Week 273: Objects, Hack de Overheid, Copenhagen, European Data Forum, Linked Data, Metropolis Lab, all new Foursquare

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).

You try to travel by rail because it's good and stuff but things go wrong too regularly. Stuck at HBF at night with a two hour delay.

And now by magic I will go to sleep in Berlin and wake up in Copenhagen.

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.

European Data Forum - Going to be interesting at least

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.

Metropolis Laboratory - another gathering for which we are too practical from the looks of it (now discussing authenticity and authority)

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.

Nice cross station where the train suddenly is street level and there is no wall.

Egg muffin from heaven

New place, totally game

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).

It's raining outside and the food here is sublime. I don't think I'm going anywhere.

Kaffe & Vinyl win @straboh

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.
Can you tell we're the commercial messages are going to be?

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.

Foursquare spelen op de radio

Afgelopen donderdag werd ik samen met de manager van Dwaze Zaken en de burgermeester geïnterviewd (Radio 1 link1) voor Radio1 over Foursquare. Foursquare het mobiele spel, vrienden-vinder en sociale gids die we afgelopen jaar naar Amsterdam hebben gehaald en dat nu ook overal speelbaar is.

Leuk om het terug te horen van vrienden. Ik wist zelf niet wanneer het uitgezonden zou worden2. Ik had wel een uur over toepassingen van internet in horeca en locatie gebaseerde diensten en spellen kunnen praten denk ik, maar als je maar een minuutje hebt dan sneuvelen er nogal wat leuke dingen bij de montage.

Hier nog even het belang van mobiele spellen. Dit soort mobiele toepassingen en spellen werkt om drie redenen (die elkaar versterken):

  • Meetbaar
    Foursquare —maar ook bijvoorbeeld de Nike Plus en Last.fm— maken handelingen (automatisch) meetbaar die dat daarvoor niet waren. Je koppelt een sensor of een software knop (check in!) aan een database en slaat alles op. Daar kun je dan statistisch interessante dingen aan afleiden en nog veel meer. Gegevens zijn goud.
  • Sociaal
    Door middel van internet en al bestaande sociale netwerken wordt het makkelijk om deze handelingen en de significante afgeleide resultaten (het beëindigen van een run, iemand van zijn mayor-troon stoten), te delen met vrienden. Hierdoor crëeer je sociaal relevante informatie en waarde.
    De journaalverslaggever vroeg al het standaard bagatelliserende: “Wat heb je eraan? Is het niet suf, treurig, exhibitionisme?”Het standaard antwoord daarop is dat deze handelingen voor bepaalde zenders en ontvangers een sociale waarde vertegenwoordigen en dat dat alleen al het de moeite waard maakt. Daarnaast zijn deze handelingen feitelijk niet heel veel anders dan sociale communicatie die al bestond maar omdat dit digitaal wordt overgebracht zijn de kwaliteiten van schaal, snelheid e.d. anders.
  • Mobiel
    Het meetbaar maken van de handelingen en het sociaal kunnen sturen en ontvangen van berichten vindt meer en meer mobiel plaats. Mobiel is dan niet alleen meer via de mobiele telefoon maar ook via andere apparaten of ingebouwde sensoren in de omgeving.
    Hierdoor is alles ook toegankelijk als je niet thuis achter de computer zit. Dat is makkelijker dan je hardloop rondje op te moeten schrijven en het achteraf thuis te moeten invoeren of veel te laat horen dat iemand in een bepaald café was. Maar belangrijker nog, het koppelt een fysieke context aan een digitale interactie waardoor het geheel beter blijft hangen bij de gebruiker.

Dat past niet in twee minuten radio.

  1. Ik wacht nog tot ze mijn naam goed schrijven op de site. []
  2. En er luisteren dus best wel wat mensen naar aan de reacties af te lezen. []

There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.

That puts personally curated travel docs and word of mouth back in play as Thrillist describes here. Every Dutch person has or knows somebody who has a Berlin Google Doc with all the Geheimtipps. Dutch people’s tastes are fairly predictable and pedestrian, so these’ll mostly be cheap Asian eateries in Prenzlauerberg but that’s also fine.

For me the most interesting recommendations for Berlin but also for other cities come through TikTok. The algorithm is well tuned to my type of person and in the short videos it’s pretty easy to size up whether somebody knows what they’re talking about or not.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/google-docs-are-the-ideal-travel-guides

December Adventure

So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.

I saw this thing called December Adventure though and that fits in nicely with my current push to release a major update for Cuppings. If I’m going to be programming until late this month, then I’d prefer it to be on something that I can release.

I can’t promise that I won’t do any AoC (Factor is looking mighty cool) but I won’t force myself to do anything. With that, let’s get going.

1/12

I started working on the map view which clicking around looked like it could be really annoying. I found some dead ends and was afraid I’d have to hack in Leaflet support myself but I found a dioxus example hidden in the leaflet-rs repository.

Yes, I’m writing this website in Rust/WASM, why do you ask?

That example required a bunch of fiddling with the configuration and a couple of false starts, but now I have a vanilla map view.

I can say that I’m amazed that in this ecosystem 1. an example exists 2. that example works 3. it works in my project with a bit of diffing and 4. it seems to do what I need.

I raised a PR to the project to advertise this example on its README just like it does the others so that others wouldn’t have to search like I did. That PR got merged:

https://github.com/slowtec/leaflet-rs/pull/36

2/12

Today I’ll see if I can tweak the map view to show the location of the cafe we tapped and get things to a point where I can commit the change.

To do this I need to figure out how to pass information along to a router when we tap a venue. That should be easy enough but the Dioxus documentation is between 0.5 and 0.6 now and a lot of it is broken.

A tip from the Discord said I need to put the data into a context from a parent and then get it out again in a child. It’s a bit roundabout and required some refactoring, but it works.

Done on time even for a reasonable bed time.

3/12

Turns out my changes from yesterday did not make it to the staging server. I’ll fix that and manually run the job again.

That’s these annoying wasm-bindgen version errors that keep happening and that require a reinstall of this: cargo install -f wasm-bindgen-cli --version 0.2.97 and the dioxus-cli. Dioxus which by the way is preparing its long awaited 0.6.0 release.

Yes, I build this on the same Hetzner box that hosts it. So here you go: https://staging.cuppin.gs

Other than that not that much will happen today since I spent most of the evening noodling around with Factor (despite my intention not to do any weird programming). It’s a nice language that’s very similar to Uiua which I tried out a while back but not being an array programming language makes it feel somewhat more ergonomic.

4/12

I can’t describe how nice it is to wake up and not have to deal with a mediocre story line involving elves and try to find time to attack a programming problem.

After today, I’m going to need that quiet morning, because I spent until 01:30 debugging an issue: Going to a detail view from the frontpage worked, but loading a detail view directly would throw an error.

There were two issues at play here:

Leaflet maps don’t deal well with being created multiple times so either we have to call `map.remove() or we have to check whether the map has already been created and keep a reference to it somehow.

I solved it by pushing the map into a global variable:

thread_local!(static MAP: RefCell> = RefCell::new(None));

These are Rust constructs I would normally never use so that’s interesting. More interesting is that they work in one go and that they work on the WASM target.

Then the error was gone but the page was blank. Not entirely sure what was happening I poked at the DOM to see all the map elements there but simply not visible. Turns out that because of the different path, the path for the stylesheet was being added to the URL like this: http://127.0.0.1:8080/venue/176/main.css

It just has these two lines:

#map {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100vh;
}

But without a height the map is invisible.

Both issues are solved but not committed. I’ll see tomorrow whether I’m happy with the solution and how to package this up. Also I’m not sure how main.css is being served on production and whether the same fix will work there.

5/12

I couldn’t help but noodle on Advent of Code a bit. Here’s my day 1 part 1 in Factor: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor

I like Factor the programming language. It’s like Lisp or Haskell but without all the annoying bits.

The environment that’s provided with it, I’m not so keen about. It’s annoying to use and has lots of weird conventions that aren’t very ergonomic.

6/12

I’ve been bad and I’ve finished part 2 of day 1 of the Advent of Code: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor#L27

Not so December Adventure after all maybe. I’ll promise I’ll finish the mapping improvements I was working on tomorrow.

7/12

Went on my weekly long bike ride. Then in the evening I didn’t have that much energy for programming other than finishing Advent of Code day 3 part 1: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/commit/0a74c38e7641141e10b4c48203c9e414cc492e1c

(I looked at day 2 part 2 but that just looked very tedious.)

8/12

Got in a ton of commits on Cuppin.gs today. After fixing the map, I wanted to see what would happen if I would add all 2000 markers to the map.

Performance seems to be doable but this is probably not ideal for a webpage. Dynamically rendering the venues is something for later. For now I can probably get away with filtering for the 100-200 nearest locations by distance and dumping those into the map view.

Now I’m back debugging Github Actions. I’m splitting up the build and deploy of the backend and the frontend into separate actions. Compiling dioxus-cli takes forever which is a step I hope I can skip with cargo-binstall.

Iterating on Github Actions takes forever and there really doesn’t seem to be a better way to develop this or a better CI solution that everybody is willing to use.

10/12

Spent some hours massaging the data that goes into the app. I had to add all new venues and after that I wanted to check whether any place in our 2k venue set had closed so we can take them off the display. This is a somewhat tedious multi-step process.

I have an admin binary that calls the Google Maps API for each venue to check the venue data and the business status (CLOSED_TEMPORARILY and such). But to be able to do that you have to feed each place ID into the API. The only issue with place IDs is that they expire from time to time. There’s a free API call that you can use to refresh them.

That expiration does not happen that often. What happens more, I found, is that a place will disappear entirely of Google Maps. For some reason it will be deleted. I don’t handle that case yet so there my updaters break entirely and the quickest fix around it is to delete the venue from the database and restart.

The only data issue that I still have outstanding is when venues move their location to a different address. I have a place around here that I think is still showing on its old spot.

11/12

Tried to run Cuppings in Xcode to be met with some weird compilation errors. Turns out that there’s an Expression type in Foundation that’s overriding my SQLite.swift Expression. It’s a pretty silly reason for code to be broken: Expression – name space conflict with Xcode 16/iOS 18

Also still fighting with the frontend deployments which seem to need a --frozen passed to them to not proactively go update package versions.

14/12

Love to have a crash on startup for the Cuppings TestFlight build and then sit down today to bake a new one and upload that and for that one to work. No clue what the issue was even though I took a look at the crashlog (that I sent in myself).

I’ve also automated building the iOS app to be done by Xcode Cloud which should making new versions (whenever the database is updated) a lot easier.

16/12

Upgraded the frontend to Dioxus 0.6.0 which just came out and has lots of quality of life issues. For my case, I did not need to change a single line of code, just change some version numbers and build a new dioxus-cli.

Nice TUI for serving the frontend

I hope that maybe solves the wasm-bindgen issues on the frontend deploy. The annoying part about the build is that it takes so long that it’s very hard to iterate on.

It’s too late even for me to see what this does. I’m off to bed. You may or may not get a new version of the website by tomorrow morning.

18/12

Spent some iterations running the frontend deploy and rerunning it but now it should be working.

22/12

I spent the evening doing manual data munging and correcting some venue locations that hadn’t been updated correctly through my data life cycle.

That forced me to clarify the two name fields the venues table has.

  • name was the original name field and was pulled from the Foursquare metadata
  • google_name is the name field that’s pulled from Google Maps and was effectively leading but not updated correctly yet when refreshing the data

So to figure that out I did a bunch of auditing in the list to see venues where there was a large discrepancy between the names. Something that happens is that a place will change its name but keep the same location and Google Maps place.

I also added a label to the iOS app to indicate whether this is a DEBUG build but that messed up the layout and I guess I might as well remove it. Sometimes I get confused what I’m running, but since it’s just me running DEBUG builds on their phone, I think I can do without.

I also started a rewrite that I’m not sure I’m going to pull over the line: I wanted to remove the search dependency on Alpine.js and replace it with htmx. For this I asked Cursor to do the translation which it did a stab at but ultimately rather failed to do even the basic steps for it. Then I did it myself and while htmx is super easy to setup, the data juggling I have to do with what I get from Google Maps is very fragile and needs to be cleaned up (which I may or may not do given that things are working right now).

23/12

Working with the backend was very annoying because every time the server restarts, it would log me out. To fix that I changed the persistency of tower-sessions from MemoryStore to FileSessionStorage and that fixed it without issues. There is now a .sessions folder in the backend which needs to be ignored for cargo watch but other than that it’s a drop-in replacement.

That means I will need to write a logout view at some point.

I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.

That has two direct consequences for me:

  • I was going to scrub the Foursquare data out of the database as a clean-up but that’s something I won’t do for now. In fact, I may recode the venues so I have ids in both worlds.
  • I was toying around with the idea of building a next generation Foursquare/Dopplr on top of atproto which is something that I think is a lot more feasible now.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source-places/

Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.

https://twitter.com/dens/status/1409506346391719941

Why Käthe Kollwitz is one of Germany’s most important figurative artists

Today I got a tour of the Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin. I had wanted to visit this museum for a while but this proved the concrete reason to finally go (though the café next door makes some mean pancakes if you find yourself in the area).

I was recently attended to her existence by MacGregor’s series on German history (episode). I now believe that she is one of the most important German artists of the past couple of centuries. If there are any other significant candidates, I would like to hear about them1.

What makes her stand out as an artist are:

  • Her mastery of both drawing and sculpture.
  • That she depicts ‘common’ people and social themes prominently. She thought these people were beautiful in their own way and that their plight was one that merited attention. For me this is a stark contrast with how current (artistic) elites try to ignore the ‘common and stupid’ people (like Trump voters).
  • The loss of her son and how that permeates her later work.

Our tour guide didn’t make the connection but I find it more than fitting that on May 1st we would be looking at for instance the Weavers cycle (one of which I have pasted below).

Kollwitz_Riot_Best

  1. I discount Caspar David Friedrich because he was a painter of landscapes. []

Nakagin Capsule Tower

Yesterday I saw the documentary on the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Rima Yamazaki as part of the DOKU.ARTS festival here in Berlin. I wasn’t aware of this landmark during my last visit to Tokyo though I must have passed close by while cycling through the city. I’ll make a point to see it when next I visit if it still stands because that is exactly the topic of the documentary.

The tower is a prime example of Metabolist architecture by Kisho Kurokawa. Metabolism is a hard to define but influential strand of architecture that is described in the documentary as an architecture without timelag. It turns out that the tower by now, though charming with its tiny rooms, is outdated and unmaintainable. Most of the owners want to tear it down and have something new built there that makes more economic sense. Among architects and historians there are voices for preserving it as a monument to an important movement in Japanese architecture and other who think it could indeed be torn down.

Lindenstraße

The main reason why I wanted to see this movie is because next week I’m moving into a building in Berlin designed by a metabolist architect Arata Isozaki. He appears in the movie as a member of the metabolist movement and as an proponent of conservation. I found his reasoning to be somewhat incoherent and overly sentimental. I’m not sure what that means for the building I will be living in but we’ll see. I’ve only been there once, but I absolutely love the building pictured above. Time will tell whether that is justified.

Another architect Toyo Ito who expressed a disillusionment with metabolism was in favor of tearing it down. His reasoning is that buildings just like people are finite and that if they have fulfilled their purpose they should be allowed to disappear to be replaced by something new. This is a way of thinking about architecture that is mostly alien if you live in Europe but that I find to be extremely refreshing. I think our local hangups on history and current efforts to construct buildings in a historicized fashion are morbid but this is the way we do things in Europe.

All along during the documentary I had to think about some William Gibson I read about Tokyo but which I cannot find right now. So instead I’ll post this from My Own Private Tokyo that I came across.

The Japanese, you see, have been repeatedly drop-kicked, ever further down the timeline, by serial national traumata of quite unthinkable weirdness, by 150 years of deep, almost constant, change. The 20th century, for Japan, was like a ride on a rocket sled, with successive bundles of fuel igniting spontaneously, one after another.

Encounter Zone Maaßenstraße

Berlin is rebuilding the Maaßenstraße into the first Begegnungszone (‘Encounter Zone’) of its kind in the city. Works are underway now after a public consultation was finished last year or the year before. I looked around a bit but I couldn’t find the plans for what they are actually building there. A quick e-mail to the senate solved that problem and I got a PDF of the plan.

Redesigning Maaßenstraße

The most important bit of that plan is the layout of the new street which is dramatically different from what we have right now. Maaßenstraße is a street in Berlin saturated with cafes and restaurants where people from far West Berlin will go to go out on weekend nights. It also touches on Motzstraße which is a popular gay going out area and there are tons more bars and restaurants littered about. On Saturdays the market on Winterfeldtplatz is brimful of people and blocks most of the traffic on the South side.

The quantity of establishment is deceiving since the gastronomy on Maaßenstraße is of such a low quality that I wouldn’t regularly visit any of the places there except the two Turkish kebab places Hasir and the Keb’up House (for the late night döner box).

Traffic wise there used to be bike paths on the pavement but because of the heavy use by pedestrians and the fact that the bike path was level with the walking area, these caused dangerous situations. The road itself wasn’t a great alternative as it was used mostly for parking, double parking and the ostentatious display of muscle cars at night. All in all the usage of the street was thoroughly out of whack with how space was distributed between the various groups.

The new plan removes parking altogether which may or may not work depending on the enforcement level. Cars can park anywhere they want in Berlin and receive a fine that is so low nobody really cares about it. Cycling and driving are integrated on the remaining piece of road that is a lot more narrow than it was and lots of space is allotted to pedestrians walking and hanging out on the street. I have no idea what that is going to do to the noise levels in the street but I don’t live on a popular party street for a reason.

I’ve annotated what I think is noteworthy about the plan below (in a 13MB image file, click for big). All in all the plan looks solid and is bolder than I could have hoped for. It remains to be seen how it will be received by drivers and whether the police enforces the zones that are on there with vigour.

06-Flyer_Begegnungszone_maassenstr

Product design focused on user wants

This post was previously published on Medium and is now archived here.

There’s some recent writing about the decomposition of apps into either thin slivers of single purpose functionality per app or even breaking out of the traditional app domain entirely and delivering their functionality through for instance the notifications screen.

I think both of these are onto something but that the trend itself is more fundamental. I think there are three things happening.

1. Apps can be decomposed into high-level user wants.

A want starts with “I want”and is followed by getting or creating something often accompanied by some social intermediation. Such a want could be “I want to send a message”or it could be “I want to read (and reply to) my messages”or it could be “I want to find a place to eat.”

These are not utilities. Most interesting apps these days are lifestyle apps. Focusing on a single want does not mean the app becomes easier to make. Implementing a want with its very specific functionality, appropriate context, user interface and communication may be even more difficult. A want is a summary of what used to be called ‘user stories’ but focused on what people want to do not on what people are supposed to do. At the risk of sounding obvious: people don’t want to do things they don’t want to do. The exception to this is work where people do things they don’t want to do. People want apps that bring them entertainment, social connections or self-actualisation.

2. Apps cannot support more than a couple of wants well.

Any app that tries to cram in more than a couple of wants from different domains starts to creak and feel cluttered. This looks like the main reason why Foursquare unbundled the totally disparate wants of local discovery “I want to find a good restaurant now”and that of social broadcasting “I want to tell my friends where I am.”

Such unbundling is becoming the norm because an app cannot do everything well without containing multiple apps. Just think back of Facebook’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink app with its own homescreen. The Facebook app itself is becoming more and more bare while wants are increasingly delivered by apps that don’t show they belong to Facebook.

This is a good indicator of what the future holds for these apps. I would for instance be surprised if complicated list management features would be a significant part of the future Foursquare mobile app. Lists do support local discovery but they will never have the mass appeal the app is focusing on.

3. Wants can be fulfilled anywhere you want.

This ties into Naveen’s piece about the notifications becoming the app. I would take this further and say that the app will be wherever people interact with a connected device. Building an app becomes a matter of translating a user want into the interaction affordances of a medium.

You could indeed read and reply to messages in a notification screen if that is where you spend your time. But soon you might do the same thing using the same app but on your connected watch. In a somewhat more distant future you might send a Yo! by slamming two IoT enabled rocks together.

The medium through which a want is fulfilled has become flexible. What matters is the want itself and appropriateness. A talented designer will figure out whether a translation makes sense and how to best implement it.

All in all this is a great development. Digital design is breaking out of screens enabling it to find us where we are and offer us the things we really want.

Tokyo Coffee Notes

Here are my notes from a couple of weeks of drinking coffee in Tokyo on a fact finding mission for Cuppings. With Cuppings we try to give you a guide of the best coffee places around the world based on our personal tastings. Some notable locales are still not as well represented as they should be. London and New York have their own excellent guides for coffee with Oliver Strand’s Coffee App and the London Coffee Map. Tokyo is one place that I thought we should fill in.

I had picked my hotel to be on the right side of the city to be off to a running start so I could visit places right from the very first day. So landed at Narita, got my Mifi and while waiting to checkin I made my way to.

Little Nap Coffee Stand

I had a quick lunch and walked to the Little Nap Coffee Stand (checkin, tip) which I had seen a video of over at My First Coffee and was totally smitten with. As promised the store was beautiful and the coffee was excellent.

Store

Little Nap

Fuglen Tokyo

Then I walked over to this place recommended to me by Companion Coffee. This Fuglen (checkin, tip) is a sister to a store by the same name in Oslo1. This place turned out to be more of a cafe with an event program and cocktails in the evening and a diverse group of Japanese people and expats hanging around with laptops during the day.

Fuglen

The decorations are lush Nordic wood and the Kalita Wave pour over that I had was terrific.

Mixology and coffee makes a good combination here in Fuglen. Just had my first Kalita Wave.

Omotesando Koffee

I think I am going to cry. No kidding.

Then after some more walking around at the end of the day I finally hit the promised place: Omotesando Koffee (checkin, tip) which had been recommended to me by countless people and where Eiichi Kunimoto practices his craft. I had an iced cappuccino here because —what I hadn’t counted on— the weather was extremely pressing and it was rainy humid and very warm all day. It stayed that way for most of my stay.

Omotesando Koffee

The iced cappuccino at Omotesando is more of a milkshake like concoction with the espresso shot put into a blender along with some ice and milk, the result is poured out into your cup and sprinkled with —I think— cinnamon. Drinking this at that moment in the idyllic garden of Omotesando was a near religious experience and felt like the best coffee I have ever had. I returned to Omotesando a number of times during my visit for the coffee, the amicable staff and the quiet ambiance of its garden.

Omotesando Garden

Bear Pond Espresso

The next day I walked from my hotel to Shimokitazawa, a 20 minute saunter in the heat through the quiet residential area of Hatagaya. I don’t have any pictures of Bear Pond (checkin, tip) because of their policy but this was the other summit of my Tokyo coffee experience.

Katsuyuki Tanaka (and Eiichi Kunimoto of Omotesando) are very different and have a totally different style of coffee and shop but both elevate making coffee to a level which can only be called artistry.

The ambiance at Bear Pond is slightly forbidding but with the American radio playing it is rather easy to unwind on one of the stools and wait for your espresso to be served. That espresso when it comes out is one of the shortest shots you have ever drunk and probably also one of the most intense.

I ordered an espresso on an empty stomach which I normally never do because it gives me problems. But this espresso was so smooth that not only did my stomach not get upset, it was so delicious that I chased it with another one. With the reduced quantity it becomes something of an effort to get every last bit of taste out of the cup.

I brought back a bag of Bear Pond’s house blend ‘Flower Child’ and even when made in Berlin (by the heroes of Companion Coffee) after two weeks, it still had that characteristic deep chocolate like flavour.

Cafe Obscura

Cafe Obscura

The next stop was Cafe Obscura (checkin, tip), a somewhat out of the way place with lots of nice leather sofas and good siphons on offer. Obscura also have a laboratory which I skipped in favor of this place. The siphon coffee is expertly made and really good.

Siphon Bar

Nozy Coffee

Then it was a quick visit to Nozy Coffee (checkin, tip) which is a small but very nice looking coffee place. I had a solid cappuccino and saw that they have lots of beans on offer. Unfortunately I had no time to come back and bring some of these with me, but this place is one to look out for.

Nozy Coffee has a terrific selection of beans

Be A Good Neighbor (Sendagaya)

Be A Good Neighbor

The following day started out at the tiny Be A Good Neighbor (checkin, tip) store in Sendagaya. The cappuccino and the cake were both excellent and the barista was very helpful in offering tips about where to get more coffee. Especially useful was his pointer to Paddlers which I started the next day with.

Be A Good Neighbor

Streamer Coffee Company Shibuya

Streamer

I then walked on to Shibuya to try the coffee at Streamer (checkin, tip). The type of coffee which they serve here and which I had is a latte. I normally don’t drink them but in the light of trying out the coffee as it is being served locally I had one. Shockingly this was the first place in Tokyo I encountered where the coffee was not fantastic.

Charging

What Streamer does do really well is to be a nice place to hangout. There were lots of people in the store with and without laptops having a great time and relaxing which is exactly what I did as well.

Streamer lounge

On the Corner No. 8 Bear Pond

On the Corner

The last stop this day was the Shibuya On the Corner Bear Pond No. 8 (tip) take-out bar which is a beautiful store front with attached coffee bar where you can sit on a handful of stools and recharge your phone or as it seems to be the intention: take out your coffee. You get an expertly drawn coffee with milk in it and a no photo policy is in effect here as well, so I can show you the cup I drank it from:

Bear Pond No. 8

I did not visit the restaurant and instead had an awesome burger around the corner at Whoopie Gold Burger.

Paddler’s Coffee

Iced Stumptown at paddlers coffee

The next day I trekked to the area around Sangubashi station in the morning and had a terrific start of the day at Paddlers Coffee (checkin, tip) a brilliant setup lunch place with Stumptown coffee on offer. I had a spectacular iced coffee in the stifling heat.

Iced Stumptown

Cafe Kitsune

My first double espresso from a Slayer espresso machine at Cafe Kitsune.

I then made it out to Cafe Kitsune (checkin, tip) whose presence I had just been alerted to. This is a fashion store in Omotesando where they have a fabled Slayer Espresso machine.

Espresso selfie

Then it was off to Kyoto to see some sights and sample the coffee outside of Tokyo. This was something of a disappointment, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Specialty Coffee Unir

In Kyoto I found it rather hard to get a coffee that I would term drinkable. Most of the local brews are very dark roasted and ridiculously over extracted to a point that I can hardly drink them even with milk and sugar (or gum syrup).

Unir

One exception to his in Kyoto was Unir (checkin, tip) where they make a very nice cappuccino and which I visited a couple of times because of this.

アカツキコーヒー (Akatsuki Coffee)

Real deal

Based on some research I found Akatsuki (checkin, tip) which is a nice place in a different part of town. This place gets the filter brew almost right and the shop itself looks beautiful.

Omotesando Koffee

Another Omotesando! The branding of this one is perfect. Soon he'll be taking over the world.

What I didn’t know until my last day in Kyoto and after my camera broke down is that they have a branch of Omotesando (checkin, tip)in the city on the main shopping street in a fashion store of United Arrows. The same impeccable Omotesando branding and the same fantastic coffee. I’m half glad that I didn’t know of it before because given the Kyoto coffee scene I would have been at this place all the time.

Hood Cafe

Well designed and just saw somebody in a Phil&Sebastian t-shirt. This bodes well.

Then it was off to Osaka to do the same. My experience here was a bit better than in Kyoto but not much. Hood (checkin, tip) is a very nice coffee shop which manages to hit all of the cultural paraphernalia associated with third wave coffee and also serves a bunch of different beans and methods but still it does not seem to hit the level of Tokyo. Still they serve very good coffee even without comparing it to the stuff on offer in the rest of the city.

Right side of the store to stitch together.

Espresso Bar Millpour

Seeing what the coffee here is like

Next up was Millpour (checkin, tip) which is a tiny place in the city where they make a near perfect cappuccino.

After that detour it was time to get back to Tokyo and to finish this visit.

The Monocle Cafe

Good coffee. Don't know about the better living.

I dropped by the Monocle Cafe (checkin, tip) in the basement of a clothing store and was disappointed by the coffee though the food was rather ok. The coffee is not terrible, but it does not have the quality that you would expect from Monocle which is more or less the same for the rest of the store.

Be A Good Neighbor Skytree

Deep in the Skytree

Then I made my way over to the Be A Good Neighbor (checkin, tip) store in the Skytree. The Skytree itself is a pandemonium of commerce where people are screaming at you all the time to buy something. Finding your way through the mall to the exact location of Be A Good Neighbor is no mean feat, but finally having arrived there the coffee is as excellent as in their other store. I would only recommend going here if you’re already in the area or god forbid entering the Skytree but then it is a welcome place to rest.

Be A Good Neighbor

Sarutahiko Coffee

Charming little cafe in Ebisu

I also did a round of Ebisu and found two very nice coffee places in that part of town. Sarutahiko (checkin) is a small shop but it seems to have everything necessary and made a very nice coffee. Definitely worth a visit.

Hitinui Espresso Bar

Tiny espressobar and Tahitian dance school

A bit further on is Hitinui (checkin, tip) which is a tiny place and also doubles as a Tahitian dance school. I couldn’t check out the dance, but the cappuccino was excellent and the barista very friendly.

Hitinui

Identity Coffee Bar+Gallery

Identity Coffee Bar+ Gallery (checkin, tip) also in Omotesando is a rather nice store and has an excellent selection of both Intelligentsia and Handsome beans which they prefer perfectly.

That was the roundup from my Tokyo coffee experience. I visited a couple of the places several times and brought back some bags of coffee but I am extremely impressed with the coffee culture and I’ll definitely be back.

  1. And Oslo with its coffee scene is still very high on my to visit list. []

Week 331

With KANT we were still figuring out mostly what it is we are doing and seeing as we are neither a collective or a coworking space it was up in the air a bit. I wrote up our offering in a more straight-forward and streamlined way where you can very easily find what it is you may be looking for. In other news we are discussing next steps for KANT in the future but anything on that order is off for at least 6-12 months.

That week I attended the Cocoaheads meetup on the Luftgarten at Tempelhofer Airport. This week the plans for the city to build at least two thirds of that field have been revealed. The 100% Tempelhofer Feld initiative is already preparing their campaign in September and it looks like it’s going to be a long winter. The reasoning of policy makers is ‘How can Berlin afford not to build on this piece of land?’ which is a staggeringly stupid way to frame something if ever I heard it.

New gadget. I had no idea they made cameras this small these days.

I got my Canon S100 camera which is proving to be a lot of fun and is getting me photographing at volume again. Judging from the pictures and the f/2.0 lens it has about the same performance as my old EOS camera with its kit lens but now in a much smaller package. What is also interesting is how accustomed people have gotten to larger cameras and phones that a small pocket cam hardly registers anymore.

I also did some experiments with video mounting the camera on my bike:
Steadycam bicycle rig

I could not bother installing Lightroom again (and definitely not with the Creative Cloud hell) and setting up any kind of workflow, so my current editing philosophy is NONE. Pictures are nominally straightened in iPhoto and slapped straight to Flickr.

Torstraße

Our Friday Sheperditchi breakfasts are getting more and more fun with random friends dropping in. If you’re reading this, we usually have breakfast with KANT at Simitdchi on Friday mornings at 09:00 to get an early start into the day.

Selbstbedienung

And also with the summer lots of people are blowing through Berlin among which Peter Rukavina:
Peter Rukavina

And just to close off with a whole grilled fish:
Fish

Week 330

A new coffee place had reportedly opened up in the area and I went out searching for it. Concierge is tucked into a gate on Paul-Lincke-Ufer and they are really nice guys pulling quality shots. It is amazing both that this part of Berlin which was quite barren when it comes to coffee is shaping up so nicely and also that

Concierge Coffee, opening party tonight. Namy, Dutch guy, making a flat white for me.

That week we went into our Open State board meeting where everything is picking up in pace considerably. After that I just made it to the drinks of the Upfront UG which was a lot of fun.

We started ideation and building of an app for the piazza+social media platform which I’m rather excited about. More on that over on the Hubbub blog soon.

I will be speaking at the Retune conference in my hometown on the subject of games with a purpose and our creative process. It looks like a super nice conference and I would love to meet you here.

Roof terrace barbecue

Our office landlords invited us to join them in a celebration on our building’s roof terrace. It’s been a while since I was on one of those and they look like mandatory facilities for anybody living in Berlin. I’m putting it my list of required utilities for the next KANT office.

Kim Chi Fries!!!

Just to prove the awesomeness of Berlin, we just had a Korean food shack opening here (besides the already rather large offering of Korean cuisine that Berlin has). I had my first Kimchi Fries there, which I think is indeed best described as a Korean kapsalon.

Out camping with the fixie

On Friday I just handled a last bit of business for the week and then went off to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MeckPom) for a bit of kayaking and canoeing which is about all there is to do in that part of Germany. It is a state that is trying to cope with severe shrinkage and because of its sparse population lends itself particularly well to forays into nature. I saw lots of animals and their young and definitely learned the difference between a kayak and a canoe. Also: bringing an aeropress can make situations much more bearable.

Spent some time paddling, saw an Adler and now at the campsite making an aeropress with the inverted method while terror dad behind me puts up the tent.

Only God Forgives

only-god-forgives

After a rather hectic week and day last Friday I went to see Only God Forgives in Central cinema1. The movie is rather excellent if you like extreme violence or Ryan Gosling or both.

The stylized violence and disjunct story telling reminded me remotely of This Is How You Will Disappear. Probably not because any real visual similarity but because I am anxious for somebody in theater to produce something that good and ballsy again. And as this Guardian critic says, the Asian setting and lighting are reminiscent of Noé’s Enter the Void which I would recommend if you can stomach it.

But the violence and the characters in essence are Shakespearian and ‘Only God Forgives’ is how you actually should do a modern day Shakespeare adaptation. The movie is a post-modern mix of Macbeth and King Lear without a hint of slavish following. I lost count of how many bloodless—in all meanings of the word— Shakespeares I have seen on the stage. With this movie Winding Refn has also just schooled all theatre directors.

  1. Which honestly is a bit of a dump, but it was the best option given the circumstances. []

Week 325

I’m running frightfully behind with these and debating whether to continue writing weeknotes if it means this work is being featured in a total of three places. That seems a bit too much.

Way back then I pushed Cuppings to the App Store.

I gave an interview about Politwoops:
Politwoops in SZ

I built a preliminary Foursquare paper map creating tool.

I was featured in WDR Funkhaus Europa with a small item about Politwoops:

And also a tweet I posted was featured on the New York Times website:
Tweet featured on the NYT

And finally I dropped by the office warming of IXDS who have a brilliant space two streets down from us on the waterside.

And finally that Saturday I had a beer with @pinboard at the Berlin Pinboard meetup.

Autofreies Kreuzberg: Manteuffelstraße

So today I went to the meeting of Autofreies Kreuzberg about the traffic calming of the Manteuffelstraße between Skalitzer and Naunynstraße.

I’m not an inhabitant of the area, but I like to sit at Görlitzer Bahnhof cafe quite regularly and the car and traffic situation in that street is pretty bad.

I found out recently that there is an initiative underway to close that street off for traffic which would solve the problem of passing traffic going to Köpenicker Straße passing through and also the double parked cars that are endemic in Kreuzberg1.

Autofreies Kreuzberg über die Manteuffelstrasse

In brief: at the meeting die Grünen were well represented and the fact that they are well represented in local politics makes this initiative almost a certainty. It will need to go through channels which means this probably won’t happen this year, but it probably will happen.

The meeting was held to present the results of a neighborhood survey and solicit ideas what to do with the resulting space.

First we got a presentation about car free zones in Berlin and outside of it and there are quite some already. I myself have lived in a car free area twice in the Netherlands and both times it was a fantastic experience as an inhabitant.

We were attended to another initiative that wants to make 30kph the default speed limit within cities. Something well worth supporting, so sign that initiative here.

The neigborhood survey had a return rate of 15 which is not very high but it showed some interesting things especially that most people living in the area already do not use motorized transportation.

The biggest objection came from one guy who was worried that making the street car free would further increase the gentrification that is happening in Kreuzberg. To that the politicians responded that the situation is already quite bad and beautifying this street is not going to create a significant change in that respect2.

There is a group of people in Berlin who try to deter new entrants by making parts of the city worse to live in. There have been campaigns of throwing trash and dog shit on the streets. These actions are of course futile. In the current climate these things only add to the ‘authentic’ Berlin feeling that so many tourists come here for.

I agree with these people that the rampant speculation in both houses and rents needs to stop, but the solution is not to hunker down and try to weather it with local ultra-conservatism. Protests against rent increases also don’t serve much of a function other than to reinforce the idea that nothing can be done. They have become rituals more than demonstrations of change. What is needed is something with concrete results3.

We also got the story how they managed to convert Crellestraße (in my part of the city) to a car free zone back in the day. It used to be the quickest way to circumvent a bunch of traffic lights and get from Schöneberg to Kreuzberg and there were several taxi operations and a gas station. Currently it is a very nice part of the city with playgrounds and terraces and generally hardly any cars.

I would like them to fix Oranienstraße4 next, but due to some quirk it turns out that its not the local council that is responsible for that street, but the Berlin council and that will prove a much more difficult change to implement.

  1. It is a mystery to me why the Ordnungsamt does not do anything about this. []
  2. One comment added that people with money prefer to have space for their cars nearby. That is why most new developments in the area come with their own garage space. []
  3. I have some ideas which will probably all prove impossible because of the terrible German bureaucracy/conservatism, but we’ll see. []
  4. Oranienstraße is blockaded by cargo loading/unloading most of the day and during the day and night the driving by (criminal) people with large cars is absurdly agressive. You really fear for your life there. []

Don’t release anonymized datasets

There is no thing as an anonymized dataset. Anybody propagating this idea even tacitly is doing a disservice to the informed debate on privacy. Here’s a round up with some recent cases.

Re:publica

Just today Berlin visualization outfit Open Data City published a visualization of the devices that were connected to their access points during the Re:publica conference earlier this month. The visualization is a neat display of the ebb and flow of people in the various rooms during the event.

It is also a good attempt to change the discourse about data protection in Germany. The discourse tends to be locked in the full stop stance where absolutely ‘nothing is allowed’ without a ton of waivers. Because of that hassle, a lot of things which could be useful are not implemented. A more relaxed approach and a case by case decision on things would be better. In the case of Re:publica there does not seem to be any harm in making this visualization or in releasing the data (here find it on Fusion Tables where I uploaded it).

What I find to be a disservice to the general debate is the application of ‘pseudonymized’ data where the device ids have been processed with a salt and hash. The identifying characteristics have been removed but the ids are still linked across sessions making it possible to link identities with devices and figure out who was where exactly when during the conference.

http://twitter.com/stefanwehrmeyer/status/337972064306724866

To state again: at a professional conference such as Re:publica there would in all likelihood be no harm done if the entire dataset would be de-anonymized. The harm done is the pretense that processing a dataset in this way and then releasing it with the interlinkage across sessions is a good idea.

Which brings me to my next point.

Equens

http://twitter.com/AlexanderNL/status/337693480014970880

Yesterday the Dutch company, Equens, that processes all payment card transactions announced a plan to sell these transactions to stores. Transactions would be anonymized but still linked to a single card. This would make it trivial for anybody with a comprehensive secondary dataset (let’s say Albert Heijn or Vodafone) to figure out which real person belongs to which anonymized card. That last fact was not reported in any of the media coverage of this announcement which is also terrible.

http://twitter.com/ThijsNiks/status/337699593464709120

After a predictable uproar this plan was iced, but they will keep on testing the waters until they can implement something like this.

Today Foursquare released all real-time checkin data but with suitable anonymization. They publish only the location, a datetime and the gender of the person checking in. That is how this should be done.

License plates

Being in the business of opening data we at Hack de Overheid had a similar incident where a dataset of license plates was released where the plates had been md5’ed without a salt. This made it trivial to find out whether a given license plate was in that dataset.

This was quickly fixed. Again this is not a plea against opening data —which is still a good idea in most cases— but a plea for thinking about the things you do.

AOL search data

The arch-example of poorly anonymized search data is of course still the AOL search data leak from back in 2006. That case has been extensively documented, but not extensively learned from.

Memory online is frightfully short as is the nature of the medium but it becomes annoying if we want to make progress on something. Maybe it would be better altogether to lose the illusion that progress on anything can be made online.

For the privacy debate it would be good to keep in mind that the increasingly advanced statistical inference available means that almost all anonymization is going to fail. The only way around this is to not store data unless you have to or to accept the consequences when you do.

Moving into KANT

So that cat is out of the bag: I’ve taken up residency at KANT, the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering. Peter who you may have read before on The Waving Cat just wrote the inaugural post on our freshly pressed Tumblr (tweets are still forthcoming).

The new (temporary) arrangement with @fidothe working in the background

I’m in the process of moving over, getting my things in order and doing all of my other work, but I do believe that we have struck upon a mix here that has all of the right kinds of volatile creativity with a solid dash of make.

I don’t know what will come out of it yet, but that is the nature of a lab like this. My main source of inspiration is the Open Coop model as pioneered in Amsterdam North where independent entities team up and create new structures from their intellectual and physical overhead. There has been talk about all kinds of ideas already but we all know ideas are bullshit. The challenge will be to narrow things down and figure what we want to do. I do think that we are heading into the right direction. Onwards and upwards.

Week 320

The week before last started out with me still in Paris sampling the local coffee scene which has been improving massively over the past year or so.

Télescope already was nice:
Proper coffee

But with the addition of Loustic, French coffee can finally be taken seriously again:
Very nice place and only open for six weeks now.

Most of these places seem to be run by English speaking expatriates and they are also mostly frequented by the same. This was something I also noticed at my coworking space in La Cantine. It seems that foreigners are a necessary mediator to introduce new things —digital or coffee— into French culture.

That Tuesday I worked at KANT and all of the people there presented roughly what they’re doing at the agency we sublease at Panorama3000.

I was thinking of writing a screensaver that does the live OSM viewer ‘Show me the way’, but it turns out there’s a way easier solution by plugging that URL into the WebView Screensaver.

Shawn holding coffee court

That Wednesday I did a quick ignite for UIKonf on Beestenbende’s design aspects and the next day I was at Heimathafen Neukölln at 06:00 to help them with setup and registration. I managed to catch a bit of the conference and based on the content on stage and reactions in the room, it looks like it was a resounding success.

Going to demo the new Cuppings in a bit at the #uikonf #uikode

The next day I spent working at the office for most of the day, but in the evening I dropped by the UIKode hackathon to show the iOS project I had picked up again that week. More on that to be announced here soon.

Week 317

The week before this on Monday (almost two weeks ago), I went to a lecture by Graham Harman. Notes on that were blogged in a timely fashion.

That week also involved a one-day trip to Munich to present on the work we did for a client there. More on that on the Hubbub blog in due course.

My desk optically flipped (not an Instagram filter)

Thursday I worked at the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering next door. I really love how Oranienstraße is coming together as a creative technological hub of import in Berlin.

Endless streams of tourists resume

The rest of the week was used developing Ripple Effect and with maintenance on GidsGame.nl.

Week 301: a flurry of appointments in Amsterdam

Last Monday was the last day in Berlin before the holidays so something of a push here and there to get things to go through. That night we had a vvvv workshop at the studio hosted by Joreg to teach somewhere around eight people the basics of node based graphical environments (the only other one I had used extensively before was Open DX and of course there’s Quartz Composer and Impure Quadrigram).

VVVV workshop. I'm psyched!

I messed around a bit with it and managed to produce this bit of media art. It is very interesting to have the power of DirectX9 under your fingers without having to program at all, though the whole fact of non-programming feels a bit strange to me.

Also there was this bit about the journalistic climate in the Netherlands:

https://twitter.com/alper/status/280658121272217600

I would recommend anybody interfacing with journalists to be wholly guarded and keep clearly in mind what’s in it for them in the interaction. The way it is played by most actors, it hasn’t been about the uncovering of the truth for a long time.

Tuesday was my travel day to Amsterdam where I wrote a bunch of stuff in the train and had an Open State board meeting that evening.

I spent most of Wednesday in Utrecht at the Hubbub studio. That night I had dinner with Tim de Gier, Loeki Westerveld and Justus Bruns partially by plan, partially by coincidence.

Thursday was also spent at Hubbub discussing business and getting work done. That night I had drinks with Kars and Lieke in a smashing new Utrecht establishment.

On Friday I met Edo van Royen at Studyflow, had lunch with Peter Robinett, coffee with Justus Bruns, dropped by at my accountant, had a beer with Thijs Niks and then drinks at the Open Coop with Lex and Alexander. Having said that: these visits to the Netherlands always tend to devolve into a flurry of errands that barely leave any time to think. That is going to change for the next one.

Carrying four RFIDs with me (down from five) because consolidating their contents is too much work.

Week 300: odds and ends

Last week was a week without travel or deadlines so a lot of stuff that had been lying around for too long got done.

I did some more work on the small secret project1. Also going forward with work on TORREON.

Chris Eidhof dropped by briefly at Praxis and told me about his plans to organize an iOS conference in Berlin.

http://twitter.com/chriseidhof/status/278462418835881984

I bit the bullet and got myself a monthly ticket for the U-Bahn along with a ticket for my bike. This has made a huge different in getting around the city. Many trips which would take half an hour by bike are a lot easier now and especially with the snow the combination of transit+bike makes a lot more stuff possible.

I enrolled in a conversational German course at the Goethe Institute to up my German to a professional level. We are going to get a new collaborator over at Praxis. And I went to my first ever CrossFit training session on the recommendation by Mustafa Isik.

I finally bit the bullet and changed my T-Mobile Netherlands plan to something a bit more minimal because I don’t spend much more than a week a month in the Netherlands anyway. On Thursday I sent a new proposal for TORREON. I did more stuff on REYNOSA.

Seems a rather appropriate sticker for Berlin

I got the funny (for Berlin’s reputation, see this Times piece) sticker for the new play Sommergäste by the Schaubühne written by Maxim Gorki. The previous play by that same director, Eugen Onegin, was absurdly boring so hopes for this adaptation of a Russian master should not be too high. Another Schaubühne play we almost went to, The Black Rider2, seems to be by all accounts also really rather terrible.

Theater is a hopeless moribund discipline but Fabian Hinrichs may prove a notable exception in Berlin this week (which I’ll be missing because of travel to Amsterdam).

This week was also the week of the brilliant eulogy for occupy by Quinn Norton. Intentional or not, it confirmed my cynicism about the movement. What little sparks of brilliance and hope were to be found in the USA versions were almost totally absent from the Dutch camps. Around the studio here in Kreuzberg there are still some remnants of the movement active:
Just another demo in front of the office

Friday I started initial work on TORREON and after that I went to the VVVV 10th anniversary event over at Letters are my friends.

#vvvvX Flagship store opening

Twitter announced the general availability of your own tweets for download in archive form. I had done some preliminary work on this when this option was available to Europeans and now ThinkUp is busy building a full-fledged importer.

Sunday morning I finished reading The Invisibles, a brilliant mind bending comic by Grant Morrison. It may not seem like it is relevant to my work, but it very much is in a multitude of strange ways.

  1. I regret not picking a codename for it now. Henceforth it shall be known as REYNOSA. []
  2. Really, the massive misguided stones necessary to translate Burroughs into German… []

Week 299: Moscow and sake release

Moskva river #wander

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.

Odd to finally see this in real life. #wander

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.

My name in Russian

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.
Catching my first ice of the season 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.

Mayakovskaya

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.

Komsomolskaya #wander

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.

Cycling to work today was a bit more hardcore than I bargained for

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.

Week 296: Back in Europe/business

After some weeks traveling to Beijing and Australia, last week I was back in Europe, touching down in Amsterdam Tuesday morning early. I had a very nice flight in from Sydney with the only annoyance being that my laptop had broken upon arrival there. This made me spend half a day of the two I had there in the Bondi Apple Store trying to figure out what the problem was.

The Genius there was less than helpful. Determining that it was my hard drive, he tried without avail to erase it and then load up a new version of the OS. I am more or less pleased that he wasn’t successful in doing that. In Amsterdam I tried another couple of things but finally handed it in at Maccare.nl who without touching it said ‘it was probably the cable’ and the very same day had replaced it for me. Since the Genius hadn’t even managed to erase my disk, I could incredulously resume working from where I was a week ago.

Finally getting my cup on at Koko

Not having a laptop I did manage to finish The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoete and a Monocle on the flights from Sydney to Guangzhou to Amsterdam and the layover.

Once more Vondelpark #wander

Niels van Hoorn from Brainsley provided support (as well as many many friends online) in the form of tools and a place to hangout while I tried swapping fresh hard drives in and out. The following day I handed my laptop in and while it was being fixed, I worked the day in Utrecht where using Chrome’s sign-in feature, I could resume most of my old work on an old Hubbub Macbook. It turns out the cloud is not a lie at all.

This morning's office looking out on Hobbemakade

Thursday morning I got my Macbook Pro back and spent most of the day working at Brainsley’s offices which are small but rather cozy. I dropped by the Open Coop to chat with Lex and pick up my Open State business cards. And that night I met up with some old friends who work now mostly as hired guns in the Amsterdam startup scene for cocktails at the famed Door 74.

Cup of coffee before I go #wander

Friday I dropped by the Village (again!) and then got onto the train to Berlin where I am typing this right now.

Back at the studio again (also: fuck it, ship it) #wander

Week 289: moving out, moving on and some small events

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.

Let's try this again. Nice and cozy.

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

Outside in

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.

Circuit boards

I started doing some game design of myself. And built an election game using Game-o-Matic: The Emile Game.

Week 275: Athens

The week before last I spent in Athens mostly hanging out, going to the beach and getting some work done.

That was also the week that I upgraded my Things client to to the Things Cloud Beta. I think I’m not supposed to say anything about it, but let me just say: ++. I have started moving large parts of my workload to Asana, so it remains to be seen if native apps like these continue to be a good fit for what is an inherently collaborative effort.

In Athens I crashed the local hackers event at the Colab Workspace Athens where the Ruby group were discussing the organization of the next Euroku. And another day I found the O.M.G. event, short for Overclocking, Modding and Gaming where lots of people gathered to play Call of Duty 4.

I wrote up a longer report of my experiences in Greece last week.

Greece, a society undergoing Stockholm syndrome

I spent last week in Athens because Lea was at work at the Athens & Epidaurus festival where the Schaubühne staged two plays. I spent the week relaxing, working and taking in the Athens air.

Rooftop drink watching the Acropolis

Athens Terrace Life

The temperature of 32-36C during the entire week was a good reason to spend all my time outdoors in the shade. Athens, being accustomed to this weather, has ample options to choose from to spend your time, from garden patios, terraces all over the place, drink and food stands and lots and lots of iced cappucini and espressi.

Garden patio

Interestingly almost every restaurant, café and terrace in the city has WiFi. One place near the hotel where we went regularly, Ambrosia, excused themselves for not having it saying ‘they were old.’ Given the proliferation of internet, I hardly saw any laptops in the various cafés neither during the day or night time. I’m guessing the WiFi is being used by smart phone users to supplement their limited data plans.

Nice cafe

Oddly during the so-called economic crisis, almost everything at terraces was still pretty expensive (Amsterdam prices). Iced coffees went for €4 and cocktails from €9 upwards also beers were definitely not cheap. I didn’t see a lack of visitors either. Many of the very upmarket establishment where I was rubbing shoulders with the Athens 1% were bustling. Those that have managed to set aside enough savings (wherever they got the money) look to be casually riding out the current storm. I have no idea how those who are less well off are weathering this.

Athens square life

A lot of real estate around town looked to be for let with “Enoikiazetai” plastered on too many buildings to count. This seems to stem from a similar price locking where property owners will not cut their prices even though the market cannot support it.

The artist at work

Strolling around the city I saw parties and preparations happening everywhere. A party would consist of a DJ, a couple of speakers, electricity tapped from a nearby distributing box and a couple of coolers filled with beer. The best of these was one evening in a derelict construction site where in a gallery space artists were at work and downstairs a rave was taking place. Tons of people were drinking and partying on the street. At least crises are good for parties.

Crazytown

The Theater Festival

I dropped by the theater festival after the opening night to have a drink. This festival like so many others was located on the location of evaporated industry. Where there once were jobs, there now are cultural venues. The Peiraeus 260 complex was a rather successful example of this development. High profile theater festivals such as this one are almost exclusively frequented by a kind of elite who have an old-fashioned and status sensitive cultural taste. I briefly skimmed the program, but I could not find anything I wanted to spend my time on.

photo 2.JPG

On that opening night, the location served Berlin beer, locally brewed but with a proper bear logo on it. All of the Schaubühne shows at this festival (and at the previous one in Athens a couple of weeks ago) had sold out even on the night that Germany was playing Greece in the EC. Greek people even were boastfully demonstrating their German language skills at anybody they could find. It looked to me as if the ruling class of Athens —fully aware where their money comes from— was cozying up to their new German masters.

This all is a bit surreal if you read reports about Greek ressentiment against Germans. We did not see anything of the sort here. If anything, in parts of Greek society Germany seems to be an aspirational value.

The Engaged

At the port of Peiraeus I saw a banner by SYRIZA claiming that the necessary changes in Greece have been made. I hope they don’t believe it themselves.

“The change in Greece has been done. Europe, are you listening?”—SYRIZA

Then at the local Ruby programmers meetup they were discussing organization of the next Euroku, a rather large event in this scene. And like anywhere in the world programmers are in such short supply that they cannot lift their heads for the amount of work on their plate. This is good for them, but that same short supply means that they will not be able to change a lot.

Hacker event discussing Ruby now

Near the end of my stay I found Exarcheia square which seems to be the focus of the counter-cultural movement. No riots to be found, just a bunch of banners obscuring the square and a collection of nice cafés and restaurants that are a bit less glossy than those in city center. Probably the place where normal Athenians hang out. At night a large group of people gathered on the square. Music from a DJ and banners professing sympathy for Turkish anarchists accompanied the revelers who were mostly occupied trying to deplete the beer supply of the local drink stand.

Street art

Whatever you may think of it, the protestors, the politicians, the programmers are all busy doing things. At least they do not spend their days idling on terraces sipping pricy beverages.

The End

My final impression is that of a country locked in a strange kind of socio-economical stasis, very much resigned to the current situation and deeply divided on many levels. Change looks to be far away either going to require a long time or the breaking of a great many things. However difficult the Greek relationship with Europe may be, it has been the source of a lot of the local prosperity.

I should work in beachside clubs more often.

On my last day there I had my wallet pick-pocketed from me while returning from the beach. This is a common enough occurrence in the tourist centers of the mediterranean. Fortunately I suffered no worse damage than having to replace a stack of plastic, having no money on me to donate to the Greek cause.

Week 272: speculative realism, iPhone development, event visiting and preparation

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

Fuck you hipster

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.

Checkin it out (no shortage of photographers in Berlin it seems)

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.
New capabilities unlocked

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.
Open bar and MS/Nintendo games on display

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).

Week 260: books, games, keynotes and Koolhaas

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.

Reassembled the library

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

Ohne Furcht und Adel (or you might know it as Citadels)

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:
Engrossed Stevenote audience

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.

Represent on the door!

Week 257: moving office, Kotti, to Amsterdam again, Open Coop kicking it off, Social Cities of Tomorrow and explorations in theory and practice

Writing these notes on a Sunday afternoon wit a mug of steaming coffee within reach as they are meant to be written.

This Monday I finally made it out to the Finanzamt with a fully filled in form for Steuerliche Erfassung (or something). After that I went to the Agora Collective to get my stuff. It is a great place, but I don’t want to be fixed in a coworking space. There are a myriad reasons why that is not a great fit, but being able to shape and own your own workplace is built-in in most offices and is purposefully left out of coworking.

Then I moved into the contur & konsorten office on Adalbertstraße with my stuff. A Burogemeinschaft with 10 people where everybody has their own independent desk, with its own walls and bookshelves, a place to put my professional library and hang my posters. In short: a place to call my own. In a total coincidence I am now a staircase neighbour of my friends at the Maker’s Loft which could lead to more serendipity in the future.

The office is smack on Kotti, the most important urban maelstrom in Berlin. It is a place where many large streams of traffic and people meet with the U-bahn transport hub (connecting U1 and U8) and the roundabout connecting the main thoroughfare of Skalitzer Straße with the Kottbusser Damm. Betahaus, co-up, the Maker’s Loft and many other creative places are within throwing distance and the area sports equal amounts of hipster cafés and Turkish eateries with the addicts holding their own on the main square. They can be a hassle, but their presence is inseparable from the conditions that made that part of Kreuzberg exactly what it is: a free-haven for people looking for cheap housing be they immigrants or artists —or both.

Tuesday was spent at the new office in presentation prep with the evening closed off by meeting with the local Open Knowledge Foundation chapter. It was a fruitful discussion exchanging various ideas on how to boost the openness movement in Berlin.

OKFN meetup

On Wednesday, I took a leisurely train ride to Amsterdam which seems to feel shorter and shorter the more I get in the rhythm. That day the long awaited Code 4 video launched. I’m immensely proud of the work we did and I don’t think there’s anybody who has pulled off a game like that anywhere in the world, so it might be well worth a look:

A more detailed write-up on that project is forthcoming.

Thursday I continued working on my presentation at the Open Coop. I also ripped the video of minister of economic affairs Maxime Verhagen endorsing open data from the NOS site, because their site sucks.

Friday was the big day of Social Cities of Tomorrow where I got the honor to be the first to present our case of ‘Apps for Amsterdam’ to the assembled audience. It was a wonderful event put together by our esteemed friends and colleagues of the Mobile City: Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal who have been leaders in this field for the better part of the past ten years. The keynotes by Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill were superb and they remain a source of inspiration for our creative work.

Getting our aeropress on with a new device that does tenth of a centigrade precise temperature with built-in scales.

I feel like I have to remark on two things that I thought of during the conference:

The entire day was infused with a critical stance against open data and transparency within government. Usman Haque served the opening volley with a criticism of indiscriminate data transparency and an approach to further civic engagement by giving people the tools to collect data themselves. After that Dan Hill also added some criticism against traditional methods of social change.

I agree with their points and criticisms and I would have liked to address them but that was impossible in the time given to me to present our case. I would like to say that if anybody in the Netherlands has been deeply involved on all levels in the government transparency movement and is acutely aware of the problems, issues and realities of data transparency, it is probably us1. Besides that we have employed most of the techniques Dan Hill presented during the last couple of years: shaping decision making processes, deploying long lasting interventions and using the sleights of hand required to realign large organizations and work with far too many people.

We have been and will be hard liners for the cause of government transparency out of necessity and conviction. I will always defend that data that has already been collected by government and carries no issues of privacy or national security with it, belongs to the public and should be accessible by the public.

The other issue is that the conference should was probably most valuable to the people in the Netherlands who are not as current on design and technology as I have come to take for granted. The lack of reflection was painfully clear in some of the questions asked by the audience. This is a common issue, but I have seen it often in the past during Mobile Mondays or the lecture Manuel DeLanda gave in Amsterdam.

Dan Hill talked about going from the matter to the meta level and back again and all three keynoters showed that they are very capable of doing that. In the Netherlands I have found that many practitioners struggle a lot with the matter and they don’t have the time or the interest to ascend to the meta level, even though that would feed back positively into their material undertakings.

I have been looking for collaborators in the Netherlands who look beyond their narrow field and manage to recombine multiple theoretical and practical strands back into their work but there are very few. I hosted the UX Book Club Amsterdam a while, but found that most attendees there took their field of design too narrowly and the field of UX too seriously. Similarly the Berlage Institute is doing a postdoctoral course ‘to explore the forces that shape the built environment in the contemporary world’ which is limited to architects. I don’t know anybody who believes that the problems that will plague our cities in the next fifty years will be solved drawing from the monoculture of architecture school.

It is as if most people in the Netherlands are trapped within the operational closure of their own practice.

I don’t know where I would fall, but I struggle every day with striking a balance between theory and practice and I think if you do not feel that struggle you should take a long hard look at what it is you are doing.

After Social Cities of Tomorrow we had a party at our offices in the Open Coop because they officially incorporated as a cooperation and are set to do great things. The party was rather tremendous and good parties are key to getting things done in Amsterdam.

And then there was this band playing in the office. #nofilter

And now it is Sunday while I am typing these notes and because of a lack of gourmet coffee, it is off to the Hubbub studio in Utrecht to be the murder board for Kars’s LIFT presentation.

  1. For a primer on the issue, read danah boyd’s “Six Provocations for Big Data”. []

Amsterdam Culinary Desert

I just read the double interview in Amsterdam Weekly with Johannes van Dam and Undercover Glutton. It is a lovely interview and their combined knowledge of food is certainly impressive. What I am a bit less impressed with is their knowledge of metropolitan cuisine. At one point in the interview van Dam extolls the culinary variety in Amsterdam and there I must take offense. I have traversed the city far and wide and I have come up empty more often than not for many a dish. Eventually I gave up and moved to warmer culinary climes.

Unfindable Treats

The problem in Amsterdam first and foremost is that many dishes and types of food lack proper representation. There are even entire cuisines missing. It is a long list, but below follows an attempt to distill my years of disappointment:

Breakfast
Try to find a place in Amsterdam to have a decent meal1 at 08:00 and you’ll come up empty. This is tied mainly with the departure of blue collar work from the city and the city getting a more languid touristy character. There’s the mad commute around 08:00, but nobody goes in for breakfast except a take-away coffee and croissant.

Brunch of any type
Tied to the previous, there is hardly a brunch offering to speak of. This is a ridiculous poverty compared to San Francisco or even Copenhagen. Most Sunday’s are highly improved by this type of food, though it can also very quickly degenerate into a fad.

Full English breakfast and the British kitchen
There are a couple of touristy places offering something like the Full English and there’s one lunch place that does a meagre version, but the city all in all lacks greasy spoons. The British have elevated eating disgusting things to an art and we should take notice. With the breakfast already unattainable, don’t even look for more specialty offerings such as the Scottish Egg or Welsh Rarebit. Relatedly I have not been able to find a reliable and affordable source of Eggs Benedict in the city in my years.

BBQ
London has recently been treated to the best BBQ this side of the pond with the opening of Pitt Cue but Amsterdam doesn’t even sport an attempt at this discipline. The festival of the Rolling Kitchens had some attempts in this direction, but the quantities were not enough for the appetite of the audience and an availability of one week a year does not amount to much.

East-European or Russian cuisine
In the Netherlands we pretend that Eastern Europe does not exist, except for Polish people who we use for scapegoating or when our pipes are clogged. The Slavic treats of Borsht, Perogi and the likes, are impossible to find and in the whole of Amsterdam there is not even one Russian or similar restaurant.

Ramen
There is currently one location in Amsterdam that does Tonkotsu Ramen and does it excellently but it only serves them a handful hours every week. You do not need to be a nippophile to be hit by a sudden ramen craving, but you will be coming up empty.

Burrito
There is also now only one place in Amsterdam that does an acceptable burrito and it is swamped on Sunday evenings. It isn’t Californian, but that is a minor detail.

Proper Coffee
Coffee in Amsterdam has been improving and there are some players that have upped the city’s game reliably. That success has however prompted a lot of douche places that look nice, but where the coffee is undrinkable. Add to that, some places (outside of the center) ask €2,50 for a mediocre cappuccino. Kees Kraakman is about to open up North any day now which will give that area a much needed caffeine boost but overall it is not enough.

Pasteis de Nata
Here in Berlin you are nearly smothered in this treat at an affordable price (the same in London). In Amsterdam, they are near unfindable and expensive when you do. The general pastry situation is laughably poor compared to either Lisbon or Paris.

Taco adds the following:

@alpercugun Add to lacks: really good tapas, more than one korean restaurant, authentic schezuan, good southern US style BBQ —Taco Ekkel

I treated the BBQ above. I can agree about the Korean offerings which are few and too expensive. I rarely ate tapas because most taperias are ballententen. And I have never had Schezuan, so I can’t comment on that.

Problems in the Fabric of Eating

The shortcomings above may be fixed in the future, but progress will be slow and incomplete because the Amsterdam culinary scene is broken on a deeper level. I can best explain that using two factors:

No 24 hour availability
Peter reminded me of this one, which is pretty important. I have long bemoaned the lack of a 24h diner in Amsterdam. I would take any diner by now, but for a city pretending to be international, the lack of food options for a traveller touching down on Schiphol between 02:00 and 07:00 is rather dismaying. Amsterdam is not ‘the city that never sleeps’, so much is clear, but allowing the people that don’t sleep to cater for themselves, would be tolerant for a start.

This is a symptom of the Dutch mentality to create rules for everything, even the things that would otherwise sort themselves out. Dutch regelzucht nips a lot of otherwise nice things in the bud. This has effects on the opening times of restaurants, but also on the (im)possibility of food carts and other displays of eating and drinking outdoors, but probably also on the ways you can prepare food and who you can hire to do that. I’m not advocating total abandon of rules here, but I am quite sure the Dutch implementation errs too far on the side of caution.

Absurdly poor price/quality ratio
The rampant inflation of housing in the city also has had an effect on culinary offerings. People paying upwards of €1200/month in rent, don’t quaff at a single sit-down dinner costing around €20 for the simplest of meals2.

Many of those people are new entrants to Amsterdam which is the biggest city they have experienced thusfar. These people are really nice and they mean well, but they are still hicks who are easily impressed by the trappings of the big city village that Amsterdam is. Their newfound abundance in cash and lack of taste spoils the market and makes good options for the discerning eater, harder to find.

Conclusion

The fact that Johannes would not mention these issues and he gives Turkish charcoal grill after charcoal grill 9 marks every week3, testifies to his age and his local knowledge. Most of the people I know consume food with a global or at least an European perspective and given the best there is on offer there, Amsterdam cannot compete.

I know the scene is improving and ever in flux, so some of the things I have mentioned above may no longer be true, but I haven’t even been gone two months yet. Additions and discoveries are of course welcome here or via more private channels.

  1. None of this granola/muesli crap, eggs at least. []
  2. I pay half that in Berlin. []
  3. Nothing wrong with that, I love ocakbasi. []

Wat moet je doen met gamification?

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.

Wij blijven serieuze reserveringen houden bij het klakkeloos doorvoeren van gamification. We denken dat een fijnzinnigere aanpak wenselijk is omdat de problemen ingewikkeld zijn en deze spellen dagelijks door echte mensen gebruikt worden. In onze praktijk bij Hubbub maken we serious games en dat doen we tot tevredenheid van klanten en spelers al zeg ik het zelf. Waar het gamification betreft ben ik één van de eerste aanjagers van Foursquare in Nederland. Ik ben me dus terdege bewust van de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van deze aanpak.

Ik wil mensen en organisaties die iets willen doen hiermee oproepen om professionele hulp in de arm te nemen. Je wilt mensen die een track record hebben in het maken van spellen die werken voor de mensen die ze spelen én voor de bedrijven die ze inzetten. Dat betekent in dit geval Hubbub of andere bedrijven die werken met echte spelontwerpers. Wij zitten niet exact te springen om meer te doen, maar we zien tegelijk wel een acute behoefte aan ervaring uit de praktijk.

Communicatie- en interactieve bureau’s doen nu een paar slides over gamificatie in hun strategie-pitches om het concept ‘meegenomen te hebben’ maar ze zijn zich vrijwel nooit bewust van de complexiteit en nuances van games en systemen.

Het zijn goedbedoelde pogingen, maar ze slaan bijna altijd de plank mis. Als je echt duurzame waarde wilt creëren kun je beter direct bij een goede partij aankloppen.

Week 238

Blit Alper

Another piece on an interesting game published in nrc.next. This week a critical review of the selective enforcement of the App Store guidelines in the case of Phone Story a game that is itself a critique of the iPhones it runs on. An indictment of Apple makes for an easy piece to write.

Geodata hero, Simeon Nedkov at the Open Data Bazaar with a very appropriate t-shirt:
Innovate or die - Hack de overheid

Tuesday saw the Hack de Overheid event called the Open Data Bazaar. It was a massive success with well over a hundred people from all over the Netherlands. Lots of students were present and lots of hacking went on throughout the day. There was also a brimful workshop program where birds of a feather discussed the current state of open data in the Netherlands.

Hacked together a display of transit information with @dvbosch and data from @openov

During the bazaar I worked together with Dirk van Oosterbosch to make an Arduino driven matrix display that shows the departure time of the next bus from the venue. It doesn’t get more situated than that and I’m glad we can whip something like that up in a couple of hours. It shows that we have come quite a way since first we started with this stuff.

Megapolis Underground - Research institute for the built environment

Wednesday I visited OTB at Delft, University of Technology. OTB is the research institute for the built environment, the theoretical backing for the faculty of Engineering, Policy and Management (at which I got a minor in Management of Technology during my studies). I will be consulting with geodata experts in the Netherlands on developer relations so the data and standards they are working on are such that they will be easy to develop with.

I also visited my old faculty which has been taken over by architecture students after their building burnt down. I must say I have never seen our buildings in better order.

I hardly recognize my old faculty.

In the afternoon we paid a site visit to what is to be the location of the next Hack de Overheid event “Code Camping Amsterdam”. Some of you may already have surmised where it is going to be. Announcements are due next week but suffice it to say that it is going to be massive. We are going to be coinciding with a massive Eddie the Eagle Museum party on the same venue after our event. Something of a departure from previous years but one which should prove to be very fun.

Auditorium from above

Thursday I spent all day at Bits of Freedom to help them with the #doyourbit fundraiser. Being an independent organization BoF are more dependent on private donations. We love them to death and Hack de Overheid is more than a bit complementary so I try to help them out whenever I can. That Thursday I spent all day at their offices and tweeted like wildfire with a bunch of other volunteers to reach the Dutch internet and get them to donate.

Spending the day helping Bits of Freedom fight for an open and free internet.

That same night there was an event about games in the Stedelijk Museum. It was somewhat problematic testified to by these pieces written by Arjen and Niels. Arjen’s piece quite precisely mirrors my qualms about the evening (see also my comment).

Hoogerbrugge going into awkward pervert mode

Friday was something of a write-off due to the volume of activities that had happened during the week. Fortunately the symposium of the STT. The day was a nice get-together with most people in the Netherlands active in the field of gaming.

The thickest section is about serious games for the elderly.

Gamification interlude

What was disappointing though not very surprising was the fact that all of the critical reflection on the day’s topic —opportunities in serious games and gamification— came from philosopher-hero Jos de Mul. Which solid as it was, coming from a philosopher, may be too easy to dismiss. The rest was profiteering. The Dutch remain a merchant nation at heart and anything that generates income will be applauded however morally dubious it may be.

The issues that we have with both of these concepts are real and they need a considered and nuanced approach. In our practice we make serious games and we seem to be doing quite ok if I may say so myself. When it comes to gamification, I am one of the principal instigators of Foursquare in the Netherlands so I am intimately aware with both the methods and their shortcomings.

Given that, I would urge people and organizations who want to do something in this field to seek professional help. That means get in touch with us or with other organizations that employ bona fide game designers. We are not exactly shy for more things to do but there is a clear need for guidance in this field. In any case make sure to work with people who have a track record in designing playful experiences that cater both to the wishes of the humans playing them and to the goals of the businesses commissioning them.

Agencies are currently including gamification as a slide in their strategy deck, paying lip service to the concept to make a quick buck. If you want to enable them doing that, you are free to do so. But if you want to create real value, why take the long way round?

Interlude over. That Saturday I went to the movie night at Filmhuis Cavia organized by the guys from Popup City. I wrote about that on this blog at: Stop Kicking the Creative Class.

And I also procured a Huawei X5 to play around with. This seems to be the first Chinese manufacturer that has found a low price point for a device that is still highly capable. The Kenyan market has been flooded with the €99 little brother of this phone, the X3.

Week 234

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

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:
Machine readable Amsterdam

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…).

Toine launching das Magazin by talking about slurred hubris

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

Open

New year, new about

I think it’s time to archive the hagiography that was on my About page. I apologize if you were duped or offended by it. Anyway, you should know better than to take any piece of text containing the phrase ‘thought leader’ seriously.

I think it’s still pretty fun, so I’m archiving it here as a quote:

Grab

Alper Çuğun is an engineer of the user experience specialized in cutting edge web technology, data viualization, physical interaction, game design and location based services.

Incredibly well connected within the tech scene but also always looking beyond the edges. He is known and respected among his peers, the most innovative web denizens, both locally and abroad and is responsible for startups, high quality writing, business innovation and winning numerous competitions.

Education

He graduated from Delft, University of Technology —a no nonsense engineering university colloquially known as the school of Getting Things Done— on the topic of crowd-sourcing avant-la-lettre. His curriculum of Media and Knowledge Engineering was comprised of a thorough foundation of computer science, signal processing, compression, computer graphics, data visualization, statistics, data mining, information retrieval, 3d programming and assorted other courses along with a solid minor of business courses in Management of Technology.

This solid grounding at one of the most respected technical universities of the world and the manner of thought acquired there have continued to serve Alper well throughout his professional and personal endeavours.

Early career

Already being well situated in the local and European web scenes after finishing university Alper went straight into freelancing for Aardverschuiving Media without an intermediate period of corporate mind numbing. Trying to find a good position to innovate the web from Delft, he also opened a coworking office for a year that became a hub for the local freelance community —he also started Dutch coworking map Coworker.nl together with Robert Gaal— shortly after which he moved to the greener pastures of Amsterdam.

Alper is also a founding member of Dutch finance startup Tipit.to a small corporation that has transformed thinking on crowdsourced micropayments and despite struggles with Paypal has financed Wikileaks among other public initiatives.

Thought leadership

Alper regularly exchanges ideas with industry thought leaders both in and out of Europe by visiting the best conferences and meeting up with the acest of web people.

The blog Alper writes on this site is a long running mainstay of the Dutch blogosphere and it continues to be a widely respected peripatetic rumination on the intersection of design, technology and society in the broadest sense.

Alper and Robert Gaal‘s nose for up and coming web trends enabled them to scout the fresh startup Foursquare and bring it to its first international outing in Amsterdam shortly after its 2009 SxSWi launch. They both remain set to this day both on founding, finding and befriending the web’s next hottest startups.

Alper’s newest foray is Monster Swell an agency to aid people, corporations and governments in making sense of vast quantities of data using statistical analysis, user experience design and data visualization. Never content to settle for yesterday’s status quo Alper is determined to stay at the forefront of the technological wave.

Extra curriculum

An avid cultural consumer of the most eclectic of offerings as well as a longtime runner, capoeirista and occasional surfer, Alper Çuğun is a modern day renaissance man in both mind and body.

Alper is also well represented on the following web properties: Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Anobii, Dopplr, last.fm and Delicious.

Week 227

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.

Away

The week was spent a bit catching up from a cold and ticking off stuff before a week of Berlin (staying at Your Neighbours) and a week of off the grid R&R in the Alps. So a frantic pace here and there.

Tuesday we went for a technical house call in the Hague:
Lattice work

Kilian wrote up his work on Statlas. Expect more on that after the Summer lull.

My presentation on CHI Sparks 2011 was put online (thanks Yohan Creemers) and quite pleased with how that turned out:

Chi Sparks 2011: Code 4 – A large scale game for organizational change from Chi Nederland on Vimeo.

There seems to be a VOLUME magazine out in which are incorporated our contributions about how architecture and the ‘internet of things’ should mesh. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m curious as to the results.

James Burke and I made plans about the Chokepoint Project and an upcoming visit to the CCC Camp in Finowfurt.

A review I wrote for nrc.next about the documentary game: The Cat and the Coup (about the British/American coup d’état in Iran) saw print in a strongly reduced form. Expect a more elaborate version of that to hit Bashers in the next month.

I wrote a brief thing about how my ideas about Amsterdam urban development are supported by Jane Jacobs seminal work: “Jane Jacobs and the city of Amsterdam” and also wrote a small something over at Monster Swell to commemorate the 10e6 Foursquare users milestone and Amsterdam’s small role in that.

With all of that done, it was into the night train to Berlin for a Friday very early morning arrival.

Berlin am Morgen

Week 226

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

Also a longer version of my review of Inside a Star-filled Sky was posted to Bashers. Seemingly any post that does not contain meta-criticism has a hard time attracting comments over there (maybe everywhere). More stuff was published also about Jason Rohrer, especially of note the Wired piece about Chain World.

Mid-week marked the first deployed iteration of guadalupe. If development on that goes the way we want it, expect private alpha invites to become available also in August.

End of the week we spent a bunch of time doing a submission to SxSWi to talk about the Heist Model. It’s an edgy philosophy and a fun way of working, which we look forward to expound in Austin accompanied by friends, margaritas and BBQ.

Friday there was Ball Invasion (with friends):
Ball Invasion with Alex and Peter

After which I managed to get stuck with a car and drive it up North to the Appsterdam HQ for the iOS Devcamp that was in progress.

iOS devcamp

The weekend was marked by rainy misery and a short piece of writing about open data becoming a normal practice of Amsterdam City-Center.

Week 217

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?”

Real estate wise it looks like our space in the Volkskrantgebouw may double and we will be able to expand our own activities and invite in friends. That will be awesome and add greatly to the dynamic of the studio. Stay tuned!

Tuesday saw the long expected completion of the Dufarge web store, a favor to our kind friends —nay! design superheroes— over at Buro Pony. Quite pleased that we managed to pull that one off in the in between hours.

L'Equipe Esthetique

Wednesday we had a Foursquare meetup here in Amsterdam with Naveen of Foursquare fame and a bunch of local enthousiasts. Lots of ideas still to do cool stuff with Foursquare but not much time.

Roof terrace interview

Thursday we gave an interview about the upcoming Statlas launch due soon to be online over at our friends of the Stimuleringsfonds. After that it was an open night at many venues for Creative Amsterdam and I went on a tour d’Amsterdam with Edial and we hit: Grrr, Foam and steim among other venues.

Freak Bionic Hand

Also some robots, just for good measure:
The Metal Horde

Robot to monitor building collapse due to NZ subway

Week 216

Sarpa di Poli

Last week got off to a good start with victory dinner by team maguro. Good times were had. Plans for world domination were forged.

Wrote up the project we did for the Amsterdam UIT Bureau: Foursquare map display for Amsterdam nightlife. We are very happy to have been able to do this project and we look forward to its debut in the ticket shop.

I also published the slides for my talk at /dev/haag: Slides for ‘Fixing reality with data visualization’

And the week was closed off with @ouroffice drinks on the roof terrace. Odds are good that we may be expanding our floor surface within the building, parts of which are already spoken for, but others still open. If you have an idea or would like to join us, do get in touch.

Roughing it on the roof

That Friday however did not conclude the week. Saturday we had a workshop as internet experts with VOLUME architecture magazine (co-organized by our friends from VURB). They are planning to do an issue on ‘Internet of Things’ though the internet’s ramifications for architecture go much much further than that most practical layer.

Week 192

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.

Worked on the integration of Bandjesland for PLAY Pilots.

Gave a presentation Wednesday at Social Media Club 030 which was pretty well received giving an overview of the Location Based Services landscape both in breadth and in history with some hints towards the future. I think this screenshot of Plazes from early 2006 was pretty telling.

Non-Potable Speaker Gift

Got the idea for project toluca and did some initial research and work on that. More of a self-itch relevance thing, but should cause a bunch of attention when it launches.

Mobile Monday Amsterdam posted the video of my presentation at their event. Thanks for that.

I also did a planning session on culiacán at Booreiland, research can start though production should be more of a 2011 thing.

Project querétaro is a hugely relevant data-journalism thing which got the in-depth brief and coding kick-off.

Laptop opladen

Friday the expedition to the VVOJ congres in Ghent started where with a group of people from Hack de Overheid we held a data ‘genius bar’ where journalists could ask their questions and Saturday we did our best to assess and resolve their issues. Interest at our desk was large (and only partially because they thought we were real hackers) and we managed to resolve pretty much all of the issues to some degree.

Stadhuis Gent

Also it’s not on the site yet —it is on the new one—, but I joined Hack de Overheid due to synergies we couldn’t ignore any longer.

Also Saturday in two weeks we will have the Open Data Day and Dutch Data Drinks #3.

Eben Moglen — “Will the net empower the center or the ends?”

Bits of Freedom did a terrific job hosting a salon with Eben Moglen this afternoon at The Hub. As Mr. Moglen did, I am going to take the liberty of assuming you already know who he is1 and I’m going to proceed to write a biased view of the afternoon.

I love Bits of Freedom in its current incarnation to death —all its members are trerific people too— and I support their causes though I’m often vocally critical of certain approaches, ideas and dogmas of the privacy movement.

Everything taken into account though, BoF are our own stalwart bastion in the fight for digital freedom so I suggest you support them.

Anyway, to get going:

Many of the points raised today with regards to control, power and its properties, the interregnum moment we find ourselves in, xenofobia, databases, anonymity are highly pertinent to the current global political environment. Mr. Moglen is a gifted speaker with a broad legal and historical perspective which is awesome.

There are a bunch of issues that I find pertinent that seem not to be touched upon within the current movement and this piece is one way of getting them out into the open and out into the Google.

I managed to get one question in that got misinterpreted and had a lively debate afterwards with Mr. Moglen about the cultural cleft between designers and hackers.

Sticking in the mud

What is often a risk with the hacker/counter-cultural attitude to technology is that any protest you have against the current state of things can be interpreted as a plea to abolish said technology and go back to the prior state.

Mr. Moglen had some part in this with his plea against digital payment methods and contactless transit payment (de OV-chipkaart).

I know he wasn’t for abolishing these things, but the more extreme outliers in the privacy movement either want to or they want to cripple these systems with freedom to such an extent that they become unusable or their utility becomes compromised. Sometimes these point of views are porpagated with such a disconnect to the larger part of society that it borders on Luddism. I think that is a real risk.

What the privacy movement needs to do is to speak out clearly for the benefits of these technologies. I clearly see the value of the OV-chipkaart and any plea for rolling back the system back to the strippenkaart is ludicrous on a variety of levels. Even if the OV-chipkaart is as Mr. Moglen stated: a policeman in every tram.

The benefits and the need for technological and service innovation in society are clear and that is not where this battle should be fought.

The challenge should be: how to create these systems and in the meantime also safeguard our privacy and freedom. What legislation needs to be carried through in mandates and audits in such a way as to not compromise or hamstring the design and yield usable, pleasant and secure systems. That is a big challenge, but it is the only one.

User Experience

The track record of the free software movement when it comes to usability and consumer appeal over the past decades has not been stellar2. In netbooks and other devices adoption is increasing but the frontier has been moved on to mobile devices and on to closed (but tempting) app platforms.

Mr. Moglen talked about the freedom box which is going to be a plug which you can put in your complete personal computing surface which will store your media and backups, intermediate your necessary services, talk to your cell phone and federate with suitable social services. This is the vision.

From an experience point of view this is going to be a hell of a nut to crack. We already have best of breed applications that serve most of these ends3. These are already crystallized, have tremendously talented people working for them and have massive network effects. Building functional parity services is going to take a lot of time, these are probably not going to be as interesting, usable or seductive as their proprietary counterparts and in the meantime those will have moved the goalposts.

There may be a large opportunity for such a device in the developing world and free culture innovation out of China or Brazil could help improve such a thing massively, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The broader problem is that both designers are not very keen to work on open source projects (though that is changing) and that open source projects are not very keen on design input. Yes, anybody can fork a project and build something ‘better’, but the division of effort is not useful while the division of labour within a project: programmer program, designer design, would be more welcome.

My discussion with Mr. Moglen served as a reminder how immense this cultural divide is and frankly I don’t think it is bridgeable in any traditional way4. It gets mired in assumptions on technology use, problems that need solving and a misunderstanding of what people (users) actually want and value in software.

So in short: freedom without usability does not amount to much. I consider myself rather well versed in these issues but I use Apple products and Facebook5. If all the knowledge within the movement cannot deter me, then 1. imagine the general public and 2. realize that it is not an education problem we are dealing with.

Public Space

So the free personal webserver is a great vision and a lofty goal, but mind that the goalposts are being moved once again and that before that project is done society may have changed under our feet.

I asked a question about this but that seemed to be so far from out field that it got misunderstood and turned into something about wireless net neutrality.

The issue is this: We have a rich set of rules and affordances governing access to and rights in public space and the built environment. With the wiring and virtualization of public space, how can we proactively codify similar rules for these new situations to create generally good outcomes?

What I meant by the wiring of public space is the fact that every object from lanterns and traffic lights to every brick and tile can and will have an internet connection (think Everyware). Construction companies and IBM are pitching this stuff on greenfield cities and systems already6. We in the old world are somewhat insulated from these developments due to sheer inertia, though we already have near perfect parking camera surveillance.

The virtualization of public space is nearing with the linking of real life and online be it conceptually or in full blown AR. Object and facial recognition, real-time image processing and filtering and differentation/personalization are going to have large scale effects. Imagine coupling this with ad supported carrier provided AR displays and things get really hairy really quickly.

I think this is going to have large scale repercussions7 and it would be good if the privacy movement had its eye on this ball as well (yes, there are many balls), however nascent it might seem at this moment.

Update: This discussion is exactly one touched upon by Zittrain in his “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It”:

But people do not buy PCs as insurance policies against appliances that limit their freedoms, even though PCs serve exactly this vital function. People buy them to perform certain tasks at the moment of acquisition. (Chapter 3)

  1. Otherwise you can read the Wikipedia page and 20+ years of Free Software literature. []
  2. These are the people that still can’t figure out how to connect a laptop to a beamer or build a workable FTP-client. []
  3. So if a friend of mine needed a backup made, would I tell them to buy and configure some arcane plug that goes into the wall or would I tell them to signup for Dropbox? Mind you Dropbox has a large and quite talented team of engineers and designers who have worked very hard to make that experience as seamless as it is. []
  4. These kind of discussions with free software people also quickly deteriorate into technological pissing contests. Though I may at times still be amused by those, your average user couldn’t care less about the intricacies. []
  5. You could argue that my knowledge of these systems gives me a more informed choice, which is only partially true. []
  6. For instance the new parking meter system in San Francisco. []
  7. I’m giving a talk on some of these developments this Thursday. []

Week 184

Last week was mostly busy with getting http://playpilots.nl to talk nicely to the Stereoscoop live game and make stuff work (mostly) properly back and forth. Synchronizing physical installations with websites is always fun.

Monday we also saw the launch of Stweetfightr, a game by the friendly people from Carsonified. The mechanic is mostly the same as PLAY Pilots, with roles, moves and turn taking except that theirs is resolved by a straight roshambo mechanic (one which we considered, but rejected).

Quantified Self Amsterdam

Monday I also attended the first meetup of the Quantified Self Amsterdam chapter co-organized by our office’s Maarten den Braber.

The second half of this week was taken up mostly by PICNIC which was a great event again. Criticism aside, Amsterdam should celebrate a cross-over event such as this that combines various disciplines and gets so many luminaries to coalesce within its borders. The conference was great and even better the catching up with various people from across the world.

Dutch Data Drinks

Friday the Stereoscoop was launched oficially at the Dutch Film Festival. I unfortunately could not attend this because I was organizing the first Dutch Data Drinks for Monster Swell. A resounding succes and the first of many events focused on the coming Big Data trend.

P1050479.JPG.scaled1000.jpg (1000×750)
Uploaded with Skitch!

Friday our friends from the Utrechts Uitburo also launched their integration with Foursquare (the first in the Netherlands), something which has been a long time in the making. Writeup: Foursquare Page for Utrechts Uitburo

PICNIC taking a large bite out of the week’s productivity, the weekend suffered (in a good way).

Urban Lenses

On Saturday I sat on the terrace of Two for Joy catching the last rays of the sun, while sketching out a concept model for an ethnographical study of metropolitan minorities in the Netherlands with regards to digital services and informal economy.
This was partly prompted by the Urban Lenses panel at PICNIC where certain panelists displayed an inexcusable amount of cultural insensitivity and simplistic thinking. This is a tendency among many of our colleagues to see their affluent, technologically able, privileged selfs as the model for which to design. Not to mention to see the disconnect between the nation’s policies and its ethnically diverse periphery high streets.
I propose going into these burbs and talking to these people to see what their lives are really like and how they use technology. Think Jan Chipchase but without the permafuck1. A project for fun, but I can’t guarantee we won’t make any profit. Up for it?

Model

You may have noticed the transition of Monster Swell from a static placeholder site to a full WordPress installation of its own. That is the first improvement on that domain for it to become a fully scalable information consuming and producing entity. How that will impact this weblog remains to be seen.

Sunday was occupied by taking the Urbanode integration at the Melkweg to a next step and learning more and more about lighting systems. Also project mérida started with some custom django deployment more on which later.

  1. Don’t worry, you will get tired plenty. []

Weeknotes 173

Some notes, this time not ordered by day, but by theme.

A bunch of conceptual and game design progress for Ebi. We created a concept which is fun, viral and not impossible to implement given the time we have. Also big thanks for the baristas at Brandmeester’s for keeping the creativity fueled.

A WINDOW UNTO THE CITY AS THEATRE

Coffee at Stumptown with @mosselman and @remcojanssen. Signup at the mental stimulation Google Wave (still a free spot left for this week!).

I attended all three days of the Mediamatic Mapping Festival. There was a lot of familiar stuff there but still saw some interesting things (see Monster Swell’s tweets) and talked to some cool people (among who catalogtree). The amount of interactive data visualizations was somewhat disappointing. It is about time we transformed data and insight into read/write media.

CatalogTree

Malkit Shoshan

Some writing:

Some updates on Haïtinu.nl a site I have been working on.

Coffee as catching up

I was already in the habit of starting my mornings drinking the best coffee in Amsterdam at Stumptown and would regularly chat with the mayor. After planning some morning meetings there, getting an early start, drinking great coffee and having a good conversation with people you’d normally not talk to, proved to be a good idea.

So I opened a collaborative document with my free spots to see if people would be interested in meeting. Early, just for coffee and just for an hour. This is going quite nicely so far, and I’m going to see if I can fill it up for the entire duration of Stumptown’s run here in Amsterdam.

I’ve still got a free spot for next week and will post my schedule for the week after shortly. Signup at the Wave:

Ambitieuze koffie in Stumptown

Via Johan Schaap kwam ik op het spoor van een popup store van Stumptown Coffee Roasters hier in Amsterdam op de Albert Cuyp (4sq).

Popup stores zijn vet en nu is de Albert Cuyp niet het armoedigste deel van de stad wat betreft caffeïne-toevoer, maar zoals in het artikel in de Times ook te lezen staat:

I’ve gotten to really know the city. But I’ve tried to find good coffee, and it’s been challenging. It’s way underdeveloped compared to the U.S., or even London or Scandinavia.

Dat is serieus waar. Mensen hebben hier geen smaak of budget voor goede koffie. In de meeste café’s krijg je een verbrande halve kop espresso, met enkele goede uitzonderingen. Het personeel (‘baristas’ hebben we hier niet) neemt het werk ook niet serieus en is niet ontvankelijk voor constructief commentaar.

Laatst bij de Koffiesalon kreeg ik van de jongen achter de bar triomfantelijk “nog een beetje extra melk”in mijn kopje gekwakt. De koffie die je uitserveert is goed, of hij is het niet. Rot op met je extra beetje melk.

Ik verheug me op mijn eerste bezoek aan Stumptown. Het moet wel goed zijn. Slechter kan in elk geval niet.

Update:

Bar(ista)

Ik ben er geweest en de koffie is er inderdaad fantastisch. Nu maar hopen dat ze blijven.

Sanquin

Verbazingwekkend snel en pijnloos:
Bloody

Dat balletje is om in te knijpen als de afname te langzaam gaat. Dan kun je dus bloed helpen eruit te pompen. Maar als je nogal ongeduldig en competitief bent ingesteld en je krijgt zo’n balletje in je handen gedrukt, ga je natuurlijk direct knijpen. Wedstrijdje wie het eerste een pint bloed eruit perst?

Over 10 weken weer. Nu nog de Sanquin Foursquare Badge1.

Doe hier de test of je ook bloed mag geven.

  1. Of eigenlijk zou het al fijn zijn als foursquare het vandaag weer eens deed. []

Interactive Environments

A small post about the Interactive Environments exhibit at my alma mater. I had to be in Rotterdam anyway that day so I decided to drop by.

There’s some confusion at Delft Science Center whether the exhibit is really open to the public, but it isn’t locked, so just head there and take the first door on your right. Maybe because of the confusion, the machines aren’t turned on, so it’s a rather static display of interactive environments.

Some pictures:
Structure
Structure
Cabinet
Structure

Vergeet niet het inchecken

We hadden het pas nog in de kroeg over om de ov-chipkaart te hijacken en te gebruiken als unieke id voor interactieve digitale projecten. Ik had lang geleden een vergelijkbaar idee om hetzelfde te doen met bijvoorbeeld de AH-bonuskaart. Het zijn allebei machine-leesbare tokens met een uniek nummer die (bijna) iedereen altijd bij zich heeft.

Toen kreeg ik gisteren deze link door met een serie API-implementaties van Foursquare waaronder: FourTap van Dan. Dan leest dus met een RFID reader zijn Oyster uit en met een vooraf gelegde koppeling tussen die id en zijn account op Foursquare, kan hij dan een actie uitvoeren zoals bijvoorbeeld inchecken in een venue.

FourTap – Checking in to Foursquare using an Oystercard from danw on Vimeo.

De OV-chipkaart is een vergelijkbare technologie, dus het zou mogelijk moeten zijn om hetzelfde te doen. Meer toepassingen voor verschillende applicaties en databases met correspondenties tussen je OV-chipkaart en Hyves/Facebook, laten op zich wachten.

Geolocatie

Irreducible Complexity?

Nog een andere leuke toepassing zou het zijn wanneer het transactie-overzicht op ov-chipkaart.nl niet zo ontzettend vertraagd zou zijn. In het ideale geval zou elke checkin en checkout via een pubsubhubbub naar geïnteresseerde en geautoriseerde partijen gestuurd worden1.

Je zou dan bijvoorbeeld een automatische Foursquare of Google Latitude inchecker kunnen bouwen die je locatie op die manier automatisch doorkrijgt.
Of een kleurrijk spel in de stad.
Of een mobiele applicatie die via GPS ziet wanneer je vergeten bent uit te checken en je erop attendeert zodat je naar het poortje terug kunt lopen2.

Voorlopig lijkt het erop dat het systeem goed draaiende krijgen prioriteit heeft (terecht) en dat dat al moeilijk genoeg is (jammer) zodat we nog even moeten wachten op dit soort technologische hoogstandjes.

Update: Lees net bij de goede mensen van Stamen over het project Fake Subway APIs (source) want:

you know, for when realtime proper APIs are an assumed part of digital civic infrastructure, just like electricity

Van de week maar even een patch toevoegen voor de Amsterdamse metro. We hebben hier ook afkortingen.

En woensdag kunnen we over dit soort dingen praten in de Verdieping.

  1. Maar ik zou al blij zijn als recente transacties binnen een kwartier in het transactie-overzicht stonden. []
  2. Hoe vet zou dat zijn! []

Locative privacy measures

Robert Scoble hits a point (two actually) that I’d been meaning to write-up as well about anti-features and privacy wich are very very important for mainstream adoption of your webservice.

There is a movement in design which says that design and the affordances it creates has values embedded in it. Not considering the potential for abuse your design allows, can be deemed bad (because negligent) design work in itself.

Scoble addresses the fact that location tracking applications and games such as Google Latitude, Bliin, Plazes, Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla and the like freak normal people out.

Among the techminded early adopters I know, use of such applications already isn’t as clearcut as some of us would like to think. A lot of people aren’t comfortable broadcasting their location to the world at large (or to a massive American company). Just talk to a ‘normal’ person about this and see if they don’t get absolutely freaked out.

There are two aspects which are both very important though they may not seem so at first.

Nokia N95 8GB Maps

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Firstly “presenting [yourself to] people as you’d like others to see you”is very important as discussed in Goffman and countless studies on social posturing and signaling that have followed. This is an important human need and basic freedom.

Privacy of Location

But more pregnantly for the mainstreaming of your application Scoble says: “(and if I’m freaked out, imagine how freaked out the average user is)”.

Privacy is important for quality of life. People leading more interesting/complicated lives than I do and people trapped in abusive power relations (corporate, domestic or otherwise) cannot afford to use this type of software.

The software may be pre-installed on the rom, it may be baked into the baseband itself. The fact that it is present on cell phones, may lead to an implicit social practice it is impossible to opt out of without social ostracism. It can and does encroach more and more into our lives.

Questions and the pre-empting of them will lead to self-censorship and (self-)limitation of freedoms which used to exist. The possibility to create some leeway in your day to day obligations to make life more pleasant/tolerable will disappear.

Just try to figure out all the edge cases, the ambiguity, the risk and the potential for catastrophic error. This is not a solvable problem and I think we need a hard design principle here: Any location based social application needs to provide a way for transparent spoofing to prevent socio-technological tyranny.

Restauranten gevraagd

Ik hou van veel en lekker eten en ik merk dat ik daarmee in het buitenland beter terecht kan dan in Amsterdam. Hier een paar restaurant-tips die voor mij in Amsterdam ontbreken en waarvan ik denk dat ze weleens een succes kunnen worden.

Mochten ze al bestaan dan hoor ik het graag. Mocht iemand ze willen beginnen dan zou ik het erg op prijs stellen.

Burgermeester

De Burgermeester

CC foto door tjeemz

De Burgermeester is mijn voorbeeld van zo’n niche in de Amsterdamse horeca die niet bediend werd. Hier is recent de Burgermesteer geopend en deze loopt nu prima.

Voordat de Burgermeester er was, moest je heel goed zoeken in Amsterdam om een grote culinaire burger te kunnen vinden1. De burger had hier blijkbaar teveel een fast food associatie en was verplicht smerig.

Succesvoorbeelden uit het buitenland genoeg en dan in het bijzonder de Burgermeister, Marienburger en Kreuzburger-achtige tenten in Berlijn.

Taqueria

Je ziet ze heel veel in Californië en Texas, de taquerías waar je voor weinig geld een goed gevulde burrito met vlees, bonen en rijst met daarbij hete sausen, guacamole en nachos kunt krijgen. Er gaat geen dag voorbij dat ik niet aan een burrito denk. Toen ik in San Francisco was at ik het ongeveer om de dag. Als ik er ooit heen zou verhuizen, zouden de taquerías een belangrijke reden daarvoo zijn.

Dolores Gourmet Burritos

CC foto door bovinity

In Europa bestaat er al een imitatie in de vorm van Dolores vlakbij Alexanderplatz in Berlijn. Kenners vinden het misschien niet vergelijkbaar, maar het is heel fijn om in de Duitse winterkou dit stukje Californië tegen te komen.

In Amsterdam is er bij mij in de buurt de Taco Shop die ik nog moet uitproberen, maar meer keuze zou niet gek zijn.

Update: The Taco Shop uitgeprobeerd en deze was best ok en ook goede prijs/kwantiteitsverhouding. Geen burritos verpakt in aluminiumfolie zoals ik gewend ben, maar goed te eten. Volgende keer de Chimichanga bestellen.

24 sep 2009

24h Diner

diner stools

CC foto door MBK

Meestal moet ik er niet aan denken om na het uitgaan complete burgermaaltijden of stacks van pannekoeken met maple syrup weg te moeten werken, maar als het dan ergens kan, dan in het comfort van een mooie klassieke diner.

Soms heb je gewoon laat nog honger en trek in lekker eten. Daar is in Amsterdam nog steeds moeilijk aan te komen. Waar ga je heen na 0:00 voor niet-shoarma of patat? Ik denk dat één diner-achtig restaurant wat 24 uur per dag open is ergens in het centrum, op heel veel bezoekers kan rekenen.

In ‘n Out Burger

In-N-Out

CC foto door Thomas Hawk

Het ‘gezonde’ fast food van de In ‘n Out Burger heeft als West-Amerikaans fenomeen een allure die moeilijk uit te leggen is. Feit is wel dat de burgers en de frieten er heel lekker zijn en dat het een sympathiek concept is tussen de grote ketens in de Verenigde Staten.

Greasy Spoon

Eggs, Chips and Beans

Pas in Shepherdess Cafe in Hackney het klassieke Engelse eten geprobeerd en dat was een succes! Alleen zó jammer dat we dat hier niet hebben; niet een goede plek om Engels eten te eten, niet een serie greasy spoons en eigenlijk helemaal geen plaatsen waar je voor £7 ( = €7) kunt zitten en lekker veel kunt eten.

Ik denk dat deze concepten mits goed uitgevoerd grote successen kunnen worden en in de meeste gevallen niche-vullers zullen zijn (zoals de Burgermeester nu is). Dus een slimme restaurateur kan hier zijn slag slaan en mijn buik vullen. Of moet ik toch naar San Francisco verhuizen?

  1. In Kopenhagen kun je ze bijvoorbeeld overal krijgen. []

Social Drinking in Print

Things are a bit slow in Amsterdam, this being high summer. Having Foursquare (see previous post) and being able to drink some beers in the city now and then does make it a lot more relaxed.

Robert Gaal and I initiated the launch in Amsterdam and it looks like it is really taking off right now. Dutch daily NRC.next wrote a two page spread on the site and quoted me and some others in it. Normally I don’t bother with papers, but I went to our neighborhood store and bought a copy:

Ben in Paradiso, kom ook man

It’s a nice balanced overview piece of the service and the trends towards more ubicomp in your nightlife experience. The big question is, these guys have delivered, will anybody else match them in the foreseeable future?

Local social network Hyves is bluffing they will introduce similar functionality but it begs the question why they didn’t already? I’ve seen this concept come by in briefings more times than I care to count and nobody has been able to get the buy-in and pull off the experience.
And when was the last update of the Hyves iPhone App? Or of the Facebook App for that matter?

In other news: There was some drama recently with people from outside of Amsterdam adding venues outside of Amsterdam and getting rebuked by some people within AMS.

Foursquare’s policy is that anybody who wants to play in whatever fashion should be allowed to do so. The data generated can always be filtered better later on using better algorithms and more insight. Just think twice about friending me if you plan on checking in outside of Amsterdam.

Four Square or can you smell the beer already?

This week returning from my new haunt in Amsterdam back to Delft, walking the streets with an appetite for beer I felt strangely disconnected.

Together with Robert we persuaded the kind people of Four Square to open up a branch in Amsterdam. Being one of the starters of the service here means I’m friends with tons of people. Knowing what is happening in the city, where the cool bars and restaurants are and immediately knowing who’s having a beer right now and where, is fantastic.

S&W say that being able to see through a city is a superpower. If so, Four Square is the superpower of being able to smell beer miles away.

Once you’re used to a service such as this and the peripheral vision it provides —and does ever so unintrusively1— walking around a city which doesn’t have it feels like having blinders on.

  1. I have my pings set to off for now. []