Month: January 2011

Transparantie in ICT-aanbestedingen

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.

Maar dan iets anders om dat uiteenlopende van die websites te verminderen, stel ik voor:

Voor elke site die gebouwd wordt met overheidsgeld en in het bijzonder de rijksoverheid, lokale overheden en zeker ook alle semi-overheden, een footer met daarin:

  • De kosten voor oplevering
  • De kosten voor operatie en onderhoud
  • Naam van de bouwer(s)
  • Facultatief: een link naar een blogpost van de opdrachtgever of de bouwer waarin de kosten worden verantwoord

Hierbij een keurmerk/manifest waarin deze regels worden uitgelegd zodat ook commerciële sites het kunnen adopteren. Vertel me niet dat dat de online wereld in Nederland niet zou verbeteren.

Week 201

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).

Marcus McBride Liberation Fest

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.

Hunk Designer at work

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

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.

iPad, iPad, Blackberry, MacBook, Monocle on half a table: this is THE place

Week 200

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 did a call on Monster Swell to collaborate more with designers at any and all levels and got some response to that. More are welcome.

For project Maguro I started prototyping the game’s data model and the message queue using Celery. Thursday I went on to make a playable barebones version of the game in django. The team was pretty psyched about that turned out.

Administration wise started the new year with a new sheet of books.

Socially, I went to the Django meetup. The Djangocon in Amsterdam is going to be awesome. Also the ISOC had their New Year’s Drink on Thursday.

Lastly on Friday I had a meeting with the city of Amsterdam and the Waag for Hack de Overheid to talk about the series of open data events this spring and an app contest for the city.

Week 199

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

Ons Nieuws — Het laatste nieuws van NOS.nl

Monday I built a quick javascript mashup with the new API by NOS called ‘Ons Nieuws’ (Our News): http://monsterswell.com/projects/onsnieuws/ inspired by the trend in glanceable display websites. The write-up is here: “Glanceable news using the new NOS API”

Blogged about the catch-22 in Dutch open data: “Bloggers, transparency and our Catch-22”

Hack de Overheid is also busy bringing a whole lot of awesome to open data in 2011. Stay tuned and look over there for announcements.

Started setup for the next iteration of Dutchstats. Kicked off the technical part of Dutchstats (the renderer) with Kilian Valkhof, drafted a set of functional and non-functional requirements and setup a project repository.

Did a bunch of deployment stuff to create a rather complex django site for mérida which is a relief to get up and running.

Game design inferno

Switched prototyping maguro from twisted to Django because that is still the technology I’m most familiar with (prototyping should not be about technology acquaintance). We had a meeting with the team and after some discussion we played a game concept that was pretty fun.

Friday we had a geek breakfast with Peter and Taco having a full English at Greenwoods. The food was good as was the conversation. We should really do this regularly.

Full English

Then I spent the rest of the day with James Burke working on the new version of the Hack de Overheid site.

HdO Website

In the weekend I picked up a second hand Grote Bosatlas 51e editie for a real bargain. It still is a fantastic cornucopia of maps and infographics. Leafing through it made me all nostalgic like I used to do back in school exploring far away places on the map.

Mapping/Infographic Cornucopia

Gelezen in 2010

Naar aanleiding van dit lijstje van meneer Webb. Ik heb elf boeken uitgelezen in 2010. Schandelijk schamel aantal, ver van de 1 boek per week waar ik naar streef (maar ik heb wél 73 films gezien).

  1. “Zero History” door William Gibson
  2. “Spook Country” door William Gibson
  3. “Red ons Maria Montanelli” door Herman Koch
  4. “Designing for the Digital Age” door Kim Goodwin
  5. “Senorita’s” door Christophe Vekeman
  6. “A Pattern Language” door Christopher Alexander
  7. “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” door Raph Koster
  8. “Sonneten en andere gedichten” door F. Petrarca
  9. “Het Diner” door Herman Koch
  10. “Visualizing Data” door Ben Fry
  11. “Makers” door Cory Doctorow

Weinig meer over te zeggen dan dat de boeken die vetgedrukt zijn aanraders zijn.

Nog: Ik heb de twee bovenste boeken van Gibson gelezen op mijn iPhone (Stanza) en zonet Freedom uit op mijn iPad (iBooks). Ik sluit uit dat ik nog een significante hoeveelheid boeken op papier zal lezen en ben al een tijdje bezig mijn boekenkast te liquideren.