Category: Monster Swell

A bunch of stuff I did last week is summarized nicely at the Hubbub weeknotes. This is going to happen more and more often, so these weeknotes may become at risk. We’ll see what happens.

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:

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.

Recovering from flu meant a week of mostly broken days, but still got a lot done and more importantly: got better.

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 continent¹: “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.

1. Which may have been slightly more inflammatory than necessary, but then again, who hates a nice controversy. [↩]

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.

Horribly late but here goes anyway. On Monday I briefly dropped by the Makers Loft and finally managed to see the Third Wave crew again.

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!

1. Web developers many of which are self-taught and who are not regularly faced with problems that are not solvable using procedural programming and databases often have no idea how more difficult problems in the domain of computer science can be solved. Corollary: game development contains many many of these more difficult problems. [↩]

At the start of the week I managed to upload a batch of trip pictures (the China section) but after things went quickly downhill.

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.

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.

Last week I built a new version of the Pig Chase client for the final test in the stables (more on which later).

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.

A massively eventful week that for me took place mostly in Amsterdam where I had tons of catching up to do after a holiday absence of I believe over two months. In between moving offices and traveling, work on kohi moved on apace. We may have something usable by a slightly wider audience somewhere in the next week.

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’ll include here Hubbub’s two reasons for celebration which were also reasons for me to celebrate and I’ll add a third in a bit. These really are the weeks when a lot of stuff is happening, being built and delivered. Not that much time for idle talk and reflection, though that too will return.

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.

A delayed picture in picture from me presenting in Helsinki:

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.

A busy week after a quiet weekend. Monday evening I attended a preliminary meeting with fellow coaches for the Berlin Python classes. After that I attended the Iron Blogger regular meetup to have beer with my fellow Berlin bloggers. Later that week I also attended the regular Campus Party drinks.

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.

The Willem de Kooning Academy published an ebook that contains the lecture I gave there about digital design and the new aesthetic. I’m quite pleased that little piece of conceptual remix is getting so much airtime.

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 front¹ 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.

1. Procuring a new identity of course. [↩]

It took a bit to get going again back from Greece.

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

On Monday I got back into work after the couple of days in Copenhagen. I also discovered that the talk I gave in Rotterdam “Designing in the Face of Defeat” about the New Aesthetic has been recorded and you can watch it above.

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.

I’ve been into something of a speculative realism binge lately reading quite some books and even more blogs from the field of current day philosophy. Last Monday I finished Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology which is highly recommended if you want to read up on object oriented ontology.

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.

A nice and quiet week in which I got a lot of stuff done that needed doing for a while.

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).

Quickly this last week. Work on our own iPhone transit application is progressing nicely. The iPhone has an exquisite palette of operations to work with.

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.

The Hybrid Talk I gave the week before is up on Soundcloud. You can listen to it here and see if you agree with our ideas about how a client driven organization can operate without being rubbish.

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.

This week was marked by a massive sprint on saba which made me miss this year’s Myfest in Kreuzberg, which is annoying but survivable. I did manage to see Ryoji Ikeda’s Data Anatomy on its last day in Tresor. A visually spectacular but thematically flat affair.

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.

A long week sprinting on saba. On Monday I got a nice desk chair:

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:

Last week commenced with preparing my presentation for the CrossLab event in Rotterdam. On Tuesday I took the train from Berlin and got there nicely in time.

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:

The week started with development on saba in phonegap. I got that to work with backbone.

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.

Running behind two weeks and off to the Netherlands tomorrow (for a talk at a Crosslab event in the Unie). Oh how time flies! This was a fun week.

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.

Work continues apace. New websites are forthcoming.

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.

Machiavelli (or Ohne Furcht und Adel or Citadels) is awaiting its first play at the studio the first free Friday we can find.

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.

Briefly written notes for last week. It was one of the first proper weeks at the office for which I am grateful. German administration remains a challenging affair as my blog post and quoted Times article also testify.

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 people¹.

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 others², 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 approved³ 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.

1. I thought panels in the Netherlands were horrible, but it seems totally new depths are reachable. [↩]
2. Back button breaking javascript on the site, a backend patched together using PL/pgSQL and a CMS in Lua. [↩]
3. Demanding the horrible horrible RDF which we could do without. [↩]

Last week we got the DSL at home to work (in two tries). It feels good to have that after something of a month of bureaucracy and false starts to deal with.

Then I went to PROGRAM’s last event on German/Turkish Material Exchange. An inspiring and eclectic evening and a shame to see the venue being wrapped up.

I met Peter Wollring, a videographer who has made the crossing to Berlin a long time ago, Peter Tegelaar, a startup veteran from Amsterdam and with Third Wave.

Finally I got the correct form te become self-employed today from the Finanzamt:

The studio is still elusive, so the kitchen table is where it is at.

Last week was a week in Amsterdam (and what a week it was!).

Monday I was in the train, which seems to take shorter and shorter because of the worklfow achieved there. I dropped in straight to the Open Coop to push the stuff I had created online (among which a professional summary of 2011) and then went off to the Mediamatic Schommelclub where I saw most of the regulars and a great performance:

Tuesday I hung out with my friends from the Village before heading to Hubbub central for a bit of metagaming¹ (arguing pro) and the kickoff for project saba. I also blogged about our Berlin plans on Hubbub and installed Unity on my laptop for some heavy duty game development.

The project is going to be great if only judging from the concept art that was produced during that afternoon.

Wednesday was filled wit back to back meetings with Justus Bruns, hanging out at the awesome Brainsley offices, having lunch with lovely Tim de Gier, talking game design shop with Christine Fountain and then having dinner and going to a play with Oliver Verver.

Thursday I spent cooped up at the Open Coop all day working on various Open State stuff and then it was off to the annual ISOC Chairperson’s Dinner and New Year’s Drinks. I discussed the option to change your date of birth with some of the more privacy minded attendees and that sparked this post.

And Friday it was a brief bit at the Coop to pack up my office and then jump on the train back to Berlin. I am now also a part of the Iron Blogger Berlin network to insure blog frequency.

1. I want a metagame deck, but the shipping is so steep! [↩]

Going on with Apps voor Nederland and culiacan (which is almost done by now). Also did a brief intermediate scripting and renedring moving text for a TA theater piece.

Went to the launch of Vice Netherlands’ web strategy. A nice event, but a bit too reminiscent of the nineties. After that I briefly visited the Hackers and Founders event as well.

Preparing my move out of the Volkskrantgebouw as well. My home base in Amsterdam will be our office at the Open Cooperatie for the foreseeable future.

}

Friday, I recorded a message from the Dutch Game Garden for Fast Moving Targets, a Dutch online tech news show. I think the things happening at the DGG deserve to be communicated much wider and if I can contribute to that by doing this, I will.

After that we went for a board game night at the garden with ample games of Space Alert and Nidhogg.

I will be speaking at the next ignite at Mediamatic on the topic of ‘Hacking for Social Justice’ (the thing we do at Hack de Overheid).

Sunday we started what could be a nice tradition: a brunch time serving of Tonkotsu Ramen at one of the best Japanese places in the city with some very smart people. If it’s up to me, that is going to be a regular occurrence.

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

I lost my fixie which was something of a blow. Feeling a bit hurt and crippled from this loss. Going to look for a new ride come spring.

I had lunch with Alexander Zeh and Peter Robinett of Mio Giro.

There is some space shortage at the Open Cooperatie but spirits at Hack de Overheid were high:

I participated in a knowledge gathering session organized by Info.nl about the future of the tax system in a fully networked society. There were some very interesting people present but always, talking with people who don’t make anything is a waste of time.

Also conceived of a special event for the playful people of the Netherlands. Stay tuned for updates on that.

Sargasso is very kind to us and says that Hack de Overheid approach is the new way of changing the world. We are very humbled (but would tend to agree).

I was a bit annoyed by voices against the ‘Creative Class’ and wrote a retort: “Stop Kicking the Creative Class”

I put the very modest advice work I did on the new Vrij Nederland site on my portfolio. I am glad I got the right people together, could help out some friends and that the result is so excellent.

I wrote a review of the Binding of Isaac for nrc.next due to be published soon. It is a deceptively deep and addictive game.

I had coffee with our good friend Toine Donk who is doing very interesting things with books. And I worked the rest of the afternoon at the offices of Brainsley. Besides good friends, they are my hope for innovation in Dutch publishing.

Ianus Keller and other friends were at Design by Fire (which seems to have been very good) and they give me hope with the following tweet:

Brainsley had their office warming party on Saturday which was a fantastic convention of internet, fashion and assorted other people:

Last week’s weeknotes were still due. I built a small public transportation exploration called: AMStransit which is a dynamic glanceable display for nearby public transit in Amsterdam: example.

Work on Apps voor Nederland and culiacan continues apace.

Visited Gamelab to see contributions by all-stars Karel Millenaar, Niels ‘t Hooft and David Nieborg.

Also an interview I gave about Hack de Overheid was published under the great title “How to Make the Skunk Work With Open Data” (tweet).

Finally I went to /dev/haag to present about the current state of Hack de Overheid (which is really pretty good).

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

We also submitted the final version of the paper that we are presenting on Chi Sparks next week in the Games and play track.

Friday a brief review I wrote the week before of Inside a Star-filled Sky was published in nrc.next. This may become a more regular fixture.

The afternoon was spent together with Lex at the Waag concepting the tentatively titled ‘Apps on the Beach’ event.

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.

Hack de Overheid made an overwhelming presence at the Spring Break of the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers to promote the cause of data-journalism in the Netherlands.

Real estate-wise we arranged to add two adjacent rooms in the Volkskrantgebouw. One of the rooms will be occupied by the lovely chaps of Bottlenose and the other one will be used as a meeting/project room.

Adding additional region sets to Statlas was succesful with some extra work. Projection conversion for Shapefiles is a rather difficult affair even with the EPSG Registry and the Spatial Reference.

Also visited the Djangocon EU, home of the faithful Django programmes. Django is still a venerable workhorse for many many of our projects.

Attended a lecture by Alain de Botton and his new book has a stance of using the cognitive psychology inherent in religion to improve secular life. Something which also the most ambitious design pieces do.

Friday was an interesting day and it was closed off by us having drinks at Ouroffice:

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.

Monday was spent at the Dutch Game Garden doing maintenance on PLAY Pilots and brainstorming for a pitch.

Tuesday I spent the day coaching students of the HvA develop their concepts for the course City Discourse. In this course students think about how information technology and open data can enrich the urban experience.

Wednesday was the Apps for Amsterdam awards ceremony. I wrote about the proceedings leading up to that event. The event was packed with a great vibe of appreciation for developers and a celebration of open data. We should do it more often if only for that and we probably are. Bigger and better things are forthcoming.

Thursday was wholly spent making presentations for firstly a Virtueel Platform expert meeting on Cities, Games and Data and for a break-out session at the What Design Can Do conference on data driven design. Both presentations were well received and with some added polish they may see wider dissemination.

Finally Friday was closed having drinks over at our friends from Bits of Freedom celebrating their new office space.

Update: A great write-up of the City_Play_Data expert meeting was posted at The Mobile City.

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.

This is the one not of this week, but of the one before (starting May 16th with me being sick for a day). A lot of stuff happened but most if it wasn’t directly work pertaining or publicly relatable.

Alice Taylor’s lecture at the HKU faculty in Hilversum was inspiring stuff. I don’t think many students get it, but as an entrepreneur in the same area her work resonates profoundly and she looks poised to pull it off.

Friday we had a launch meeting for Statlas at the Fluxility offices. Statlas should be in public beta by June 6th.

Updated maguro and setup new branches and development environments. Finished the latest bits of acapulco.

Tuesday went to our friends at Adaptive Path to listen to a lecture by Andrew Devigal.

Spent a day working at Buro PONY. The guys who also made this very nice avatar for Monster Swell:

Wrote a post on Nicholas Carr “Carr’s self-interest” and another one on Color.

Fixed up my fixie and worked a day at the friendly people of Booreiland.

Also managed to finish Reality is Broken to start directly in Players Unleashed!

Sunday migrated hermosillo to ep.io because djangy despite having promised to run until the end of this month started flaking out already.

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

1. Monday saw my last official lecture at WdKA. Students will present their work next week which I’m looking forward to greatly.

2. Worked the entire week for maguro which is going into a pilot run as I am typing this.

3. Acapulco saw an initial release but needs a bit more touching up.

4. Hack de Overheid: Apps for Amsterdam edition was this Saturday. I was the host of this event we had been preparing for a long time was every bit the succes we had hoped it would be. We had lots of friends come over and useful applications were created.

I visited the Virtueel Platform book presentation and the Big Brother Awards on Wednesday. Both e-culture and privacy in the narrow sense remain difficult but relevant concepts for me.

On Monday I gave week 2 of my course and then went on to fourcehub to prepare the maguro playtest. Which playtest took place on Tuesday and was totally awesome.

I sent some talking points to Dutch politics about open data. Here they are reproduced in Dutch:

– Het parlementaire informatie aanbod
De informatievoorziening van ons parlement is om te janken zo slecht. Voor een klaagzang hierover kun je terecht bij @steeph. Stemmingen, stukken etc. zijn allemaal nauwelijks op te vragen en zeker niet machine-leesbaar op te vragen (vaak allemaal suffe PDFs).

– Overheid als platform
Al genoemd. De overheid verzamelt al heel veel informatie om haar eigen taken uit te voeren. Er is geen enkele reden dat anderen dan ook moeite zouden moeten doen om diezelfde informatie te verzamelen. Het verzamelen is ook al betaald dus het vrijgeven (van bijv. de BAG of de NDW, NDOV) móet gratis zijn. Anders kunnen zoveel mensen die potentieel waarde kunnen toevoegen bij voorbaat al niet meedoen en krijg je zeker weten wat je altijd al kreeg.

– Overheid als startup
De kosten van productie zowel online als offline zijn gigantisch gedaald. Dit zorgt ervoor dat het bouwen van een boeiende dienst met wereldwijde impact bijna niks meer kost (mits met de juiste sturing). De overheid zou dezelfde drivers die de kosten omlaag brengen en de effectiviteit en flexibiliteit moeten omarmen. Er is geen enkele reden dat een simpele overheids-site tonnen moet kosten en dan alsnog kwalitatief slecht moet zijn. In Amerika zie je met de overheidswebsites en de open data portals dat ze daar al een heel eind mee zijn.

– Datawijsheid
Bij alle besluitnemers mist diepe kennis over internet, data, wat je ermee kunt bereiken en hoe je het moet doen. Geld is niet het probleem maar kennis. We kunnen niet tot den treure de vraag beantwoorden: welke data wil je dan vrijgeven, welke voordelen zijn er dan, wat is de business case? Op een gegeven moment moet de bewustwording er zijn en moeten we uit deze catch-22 komen.

On Wednesday I gave a brief presentation on open data and the value of fake APIs on the VPRO App in a Day event.

There was a tremendous amount of interest and presence of capable geo-hackers. That is a great victory for the open data movement. Also it is very interesting to see a traditional media company like the VPRO open up the production process of a show they are making. Definitely not standard issue in Hilversum.

Also I had an interesting experience with an automatic bike dispenser.

Then we went to the kickoff for the Apps for Amsterdam contest. See also this blog by Thijs. I happen to be in the jury for that contest as the official representative of Hack de Overheid.

It was a good day for three members of Hack de Overheid to be out in full swing. There’s no telling what we’ll achieve if all six of us are firing at the same time.

Thursday was spent entirely on maguro.

At the end of the week we had a meeting at the NVJ (Dutch Reporters Association) and we finalized the program for the Hack de Overheid March 12th devcamp event.

The weekend was spent doing some catchup on acapulco and starting work in earnest on hermosillo.

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.