travelled onwards to my AirBnB in Paris in the area of Porte de Saint Ouen. A neighborhood far away enough from the city center to be cheap and colorful (a bit like Delfshaven), but just inside the Péripherique boundary so not too threatening.

On Wednesday in Paris I went to La Gaîté Lyrique where a Joust tournament was due to take place. We had a lot of fun playing for an hour or so with all comers. I was going to visit la Gaîté anyway to see the games by Eric Zimmerman and Babycastles and as a nice addition I got to play Fez on one of the consoles they had on display.

La Gaîté Lyrique has as their tagline: ‘Révolutions Numérique’ which translates to Numerical Revolutions and nicely symbolizes the time we are living in right now. The venue hosts a number of events based in art, games, music and net culture that seem to be perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist but also have the production values to appeal to a large audience. I wish a reboot of the Dutch electronic culture venues may approach this level.

On Thursday I did some preparations for my presentation in Helsinki at the end of the week in some beautiful but horribly expensive Paris cafés like Les Arts et Metiers and in the evening I met Peter Robinett and his sister at the University of Chicago’s Paris Center. There we listened to a lecture on Baudelaire and the bourgeois experience of the city in the 19th century.

I will also be giving a small workshop on Civic Hacking at the Campus Party where I will be sharing all the tricks we used with Hack de Overheid in the Netherlands and which we hope to deploy across Europe to make government more accessible and accountable using the internet.

Friday I flew to Helsinki for my first time over there. Helsinki is a lovely city though a bit empty in July and the Pavilion for the World Design Capital is a beautiful venue.

Also the video report of our last hackathon in the Smart Project Space in Amsterdam was posted:

Saturday we attended the presentations on Transmedia storytelling with again a great report by Jasper Koning on VPRO’s Netherlands From Above project and on Sunday we presented for the social cities program.

Also it was announced that we will be presenting in Helsinki on the Dutch E-Culture Days (here’s a summary).

Tuesday afternoon we met up with some fellow digital urbanites at the HIIG to discuss research avenues for data in the city. As practitioners we all do not have much time to busy ourselves with formal research, but it is good to update those that do with some of our actual concerns from the field.

The authority of the HIIG may be a useful instrument in reconstructing our governance models in the light of digitization. They are failing on almost every level because of the inherent complexities of network technology. We need to educate scholars, policy makers and pretty much everybody.

Also my NEXT Berlin talk recording was published. A fun event where I tried together love and games by frantically pointing at things while stepping just shy of innuendo.

Friday I put the final touches on Beestenbende (see these weeknotes over at Hubbub) and visited some sessions at the Guggenheim Lab about real estate politics.

Then the last day of last week it was time to pack up everything and embark on a somewhat long trip. First stop: Ghent.

This week I put in quite some work on kohi doing full stack development both on the iPhone client and on the backend.

On Tuesday I had lunch at Gidsy. Any visit to the Makers Loft is fun but I go up there infrequently enough that every time I visit, the company has grown leaps and bounds. I also had a good time meeting up with Rainer Kohlberger, a good Berlin friend.

I did some final work on Beestenbende and made arrangements to visit Helsinki next week to present on an event organized by Virtueel Platform for its World Design Capital program.

At last we also are doing internal work at Open State / Hack de Overheid both on the design front ¹ and on strategy to prepare us for a next phase that will entail considerable growth as well as maturation for the foundation.

And not something that we did, but still nice to hear that KiesBeter.nl has started publishing data. Ton Zijlstra and I gave a workshop there last year to show them the potential of open data and after the required time to process these things internally, it has happened.

And that Friday it was off to Wartin with a whole bunch of awesome Berlin people on a weekend organized by the kind people of Third Wave. We had our fill of good conversations, nature and late night werewolf.

More work on Beestenbende which had a push to finish everything on the deck. I had talks with Netzpolitik and Invisible Playground.

I briefly visited an event by Platoon about the interplays between gentrification and graffiti which was about as absurd as it sounds.

I published my notes on the Greek situation.

I received my copy of Chouinard’s new book ‘The Responsible Company’:

Very much looking forward to reading that and applying it here.

Sunday I did a bunch of work on the kohi prototype. kohi prototype

That was also the week that I upgraded my Things client to to the Things Cloud Beta. I think I’m not supposed to say anything about it, but let me just say: ++. I have started moving large parts of my workload to Asana, so it remains to be seen if native apps like these continue to be a good fit for what is an inherently collaborative effort.

In Athens I crashed the local hackers event at the Colab Workspace Athens where the Ruby group were discussing the organization of the next Euroku. And another day I found the O.M.G. event, short for Overclocking, Modding and Gaming where lots of people gathered to play Call of Duty 4.

I wrote up a longer report of my experiences in Greece last week.

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).

I met the great people from Campus Party who are going to hold an event in Berlin at the end of August. More to follow in the light of hacking, programming and opening up the things that should be open.

Tuesday Eric Zimerman and Nathalie Pozzie gave a lecture at the Universität der Kunsten as an introduction to their residency here. It is very nice to have them over for the summer and I’m curious what will come out of it.

Work is revving up for the next Hack de Overheid event on June 16th which is going to be a lot of fun. Wednesday we saw Ignite Berlin which had a very nice line-up of talks.

Thursday I met Julianne from Social Media Week Berlin and went to the School of Data meetup by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Friday I met up with Chris Eidhof, fellow Dutchman and iOS developer here in Berlin. Always a pleasure, and then it was off to the massive Karneval der Kulturen street festival.

On monday the protocol of the meeting we had in the Berlin parliament about open transit data was published. It contains all the proceedings and slides.

On Tuesday I went to Hilversum to give a workshop on journalistic data visualization over there. It’s always fun to give these and it’s going to be even more fun to see the results coming out of it.

After that I bounced over to Utrecht to relax a bit in the Village. It had been too long ago and it’s still the best coffee store in the Netherlands. After that I went to Hubbub headquarters for some future planning with Kars Alfrink.

On Wednesday we had a lot of stuff to do with the (Open State) foundation (more on which later). That same evening we had a board meeting.

On Thursday I had a nice lunch with Tim de Gier and finished my next game review for the paper.

This is the view from the Amsterdam office. Pure luxury for that city.

Also I had to buy the new book “Koorddansen in de Kaukasus” by Olaf Koens about his adventures in the Caucasus. It is a fast paced collection of stories in this very bizarre part of the world.

I also managed to visit the newly opened EYE movie institute on the IJ shore. A beautiful building with a stunning view, heralding in a new era for this part of Amsterdam.

Next it was the train back to Berlin and prototypes for some new applications.

The rest of the week was spent preparing the presentation for NEXT Berlin about Love in Times of Gamification. It went well (1, 2, 3, 4) and should be online shortly. It was an honour to be invited and to share the stage with James Bridle, David Bausola and the many others present at the event.

After that it was time to unwind and meet a lot of nice people and go for a nice dinner.

RT @ Bopuc: OH: “my girlfriend learned to code Ruby… She was jealous of my lifestyle.” @ alper

— Thomas Madsen-Mygdal (@mygdal) May 9, 2012

Next came the recovery part of the week. Also Iskander Smit wrote a nice recap of NEXT.

The next day Stefan Wehrmeyer and I went to the Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin to present on the subject of open transit data.

The situation here when it comes to opening up data is rather shameful. It seems hard for transit operators to realize that information about their services is an intrinsic part of their services. People who don’t know how to get somewhere, will also not buy any tickets.

This seems counter productive if you assume that transit operators actually want to transport people which it seems they do not. They want to serve the terms of their contract as cheaply as possible and as long as open transit information is not stipulated within that contract they will not do it. Thankfully Berlin politics is moving on the subjects (because the next tender is not due for many years).

On Thursday I prepared and gave my talk for Hybrid Talks at the Berlin University of the Arts on the Heist Model which went quite well. I am going to write that particular presentation up on the Hubbub blog soon because I think it has a lot of mileage still. Most of the ways of organizing work that are doing the rounds assume you are a company selling a product, not a company doing work for clients.

On Friday I went to re:publica with a familiar theme. In any case it was a good opportunity to meet some people I hadn’t talked to in a while and to see the narratives being told in German about the internet.

After the keynote by the Vice President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes, I got the opportunity to meet with her and discuss pressing issues when it comes to the digital agenda. I decided to step out of my immediate day to day worries and speak out for programming education for all school children (more on this soon, I hope). This struck a cord with her, but somewhat confused many of the other attendants who were more keen to push their pet agendas.

Talking with @ NeelieKroesEU, @ lorz says the collected German digerati are not interested in startups or education. Your problem right there.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) May 4, 2012

After that I rushed over to Markthalle IX for the book launch of A Smart Guide to Utopia.

Most of the weekend after that was spent preparing my presentation for NEXT this week.

On Monday I also finished the Thinkup hack I wanted to present at the Berlin Hack ’n Tell.

Tuesday was another long sprint on saba and then off to the event. The presentation went quite well and I think I managed to hit both the technical rationale behind the hack as well as its longer term implications.

On Wednesday I wrote up the Thinkup thing over at Monster Swell: “A full Twitter index in your Thinkup” and requested my full history from Twitter.

More saba. On Thursday I went to a book presentation by Jonas Westphal at the FES about the society amidst digital change. It is good that these kind of books are being written to make palatable the socio-technical changes to people not so well versed in these developments. I have several similar reports like this at the studio by the WRR, RMO and by Rathenau.

I also embarked on my first experiment in Taobao shopping (inspired by Jan Chipchase). If this is succesful, I’m quite sure this will be the first of many more.

And finally on the weekend it was the gallery weekend here in Berlin and I took the chance to visit half a dozen in half an hour.

On Tuesday I went to the Django meetup which was a lot of fun:

On Wednesday I spent the whole day hacking Thinkup and after went to see Brecht in the Schaubühne.

On Thursday I went to a lecture by Quentin Meillassoux which was terse but interesting. Meillassoux circumvents the problem of the correlational circle to access the absolute by taking the circle itself to be the absolute. That absolute is the contingent nature of everything (contingent, to fact to artifact). What there is is only discoverable by experience. Meillassoux wants to demonstrate that the empiricist is absolutely right.

And I spent most of the weekend writing:

Tuesday was spent getting back on top of work.

In the evening I got tipped of by Mathias Schindler that there would be a talk in St. Oberholz about the value of free knowledge. I visited it but it was more of a free for all with the writer spouting their well trodden arguments (and quite a bit of gibberish) and Mathias doing much of the same.

I have written before about how copyright in Germany is locked up in a fierce protectionist policy that benefits only those that have something to lose and not those with something to gain. Germany’s cultural production is not even that interesting for the world at large, but the biggest reason to maintain it: it employs a lot of people. The debate right now is strangely being dominated by ‘Tatort-autoren’ which is odd since the show is on public television and quite dull.

The transition to more dynamic (i.e. not as strictly regulated) copyright is underway and the more the powers try to protect copyright, the more they expedite its demise. It still must be painful for the Tatort man and all those in his camp to be so very much on the wrong side of history.

Also, I’m going to talk about our agency working model —the “Heist”model— at an upcoming Hybrid Talks.

Talking about copyright, on Wednesday the Pirate Party hit 13% in a national poll. I’m also going to present about open transit data in the Abgeordnetehaus Berlin alongside Stefan Wehrmeyer and other notables on an invitation by the Greens.

At the end of the week I went to DAM to see the Blind Sequence Trust exposition by Joan Leandre. I wrote about my impressions of that exposition which is very much recommended seeing.

I also wrote quite a bit about theater that week it seems. A piece about what you should see in the Schaubühne and a piece about the German/Dutch theater debate I attended at the Deutsches Theater some time ago.

I also fixedbetter Tijs’s version of the Anobii to GoodReads exporter and moved my books over there where you can find my reading. And I wrote a bit about how Jan Chipchase’s experiment pertains to the design of withdrawn objects.

The end of the week was marked by an impromptu visit by prof. Scheiber to Berlin which was celebrated with pints of Augustiner and Korean food.

What had to be done was the prototype iPhone app for the first playtest of saba. Which was finished in the nick of time with programming sprints that ended later and later into the night.

Then it was a train on Friday to Amsterdam for the Open State board meeting followed by the more general strategy day on Saturday. A lot of fun was had and important things were discussed during the weekend (see this write-up by Natasja Trifkovic), which makes it all worthwhile, but some downtime would be welcome at this point.

The face of Rotterdam is changing massively and visibly right now with the construction of a new central station that is going to be architecturally impressive:

Glad to see so many friends out for the event it was great to present a new aesthetic, algorithmic design (& peril) presentation to the audience of Rotterdam designers.

Wednesday it was off to meet a client in the Bijlmer and then a workday at the Coop.

Thursday I called at Utrecht among other things to celebrate the first anniversary of The Village Coffee and Music. Their continued presence makes working in Utrecht more than bearable.

The other pleasure is hanging out all day at Hubbub base where a lot of things are on the burner waiting to get shipped.

I got to play Hokra at Tweetakt which is one of the social games that are programmed there. The other Joust is pictured below and got a lot of play time:

I created a template to send invoices from German. Unfortunately at this point the amount of text that needs to be on there (numbers in both languages, custom phrases for the tax service) makes any attempt at whitespace impossible. I’m just glad if everything fits onto one page and I can send that.

There was a flurry about the BMW Guggenheim laboratory that was supposed to call in Kreuzberg on its world tour. Some extremists threatened it with violence because they have issues with gentrification, see Peter Bihr’s write-up. The most recent news that reached us was that it was rescheduled for Prenzlauerberg, but now there is yet another piece in Freitag about the lab.

If the goal of the lab was to provoke discussions about the future, it has been quite successful at that, though probably not in the clear-cut fashion that its organizers imagined it would. The discourse about gentrification is often hijacked and skewed and lacks representation and realistic courses of action. Anybody who has read their Jane Jacobs would say that it is inevitable that neighborhoods change. You can prevent them from overheating by releasing development pressure to other areas with targeted development. Freezing time is not a solution. Neither is socialism.

I attended a work session at Fraunhofer FOKUS about a report on open data in Germany. We touched upon most of the points that I have discussed about in the UK an the Netherlands already these past years so with all of that prior art, the Germans should be able to follow a clear path to open data.

Phonegap development continued in earnest but it turned out on the iPhone DOM manipulation is ridiculously slow even for the simplest of operations. Instead of trying to optimize a dog of an application I switched to native iOS development which should be a challenge, but the clear definition is a refreshing change from the relativity of web development.

On Friday I received a shipment of tyres and I could build up my bike again to tear through the city. That was a beautiful day.

Friday night I attended a discussion at the Deutsches Theater about the culture cuts in the Netherlands and how they could/would be applied to Germany. I piece about that is forthcoming as soon as I get around to writing it up.

On Monday development for saba started in earnest and there was much hacking in Phonegap. Or Cordova, or whatever the project is called these days. By now we have abandoned that approach for reasons that are forthcoming but it was fun while it lasted.

On Tuesday I went to Gobsquad’s Kitchen mostly on a recommendation from Kevin Slavin. That was a very entertaining show.

I finally found a Steuerberater here who seem to be good at what they are doing and friendly.

On Friday I accompanied Alexander and Ernst-Jan who were visiting Berlin on a tour of the former Stasi remand prison in Hohenschönhausen.

Hack de Overheid now has a Google Group where everybody can have their say. It still needs a bit of a startup, but these things always do.

With some heavy lifting in the U-Bahn, I managed to reassemble my library. I eagerly anticipate when I can digitize everything here and not worry about the physicality of my external brain anymore.

The Apps für Deutschland price winners have been announced. We had nothing to do with this competition, but it is interesting to see how this develops alongside the Netherlands.

On Wednesday I went to co.up to watch the Stevenote:

I got to catch Jeroen Visser and Robert Jan Verkade in Berlin after they had just given a workshop. Dutch website all-stars if ever there were some.

After which I went to the Mart Stam talks in the Dutch embassy in Berlin. Getting a tour of Koolhaas designed building was a nice addition to the event.

The tour made clear two important parts of the building about which a lot probably has been written but which I’ll add here nonetheless:

Our tour guide continued to explain how unpractical various quarters in the building were, how they were not used as much as you would want or expect and how a lot of things had to be patched up after delivery. During the tour one of the very nice looking skewed doors fell apart as if to emphasize this again. In more than one place cables were added because the normal connections were not suitable or were too hidden away.

That very unsuitability for human inhabitation and work is a form of power projection. The fact that a government can afford to place an exorbitant impractical building in the middle of another nation’s capital to sit there and impress guests is another form of functionality, though at considerable expense.

Add to that the Germans’ reactions to the modernity of the building. Many of the (old) people on the tour were very vocally amazed with the material use, furniture and architectural tricks in the building. The building is radical departure from the Berlin tendency towards historicist architecture. Taking both those points, the embassy is ultimately an elaborate joke played by the architect on the German and Dutch people.

Last week also our company names (all three of them!) were mounted on the wall at the office which gives our residency in Berlin a more official air.

We put a small Tumblr called “Ramen Hunter” online on which we document our peripatetic consumptions of the Japanese manna called ramen.

Also the news that I will be speaking at NEXT Berlin on a topic near to my heart “Love in Times of Gamification”. Not only is that turning out to become a huge and important subtopic within gaming, it is also going to be a lot of fun. The Dutch newspaper NRC featured an article (link for subscribers) about the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference in which I am also quoted talking about Hack de Overheid and Apps for Amsterdam.

Another German copyright issue arose because Open Köln republished a series of government documents on their own website. I wrote up the chain of events and the chilling effects that are bound to follow.

I went to an event called Zukunftgespräche about the future of creative and innovative work in the city. That was mostly a disappointment with commonplaces being trodden over and Zeit articles being quoted near verbatim. It seems these kind of events in Germany are too institutional and manage to invite exactly the wrong people ¹.

The rest of the week was spent hauling my library to the office, writing up some proposals and Skype-ing with the homefront. I also submitted our research initiatives from Open State to Virtueel Platform. And I could finish off the week having a beer at Soundcloud Rebase which turns out to be a pretty good way to end a week.

On Sunday I read up on the Liquid Democracy software platform used by the Pirate Party to decide upon their points of view (read a good Spiegel overview here: “Web Platform Makes Professor Most Powerful Pirate”).

Technologically I have quite some issues with the implementation which is brilliant at places and patchwork on others ², but those are mostly besides. It works and it does what it needs to do. The main Pirate Party implementation lives here: https://lqfb.piratenpartei.de/ and is publicly browsable. A cursory glance reveals a lot of interesting things.

First and foremost, it is interesting and essential to build a web native application for the processes of politics. Most parties if they would start anew today would not end up at this exact point, but this is obvious if like the Pirates your pedigree is digitally native. Being able to participate in a more accessible and equally footed arena, without having to go to party congresses is something other parties should learn from and the open democratic process is reminiscent of the Occupy general assemblies. Even more importantly, codifying the democratic process in software and opening that up for evolution by means of open source contributions, looks like the the future of political systems in the digital age.

More worrisome are the non-digital points of view proposed on the platform. Besides a proposal for Open Government Data being approved ³ there are also proposals for a base income for everybody and many other wish-list utopian social measures. None of those seem to be predicated on fiscal solvency. Many of the measures rely on more government to improve society. That is oddly reminiscent of the modeling paradox: a better model does not guarantee better outcomes. The same with government, the current government here is not very small but already rather dysfunctional.

The free for all democracy of Liquid Feedback might easily lead to a California-like situation where proposition after proposition has lifted taxes so far that it has bankrupted the state. This is the biggest risk with general assembly and other referendum type decision making processes. It is too easy to demand everything if there are no consequences attached to it. Thankfully the Pirate Party will never hold a majority in German government because if they did, they would probably bankrupt the nation within a week.

This Monday I finally made it out to the Finanzamt with a fully filled in form for Steuerliche Erfassung (or something). After that I went to the Agora Collective to get my stuff. It is a great place, but I don’t want to be fixed in a coworking space. There are a myriad reasons why that is not a great fit, but being able to shape and own your own workplace is built-in in most offices and is purposefully left out of coworking.

Then I moved into the contur & konsorten office on Adalbertstraße with my stuff. A Burogemeinschaft with 10 people where everybody has their own independent desk, with its own walls and bookshelves, a place to put my professional library and hang my posters. In short: a place to call my own. In a total coincidence I am now a staircase neighbour of my friends at the Maker’s Loft which could lead to more serendipity in the future.

The office is smack on Kotti, the most important urban maelstrom in Berlin. It is a place where many large streams of traffic and people meet with the U-bahn transport hub (connecting U1 and U8) and the roundabout connecting the main thoroughfare of Skalitzer Straße with the Kottbusser Damm. Betahaus, co-up, the Maker’s Loft and many other creative places are within throwing distance and the area sports equal amounts of hipster cafés and Turkish eateries with the addicts holding their own on the main square. They can be a hassle, but their presence is inseparable from the conditions that made that part of Kreuzberg exactly what it is: a free-haven for people looking for cheap housing be they immigrants or artists —or both.

Tuesday was spent at the new office in presentation prep with the evening closed off by meeting with the local Open Knowledge Foundation chapter. It was a fruitful discussion exchanging various ideas on how to boost the openness movement in Berlin.

On Wednesday, I took a leisurely train ride to Amsterdam which seems to feel shorter and shorter the more I get in the rhythm. That day the long awaited Code 4 video launched. I’m immensely proud of the work we did and I don’t think there’s anybody who has pulled off a game like that anywhere in the world, so it might be well worth a look:

A more detailed write-up on that project is forthcoming.

Thursday I continued working on my presentation at the Open Coop. I also ripped the video of minister of economic affairs Maxime Verhagen endorsing open data from the NOS site, because their site sucks.

Friday was the big day of Social Cities of Tomorrow where I got the honor to be the first to present our case of ‘Apps for Amsterdam’ to the assembled audience. It was a wonderful event put together by our esteemed friends and colleagues of the Mobile City: Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal who have been leaders in this field for the better part of the past ten years. The keynotes by Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill were superb and they remain a source of inspiration for our creative work.

I feel like I have to remark on two things that I thought of during the conference:

The entire day was infused with a critical stance against open data and transparency within government. Usman Haque served the opening volley with a criticism of indiscriminate data transparency and an approach to further civic engagement by giving people the tools to collect data themselves. After that Dan Hill also added some criticism against traditional methods of social change.

I agree with their points and criticisms and I would have liked to address them but that was impossible in the time given to me to present our case. I would like to say that if anybody in the Netherlands has been deeply involved on all levels in the government transparency movement and is acutely aware of the problems, issues and realities of data transparency, it is probably us ¹. Besides that we have employed most of the techniques Dan Hill presented during the last couple of years: shaping decision making processes, deploying long lasting interventions and using the sleights of hand required to realign large organizations and work with far too many people.

We have been and will be hard liners for the cause of government transparency out of necessity and conviction. I will always defend that data that has already been collected by government and carries no issues of privacy or national security with it, belongs to the public and should be accessible by the public.

The other issue is that the conference should was probably most valuable to the people in the Netherlands who are not as current on design and technology as I have come to take for granted. The lack of reflection was painfully clear in some of the questions asked by the audience. This is a common issue, but I have seen it often in the past during Mobile Mondays or the lecture Manuel DeLanda gave in Amsterdam.

Dan Hill talked about going from the matter to the meta level and back again and all three keynoters showed that they are very capable of doing that. In the Netherlands I have found that many practitioners struggle a lot with the matter and they don’t have the time or the interest to ascend to the meta level, even though that would feed back positively into their material undertakings.

I have been looking for collaborators in the Netherlands who look beyond their narrow field and manage to recombine multiple theoretical and practical strands back into their work but there are very few. I hosted the UX Book Club Amsterdam a while, but found that most attendees there took their field of design too narrowly and the field of UX too seriously. Similarly the Berlage Institute is doing a postdoctoral course ‘to explore the forces that shape the built environment in the contemporary world’ which is limited to architects. I don’t know anybody who believes that the problems that will plague our cities in the next fifty years will be solved drawing from the monoculture of architecture school.

It is as if most people in the Netherlands are trapped within the operational closure of their own practice.

I don’t know where I would fall, but I struggle every day with striking a balance between theory and practice and I think if you do not feel that struggle you should take a long hard look at what it is you are doing.

After Social Cities of Tomorrow we had a party at our offices in the Open Coop because they officially incorporated as a cooperation and are set to do great things. The party was rather tremendous and good parties are key to getting things done in Amsterdam.

And now it is Sunday while I am typing these notes and because of a lack of gourmet coffee, it is off to the Hubbub studio in Utrecht to be the murder board for Kars’s LIFT presentation.

Last week was cut a bit short by a commute to Amsterdam at the end (touching on that in a bit).

Monday I settled in at the Agora Collective for the week to work from there. I mentioned before that I really needed a fixed studio space to work from. I wasn’t really aiming for a coworking space, but Agora is a great place to be at.

I spent more of the week in XCode and playing around various iPhone development ins and outs.

Wednesday I viewed an office at Kottbusser Tor and then made my way to the HIIG for a discussion on how the internet changes democracy (about which I wrote ‘A deeper simulation fever’).

Thursday I had to go to the Netherlands early to attend the closing event for ‘Nederland van Boven’ a VPRO series featuring aerial videography and data visualizations. The production team spent a lot of time getting at data to be able to show it on television. I was invited to debate for the cause of open data alongside Alexander Klöpping against the sceptic positions of Marleen Stikker and Arco Groothedde.

On my visit I briefly dropped by the Open Coop and on Friday morning I skated a bit across the canals of Amsterdam before jumping into the train back to Berlin again.

Anil’s last point in “Upgrades” triggered me to write this, because this is the way we’ve (i.e. Hubbub or Monster Swell) been working together for a while now (and yes Spry Fox is great!) and trying to figure out what the best way moving forward is.

Trying to recruit people seems to me to be a fool’s game. I always feel a bit sorry if I see good people posting jobs or people posting good jobs, because I know how hard those are to fill. At this stage in my life, I wouldn’t work for a company unless they were ridiculously special and made me an extremely good offer. If I look around I don’t know anybody with skills looking for a job.

In short: I wouldn’t want to work with anybody who would work for me.

This isn’t to say that people who work at companies don’t have skills, but those that do are highly sought after and usually have no trouble shaping their own career paths without help from online job postings or head hunters. Of course there are exceptions and if you are serious about hiring and growing a company that way, you would do well take a look at Netflix’s playbook.

Really Networked

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The way we have to do it both practically from an overhead, financial risk and skill mix point of view as from a conceptual stance where project demands and excellence drives organizational structure is a kind of networked agency. But as Spry Fox explains, this is a newfound model compared to the old networked agency. Which used to be mostly agency cores supplemented by more than occasional freelancers.

The way to work with the best of the best: usually fluid usually creative partnerships, open for repeats, trust and transfer of agency. People need to be rewarded both financially but also with work that is worthwhile. Trust means accepting the edges of your collaborators as a tradeof for their ability and trusting that what they do will be the best to all your ability

To be able to do this, some basic structures need to be in place both physically, infrastructurally but also conceptually. Aligning cognitive wave lengths with a suitable group of people and keeping hold of freelancers with meaningful availability is hard enough as it is.

What seem to me to be important ingredients for building these structures are:

• A strong thematic focus so that everybody participating knows what it is you are doing and why you are doing it. A repeatable but also scalable back story.
• Buy-in. Ensure that everybody has enough skin in the game for it not to be a 9-to-5 commitment. The success of the project is shared success. They are partners not employees or outsourcing shops.

There are tons of issues which I’m going to leave out for now. I don’t have the time or the ability right now to write the end-all on this subject and we’re inventing most of this as we go along anyway. Your experiences and questions would be helpful.

Update: after a late night conversation, we dubbed this the Heist model of collaborating.

Update: James Governor points to a Business Week article on the same trend “Entrepreneurs: Struggling to Recruit Software Engineers” (without much of a solution though).

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.