Work

To all you who have won awards (and to all you who haven’t):

Running dreadfully behind with these weeknotes so this would have to be a short one.

Ik was twee weken geleden op een bijeenkomst van de STT over serious games en ik was een beetje teleurgesteld dat de enige kritische reflectie op het onderwerp van de dag —kansen in serious games en gamification— kwam van super-filosoof Jos de Mul. Hoe goed zijn kritiek dan ook was, kritiek van een filosoof is te gemakkelijk weg te wuiven door mensen uit de praktijk. Nederland blijf een land van handelaars en nering is hier de makkelijkste manier om de handen op elkaar te krijgen.

I was at a meeting this weekend by the Pop-up City and the documentary displayed about urban development fits into a wider recent trend where people kick the creative class and blame them for society’s ills. Usually the dreaded specter of gentrification is pulled out to show how apathetic and different and outright bad the Creative Class 1 are.

I thought this piece: “Amazon and the reintermediation of the spectacle” my Michael Smethurst was well worth reading. Here are some choice excerpts, but these are mainly for me. You should read the entire thing.

Monday

On Monday I let go a bunch of stalling side projects which were not going anywhere.

Another long form weeknote, history recapping brought by the fantastic Memolane service which aggregates my various media chronologically so I can quickly write this overview.

A new experiment, extended weeknotes combined with assorted reading and outtakes. I think this may be more fun for me to write and more fun for you to read.

A bunch of work on finalizing Code 4, work on culiacan continues steadily nearing a launch sometime soon, and kicking off ideation and sketches for tlalnepantla.

Monday I went off exploring a fort for an upcoming Hack de Overheid event. The industrial scenery and weather at the sea locks of IJmuiden was positively apocalyptic that day.

Last week a bunch of visual progress was made on culiacán. Expect an August release on that.

Last Monday I paid an information architecture house call at a friend at one of the beleaguered (a somewhat redundant word when discussing print publications here) Dutch weeklies. Looking forward to advice taken to heart and maybe some online Dutch media that I can consume with pleasure.

Monday I spent all day planning the Statlas release and encountered some showstoppers still. That night I went to Utrecht for This Happened.

Monday I did some support and then went off to the UvA to present on data journalism together with Stef.

The week was mostly spent doing stuff for either Statlas or for another project on the essence of architecture.

Belayed notes for the week before last but right now I’m bored out of my skull so it’s as good a time as any other.

A massively busy week this last, and going on a probably well deserved surfing trip to Bilbao next week so expect things to quiet down a bit here.

Things are speeding up and these are taking too much time so I won’t know if I can keep it up. Still I think there is a lot of value in creating an archive of our work. And I think these have netted the most consistently positive response compared to other blogposts here.

Lots of writing last week. We submitted the maguro project as a practice report to the DiGRA conference. Also wrote a bit of damage control on the Apps for Amsterdam contest regarding the implications of a certain submission: “Dude! Where’s my car?” Decisions made border on the ludicrous and it falls upon us as Hack de Overheid to choose the side of sanity. Finally I punched out some meta-writing about the conundrums of writing (or trying to write) for larger audiences: “Why write about games?”

Is it Wednesday already? We’re a bit in a production down cycle, but you wouldn’t notice for the lack of administrativa that needs dealing with.

A busy week, maguro got completely finished and delivered to client. Culiacan managed to overcome the horrible Media Temple hurdle.

The weekly bit of media consisted of a brief Radio 1 excerpt about the issue of new anti-piracy legislation. This is of course futile and I did my best to explain such in a couple of minutes and a blogpost.

It looks like the past period of turbulent ascent is over and the plane is going to be level for a bit. That does not mean that there isn’t an awful lot of awesome stuff on deck waiting to be published nor that there aren’t a bunch of new prospects on the horizon. More on those in due time.

Last week Monday we saw the final work presentations at the Willem de Kooning Academy. It was a great experience and I was really blown away by the breadth of some of the work presented. Nevertheless it remains a challenge to fit a full data visualization curriculum within the course of 4 weeks. Given the time we had I am very proud of the progress made.

A busy and monotonous week with deadlines for many long running projects.

Maguro got its next test and nicely stood up to everything thrown at it.

Busily so briefly.

Drive by-ing these notes twothree four days late. Yeah, these are those kind of weeks.

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

A different format for these weeknotes:

Ik ben meer dan een beetje benieuwd hoe het aanbestedingstraject van grote ICT-projecten bij de overheid verloopt. De uitkomsten zijn zo raar en uiteenlopend dat ik me afvraag of er een eenduidig model achter steekt. En als er dan niks onoorbaars gebeurt tijdens zo’n traject, waarom zou ik er dan niet bij mogen zitten? Ik ben best bereid een NDA te tekenen.

Solid progress on Maguro in Utrecht. Spent a large amount of time over there also to evaluate the PLAY Pilots project’s succes. Started building a prototype that runs more in real-time and on timed events (and all that in a traditional web framework).

Got some reinforcements at the office:

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.

Last week was the week things got into gear again for 2011.

The ephemeral week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Last week was mired by the flu which made it a bad week for production (and only slightly less bad for meetings).

Urbanode running from an Android Phone from VURB on Vimeo. The movie shows an Android phone controlling the stagelights at the Melkweg using a colour picker on a webpage.

A somewhat more downpaced week with a bit of a cold in the middle, but:

Alle samples van Bandjesland staan online en het is af. En dat is —zoals ze zeggen— ‘a wrap’.

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.

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.