For project Statlas, we kicked off the design framework with Alexander and made some good strides with that. Also met with Kilian for progress on the renderer. I acquired a small Python script from Henkjan that we were allowed to release as open source, a Rijksdriehoekscoordinatien to WGS84 converter. I had been meaning to write this myself, but felt we shouldn’t duplicate the effort.
I’m writing this sitting in a foggy Village Bagels in Amsterdam looking out onto the snowy streets. It’s been a while, and things are different than they were a year ago.
Release van Dutchstats een online interactieve datavisualisatie van verkiezingsuitslagen en statistieken voor Nederlandse gemeenten door Monster Swell een Amsterdams datavisualisatie-bureau i.o.
A busy week the last one, met with several people busy in the field of open transit data to the point of actively starting projects or planning to integrally solve the problem. Good to see that a lot of momentum (and perceived value) is in that space.
We hebben bij ons op de studio in @ouroffice binnenkort twee bureau’s vrij. Wil je op bureau met de leukste en creatiefste mensen van het Volkskrantgebouw — Eric, Maarten en ik— roep dan en we kunnen kijken of het past.
Last week was the first week that I was back from the Levant. I have notes for the three weeks in between, but I think I’ll skip those (though plenty of interesting stuff happened over there too).
Morgenochtend staat er op de opiniepagina een stuk in de NRC.next van mij over de noodzaak van open openbaar vervoersgegevens in relatie tot de huidige vervoerders en het NDOV.
Last week I attended the Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton (our hero) as one of its speakers. I managed to jot down some quotes by him. All of these are paraphrases but they’re good ones:
De laatste dagen staan een beetje in het teken van gelekte e-mailtjes van, naar en door invloedrijke mensen in Nederland. Een van de recentere is die van de nieuwe hoofdredacteur van het NRC, Peter Vandermeersch, naar zijn redactie, hieronder (via):
Goal # I want to create a simple visualization tool for Processing so I can input a set of values for each Dutch municipality and then color a map based on those values.
Last week was mostly busy with getting http://playpilots.nl to talk nicely to the Stereoscoop live game and make stuff work (mostly) properly back and forth. Synchronizing physical installations with websites is always fun.
We moved in our new desks and got rid of the old ones. This clears up a lot of space in the studio and we now have a fifth desk open for lease. If you’re design minded and interested in a great place in a creative hub of Amsterdam, get in touch.
Last week was concerned with finalizing stuff for the first presentation of guadalajara. The current concept was more exploratory, we do not seem to have found the point of relevance yet to move forward.
This week was dominated by a bunch of things. Preparations for Stekkerfest and touching up the website for that were very important. Also anticipation for the live demonstration of the first PLAY Pilots live game by Fourcelabs.
This week was completely spent with work each day on project Ebi, better known as PLAY Pilots. The site is due to launch this week (it in fact launched yesterday night).
Today marks the end of the Dutch presence in Afghanistan and here’s a small data oriented tribute to those that have fallen in service. Inspired by the Home and Away visualization by Stamen, I decided to see if something similar for our Task Force Uruzgan would provide any insight.
I don’t know how I missed this job in my post this year on “New disciplines for a real-time data world” but this week the position for a Data Griot and Community Activator popped up at Last.fm and was brought to my attention by Chris Heathcote’s post who did some griotting into Grindr (an interesting app worth a post on its own).
Dit rapport is tijdens de verhuizingen een beetje tussen wal en schip geraakt. Het lijkt me goed om de gedeelten die ik al had aangestreept even snel te bloggen voordat we diep op de openbaar vervoersinformatie-situatie in Nederland ingaan.
Monday # Continuation of Ebi and first deployment to the server. One of my biggest beefs with Django is that any fresh deploy to a server will cost you at least one hour, despite it being the same old stuff you have been doing for ever (as opposed to App Engine).
Afgelopen dinsdag gaf ik een presentatie op Online Tuesday over de toekomst van het internet. Ik had me niet geheel beseft dat de brief van de presentaties subtiel verlegd was naar doe een pitch over de toekomst van je bedrijf, maar des te beter eigenlijk.
Ik heb hier al geschreven over datavisualisatie in campagnes in de Verenigde Staten en het Verenigd Koninkrijk. De campagnes hier lijken te klein, te kort en te weinig budget hebben om serieus mee te spelen met de grote jongens maar verschillende partijen doen toch hier en daar hun best.
Interesting to see that there were a ton of election result charting, display and visualization sites that popped up just before the elections. It seems that this is a hot topic.
Last weekend we released Dutchstats, an online interactive datavisualization of election results and local statistics for Dutch municipalities by Monster Swell, an Amsterdam dataviz agency.
Last week we had this piece of news in the Netherlands: “Scholenranglijst van Trouw heeft effect” (School ranking by Dutch newspaper Trouw sorts effect): Trouw has a database on their website with the statistics from our board of education which they editorialize and republish on their Schoolprestaties site. The news piece reports on research that shows this ranking has a real effect both in prospective school choice and in school improvement.
With the upcoming Dutch elections the campaigns are heating up and we will be allowed to choose our parliamentary representatives yet again. It is interesting to see how statistics and their visualization are used to clarify and position issues in our complex world.
This entire weekend was taken up by Amsterdam Music Hackday for which Alex, Dirk and I had planned to build a prototype version of a surface table projector for music discovery.
Presentatie gegeven over open data en de obstakels waar je in de praktijk mee te maken krijgt. En passant ook een open data maturity model gemaakt wat wel enig hout snijdt.
Some posts that had been sitting in my browser tabs for a while combined together in a brand new job guide for 2010. You can also read this as a follow-up post to my previous post on Why developers are important, this is which developers are important. This post has been lying in my drafts folder for a while, but it has actually only become more relevant.
Some ideas start out small and then grow larger than you thought imaginable. Coworker.nl is one such idea. This is a write up about how it came to be and how you can build your own.
Snel een visualisatie in elkaar gedraaid op basis van mijn Europees Parlement visualisatie van vorige week. De huidige verkiezingen voor de gemeenteraad 2010 (klik voor groot):
Afgelopen donderdag werd ik samen met de manager van Dwaze Zaken en de burgermeester geïnterviewd (Radio 1 link 1) voor Radio1 over Foursquare. Foursquare het mobiele spel, vrienden-vinder en sociale gids die we afgelopen jaar naar Amsterdam hebben gehaald en dat nu ook overal speelbaar is.
Like I said yesterday, I added support for the Amsterdam subway to fakesubwayapis and fakesubwayapis-data. My forks: gae-fakesubwayapis and gae-fakesubwayapis-data.