This week I gave an interview to Süddeutsche Zeitung about our project Politwoops which turned out pretty well:

Just before German class I was interviewed in German about altogether different matters:

This is @ alper getting interviewed about @ kantberlin on German National TV twitter.com/chriseidhof/st…

— Chris Eidhof (@chriseidhof) May 21, 2013

KANT is slowly shaping up:

I received this device to be able to live digitally in the outdoors:

And end of that week I spent some time writing and especially my piece on data was picked up nicely and got a record amount of views:

Very good point made by @ alper on releasing pseudonymized locational data alper.nl/dingen/2013/05… #privacy #datamining

— Timo Grossenbacher (@wnstns) May 25, 2013

Wie Daten richtig anonymisiert werden sollten vor ihrer Veröffentlichung. Post von @ alper alper.nl/dingen/2013/05… via @ opendatacity

— Thomas Husmann (@thusmann) May 25, 2013

RT @ wnstns: do not release pseudonymized locational data- by @ alper alper.nl/dingen/2013/05… #privacy #datamining

— offenenetze (@offenenetze) May 25, 2013

Ähnlich argumentierte heute @ jburnmurdoch bei #jpd13 MT @ opendatacity: Post von @ alper zu anonymisierten Datensätzen alper.nl/dingen/2013/05…

— Max Zierer (@maxzierer) May 24, 2013

Post von @ alper in Sachen re:log: Warum anonymisierte Datensätze nicht veröffentlicht werden sollten (in Engl.) alper.nl/dingen/2013/05… #rp13

— OpenDataCity (@opendatacity) May 24, 2013

And the next day Peter and Michelle got married which was a tremendous amount of fun:

What happened that week was a bunch of work and getting a desk from IKEA to work on at the new place:

The Möbeltaxi driver took us on an interesting shortcut through the old service tunnels of Tempelhof —I am amazed that Moves tracked it as well as it did— which might be fun to do some urban exploring in at some point:

Back then we were still drinking some horrible leftover coffee brewed in a two step process:

And I had a talk for at Bits of Freedom that I sketched out on our brilliant new whiteboard:

I promised the people future shock and I think I delivered that to some extent.

Na de avond van @ bitsoffreedom resoneert bij mij een opmerking van @ alper: het vermogen tot gebruik van technologie is wat ons mens maakt.

— Xander Bouwman (@xbouwman) May 29, 2013

I spent a full day with the team on Tuesday working on KAIGARA:

I drank very awesome coffee that Angelo had brought back from his road trip along the west coast of the USA:

We celebrated shipping some projects that night with Kars and Simon and the next day I was back at Hubbub for another day of work. That night it was off to the Open State offices in Amsterdam for a bit of envisioning with our new managing director. A very solid and constructive session, well catered by our in-house team of Bite Me:

My work setup at the brilliant Koko:

The Thursday I spent working at the Open Coop and preparing my Python programming course I gave on the now defunct Gidsy.

Friday I took the train back to Berlin and it was confirmed to me again that train companies are stupid. If I take a different train to Berlin I need to pay the difference in distance even if I start and end in the same place:

And Saturday I also managed squeeze out a long overdue Recess!.

So lots of stuff and more to follow.

I did post the answer to the most frequently asked question I get, which is how you actually pronounce my name:

http://soundcloud.com/alper/pronunciation-of-my-name

And in between stuff I dropped in on this book presentation at c-base, which was pretty weird:

And I had a strange encounter with Berlin police who it seems cannot look around them.

Furthermore I did some account maintenance for Open State, getting things in order for our new CEO who arrives next week.

Week 313 was spent in the Netherlands with a somewhat hectic visit. I spent a lot of time at the Hubbub studio and at the Open Coop.

And of course the inevitable five (!) visits to the Village who were serving only Coffee Collective coffees when I was there:

And that Friday was Free Bassel Day in remembrance of our friend who is still imprisoned in a Syrian prison:

And then it was an ICE back to Berlin already:

I did manage to get some good writing in those two weeks. First one piece about why levying a tax on data is not a bad idea at all: Taxing data is not crazy. And the week after that about Jaron Lanier who is a crazy person with some interesting ideas: Who owns the future?

TORREON should be about finished by now. And last Friday we also forcibly launched the German incarnation of Politwoops now with an accompanying Twitter account because the SPD chancellor candidate posted something he shouldn’t have.

Also I’m doing another bout of programming education for non-programmers in Amsterdam next week with a course and a meetup. More on that in a bit.

And I finished my Recess! post.

To my shame it took me until Friday night to write my second installment of Recess!

I also got in touch with the government of Tempelhof-Schöneberg to procure all building permits for the area which had some disappointing results. More on that later.

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).

In this interview about Liquid Democracy you can read quite clearly how the technical mandate drives the direction of the project. Something that may not be very desirable if you think of it as a democracy-centric issue and not a technology-centric one.

So to see how hard it would be to write something similar in vanilla django. It’s easy to hate on django but you can find tons of people who can work on this in just about every major city, the framework and the documentation are mature and many parts of the framework can be called excellent ³.

I thought putting something together that at its core implements a delegated voting engine should be doable in an afternoon and it was. What took the most time was playing around with the settings of the testrunner which I hadn’t really used before. So the watersnake app in this project does majority voting on single proposals with support for delegation ⁴. To see it work you have to run the tests, but building this out into a full fledged (web) app that can be deployed to heroku with a single command is technically trivial (and also time consuming).

This wasn’t a stretch to implement right now because I’m also doing some other projects which border on collaborative writing/decision making/filtering. As always, technology is neither the problem or the solution, but certain technical systems grant different socio-technical affordances than others. I will probably not work on this unless there is a clear demand, but I thought it would be useful to debunk the idea that building such a system needs to be difficult or complex.

Wednesday we got a new person to join us over here at Praxis: the elusive iksi who seems to be rather more connected to my Dutch friends than I had foreseen.

The rest of the week Kars Alfrink was here in Berlin for copresent sprints on all the running projects and you’ll read more about all that stuff in last week’s Hubbub weeknotes.

I did bang out a Re:publica submission, kick started a hackathon (there’s a separate post on that) and started a neighborhood initiative.

We have done a lot of what we used to call ‘civic hacking’ in the past, a phrase that has been used so often by now that I’m slightly sickened when using it. But there is still a lot to be done and both resistance against the movement and co-optation are growing. In Germany, where I live now, things are still in a pre-dormant state. The internet is in a rather sorry state here and people are good at complaining but less so at changing things.

Saturday’s hackathon is meant to focus efforts and do random stuff. The stuff you normally never get around to doing because of the day-to-day business. I have some rather unorthodox ideas to change things but I could use some help. So join us!

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.

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.

@polledemaagt An account manager is the clearest sign that you are paying too much. — @alper

Thinking of stuff to do while in Berlin and underemployed (in the beginning maybe).

Last week’s Pirate Party victory in Berlin where they got 10% of the vote should serve as a wake-up call to left-ish political parties that are paying lip service to the internet. There is a massive untapped populace who are completely disillusioned with the out of touch politics of today. GroenLinks and D'66’s only luck right now is that the Dutch Pirate Party is so incompetent for now.

And it seems that time travel maps are still popular while we still don’t have access to the data. Here’s a project being executed by my office mate Arjan Scherpenisse:

Skimmed this book by the Council for Social Development (RMO) about the public debate in the age of the internet:

Tuesday

Our friends at Two for Joy Coffee Roasters have opened their second store in Amsterdam. It’s a new favorite place to work and meet:

Kars put the slides for his dconstruct talk on the Transformers online. Well worth a read for a realistic view on the city and games.

Work on Apps voor Nederland and culiacan working at pace. I’m very proud of the community that is coming together.

Wednesday

I dropped by Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Ward Wijndelts who are settling in their new offices for their startup:

I concluded the day by chairing the jury deliberations for Apps for Noord-Holland. The day was concluded with the award ceremony and festivities.

Thursday

Finished reading The City & The City by China Miéville. A poignant book. The science-fiction book for this year. I read it on Readmill which is a pleasant enough reading experience but I don’t know yet if it will be the home of my future library.

Dropped by the great design team at Buro Pony in Rotterdam to discuss the future of the specialty design store: Dufarge.

Met with Christian Friedrich at Rotterdam’s new espresso bar Hopper.

Caught up a bit on the Fyra back with Yuri van Geest. A pleasure as always.

Friday

Friday was concluded in Utrecht with more writing and working at the Hubbub studio.

We had a great time playing The Resistance a mashup between Mastermind and Werewolf.

Yes, that is the best we have found thusfar for a Microsoft Surface Table.

Catching up on the news of the week in die Zeit, here a profile of all the elected Pirates:

Most of them have either studied sciences or work in IT (or both). Politicians who can do maths. That may be an actual solution to the economic crisis we are in.

And an editorial about the lack of responsibility in society both on the macro as in the microscale:

Blogged about the Foursquare screen we made with a video which finally wrapped up that project (try to find a slot between 12:00 and 17:00 to make it to Leidseplein on a workday).

Interesting bit of news that TfL is implementing systems to prevent Oyster overcharging. This is where the transit card in the Netherlands is used as a way to surreptitiously draw money from unsuspecting travelers.

Found this random shirt design site: Zufallsshirt.de

Wrote a small review in Dutch of the theater experience De Club we went to last week. It aims to be an engine for social change instead of a traditional play, but in that respect it is somewhat lacking still. We are somewhat interested because this —creating systems that yield interesting experiences— is our work.

Tuesday I finally got to see this video from our visit to the fortress:

We are quite busy planning the next events for Hack de Overheid.

Wednesday was spent working in Utrecht and I got featured in an interview where I called out gamification for the bullshit it is at Virtueel Platform: “De keerzijde van gamification”

Thursday my profile got featured on The Next Speaker where you can now hire me to present at your event.

Amsterdam is also increasingly getting more machine readable:

We are also very glad with the funding of Venus Patrol a publication that we hope can shed a new light on the relation of games and culture.

I was present at the launch of a new Dutch Literature Magazine: Das Magazin (yes, German name…).

Friday after breakfast with Dirk van Oosterbosch en Alexander Zeh, I helped out with painting the Open Cooperatie.

Tuesday I was in Utrecht to work on the Code 4 presentation for CHI Sparks. Working at the garden again was a very enjoyable experience made more so by the unexpected visit of Christine who’s making forays into game design herself.

A lot of the rest of the week was occupied with testing and preparing Statlas for a launch this week, which it did, so you can check it out and read more about that in next week’s notes.

Mr. Morozov visited the Netherlands which made for an interesting night out along with a very unexpected meetup with Babak and Ulla.

My takeaway from Evgeny Morozov can be summarized in this tweet:

Conclusion of a night with @evgenymorozov: government meddling on the internet doesn’t do us any good and can only hurt us in the long run.

Government control of the internet’s technologies seldom nets anything and is usually implemented on the back of scare tactics about terrorism or child pornography. When things turn sour, the systems that were deployed can be used to a very great effect against the entire population without much effort. This means it is imperative to maintain a free and open internet to safeguard freedom.

Thursday it was off to Arnhem to present at the CHI Sparks conference. The place where all seriously academic HCI people get together to present their findings. I presented on a serious game we made with Hubbub in the Games and Play track. Thanks to the organization for giving us the stage and thanks for the kind support from friends in the audience. I hope our presentation was worth your while.

And that was that, like I said, this week is even more exciting and with the return of Kars from the Land of the Rising Sun, it promises to become a hot Summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress on the design framework of Statlas. This week we should see that coming together and look at the progress on the renderer, but I’m getting ahead of ourselves here. I rounded up the research I did on personal mapping platforms that are online now.

Dinner with Johnny Wonder Jaap was nice, collaboration on the public affairs side of things looks promising:

Apps for Amsterdam should come along nicely and we should announce a bunch of stuff this week (or else!). You can pencil in March 12th as the next Hack de Overheid event but don’t tell anybody I told you.

I also went to the Open Streetmap drinks in Amsterdam. Wherecamp EU may take place in Amsterdam, so that would be very good geo news.

Ik denk dat mijn initiatief gebaat is met een grote hoeveelheid openheid en ik denk zeker ook niet dat ik het in mijn eentje zal kunnen doen. Daarom zal ik binnenkort op dit weblog uitleggen wat ik wil hebben (en wat ik bereid ben te bouwen).

Maar nu eerst even iets anders.

Mobiliteitsmanagement

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SenterNovem is een overheidsinstelling in Nederland die subsidies uitdeelt aan mensen die daar nuttige dingen mee denken te kunnen doen. Ik was een paar weken terug in het kantoor van SenterNovem in Utrecht bij een informatiebijeenkomst over hun programma mobiliteitsmanagement.

Ik schrijf hier een verslag van de bijeekomst en probeer daarbij de inhoud te filteren uit de overheidstaal ¹.

Belangrijke informatie van de eerste spreker was dat er binnenkort een kwaliteitsimpuls reisinformatie komt. Ik kwam hier later meer over te weten van iemand van Connexxion. Het houdt in dat er een platform komt voor dynamische reisinformatie door heel Nederland. Ik kom hier later nog op terug.

Daarna kwam Klaartje Arntzen die vertelde over het programma en de invulling ervan. Het programma mobiliteitsmanagement van SenterNovem is er om veranderingen in reisgedrag te bewerkstelligen en de bereikbaarheid in Nederland te vergroten.

Wie?

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Bedrijven en instellingen die zich met mobiliteit bezighouden en belang hebben bij de uitkomst van een project ² die een project in Nederland uitvoeren komen in aanmerking voor het programma.

Budgetten

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Projecten worden ondergedeeld in Haalbaarheidsstudies, Onderzoek & Ontwikkeling en Praktijkexperimenten.

Haalbaarheidsstudies krijgen 75% van de kosten vergoed tot een maximum van €40'000. Onderzoek & Ontwikkelingsprojecten krijgen 50% van de kosten tot max €120'000. Praktijkexperimenten krijgen 25% van de kosten tot een maximum van €350'000.

Er is €1.5M beschikbaar voor praktijkexperimenten en €500k voor haalbaarheidsstudies en O&O (elk?).

Proces

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Er is uiteraard sprake van een proces. De termijn voor indiening is verlengd tot woensdag 2 april 2008. De kosten zijn subsidiabel vanaf het moment van indienen. Een adviescommissie adviseert over de rangschikking aan de hand van de gestelde criteria ³.

De criteria zijn:

• Bijdrage aan de doelstelling van het programma (hoe nieuw en hoeveel impact)
• Bijdrage aan bereikbaarheid en kwaliteit van de leefomgeving (CO2-effect en verkeersveiligheid)
• Kans van slagen project (reizigers laten meedenken)

Senternovem biedt begeleiding door informatie, adviesgesprekken en het bespreken van concepten, de adviescommissie velt een oordeel en na de toekenning van het geld dragen zij zorg voor de beheer en begeleiding.

Praktijkvoorbeelden

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Hierna kwam iemand van Connexxion vertellen over praktijkvoorbeelden van projecten die al dan niet gesubsidieerd waren en al dan niet geslaagd waren. Het was een duidelijk verhaal van ‘where the metal hits the road’ dat de werkelijkheid meestal een stuk weerbarstiger is dan in dit soort plannen staat en er rekening gehouden moet worden met generaties aan systemen die al in functie zijn.

Subsidies

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Ik heb een gesprek met een subsidieconsulent van SenterNovem gehad. Deze kon mij niet al teveel verder helpen, behalve dan met de constatering dat mijn idee wel degelijk innovatief was en dat ik maar een aanvraag moest indienen en het met de juiste persoon bespreken om te kijken hoe we het beste hiermee verder kunnen.

In dat gesprek stelde ik nog wat dingen aan de orde, maar degene met wie ik sprak was te low level ⁴ om me een zinnig antwoord te kunnen geven.

Openheid van boeken

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Ik heb wat brochures meegenomen over het programma in zijn algemeenheid en (verantwoordings)publicaties met daarin de projecten waaraan subsidie is toegekend in elk jaar met speelse illustraties en leuke verhalen over hoe goed het allemaal wel niet is gegaan. Wat me daarin meteen opviel was dat bij geen enkel project stond wat het toegekende subsidiebedrag was voor dat project ⁵.

Ik weet niet wat de reden is om die bedragen niet te publiceren. Het lijkt me dat het de eerlijkheid ten goede komt als de bedragen publiek zijn en dat het toekomstige subsidieaanvragers ook iets geeft om op te mikken wanneer ze hun aanvraag indienen.

Openheid van data

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Bij de presentatie van de man van Connexxion viel me op dat sommige van de dingen die hij noemde al lang ontwikkeld zijn door ondere OV-bedrijven in Nederland. Volgens mij hebben bussen van Connexxion bijvoorbeeld nog steeds geen bord waarop staat hoe de halte heet waar je nu bent.

Het lijkt me een aardige eis aan projecten om binnen redelijkheid hun methoden en data open te stellen.

Dynamische Reisinformatie

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Ik schreef hier al eerder over en de man van Connexxion was buitengewoon negatief over het vrijgeven van de statische informatie omdat die ‘van hen’ was. Het feit dat reizigers al twee keer betalen voor die informatie negeerde hij vanzelfsprekend.

De partijen die in Nederland verenigd zijn in een platform om de reisinformatie te regelen, houden zich op dit moment meer bezig met de invoer van systemen voor dynamische reisinformatie, zodat je dus op elk moment kunt weten waar vervoersmiddelen zich bevinden.

Hiervoor wordt een nieuw platform opgericht en gelet op hoe mensen in deze sector aankijken tegen hun klanten ben ik niet hoopvol dat het algemene publiek iets met die informatie mag gaan doen of dat partijen als Google Transit hier voet aan de grond gaan krijgen.