Alper.nl

Week 270: Amsterdam encounters, data visualization, foundational work

2012-05-21T10:13:29Z

Last week was a week for some work in the Netherlands and some much deserved catchup with friends and colleagues over there.

On monday the protocol of the meeting we had in the Berlin parliament about open transit data was published. It contains all the proceedings and slides.

On Tuesday I went to Hilversum to give a workshop on journalistic data visualization over there. It’s always fun to give these and it’s going to be even more fun to see the results coming out of it.

After that I bounced over to Utrecht to relax a bit in the Village. It had been too long ago and it’s still the best coffee store in the Netherlands. After that I went to Hubbub headquarters for some future planning with Kars Alfrink.

On Wednesday we had a lot of stuff to do with the (Open State) foundation (more on which later). That same evening we had a board meeting.

On Thursday I had a nice lunch with Tim de Gier and finished my next game review for the paper.

This is the view from the Amsterdam office. Pure luxury for that city.

Also I had to buy the new book “Koorddansen in de Kaukasus” by Olaf Koens about his adventures in the Caucasus. It is a fast paced collection of stories in this very bizarre part of the world.

I also managed to visit the newly opened EYE movie institute on the IJ shore. A beautiful building with a stunning view, heralding in a new era for this part of Amsterdam.

Next it was the train back to Berlin and prototypes for some new applications.

Week 269: Talks given and posted

2012-05-17T15:47:04Z

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

The rest of the week was spent preparing the presentation for NEXT Berlin about Love in Times of Gamification. It went well (1, 2, 3, 4) and should be online shortly. It was an honour to be invited and to share the stage with James Bridle, David Bausola and the many others present at the event.

After that it was time to unwind and meet a lot of nice people and go for a nice dinner.

RT @Bopuc: OH: “my girlfriend learned to code Ruby… She was jealous of my lifestyle.” @alper

— Thomas Madsen-Mygdal (@mygdal) May 9, 2012

Next came the recovery part of the week. Also Iskander Smit wrote a nice recap of NEXT.

Week 268: presenting on transit and work, talking with Neelie Kroes

2012-05-12T16:44:26Z

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

The next day Stefan Wehrmeyer and I went to the Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin to present on the subject of open transit data.

The situation here when it comes to opening up data is rather shameful. It seems hard for transit operators to realize that information about their services is an intrinsic part of their services. People who don’t know how to get somewhere, will also not buy any tickets.

This seems counter productive if you assume that transit operators actually want to transport people which it seems they do not. They want to serve the terms of their contract as cheaply as possible and as long as open transit information is not stipulated within that contract they will not do it. Thankfully Berlin politics is moving on the subjects (because the next tender is not due for many years).

On Thursday I prepared and gave my talk for Hybrid Talks at the Berlin University of the Arts on the Heist Model which went quite well. I am going to write that particular presentation up on the Hubbub blog soon because I think it has a lot of mileage still. Most of the ways of organizing work that are doing the rounds assume you are a company selling a product, not a company doing work for clients.

On Friday I went to re:publica with a familiar theme. In any case it was a good opportunity to meet some people I hadn’t talked to in a while and to see the narratives being told in German about the internet.

After the keynote by the Vice President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes, I got the opportunity to meet with her and discuss pressing issues when it comes to the digital agenda. I decided to step out of my immediate day to day worries and speak out for programming education for all school children (more on this soon, I hope). This struck a cord with her, but somewhat confused many of the other attendants who were more keen to push their pet agendas.

Talking with @NeelieKroesEU, @lorz says the collected German digerati are not interested in startups or education. Your problem right there.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) May 4, 2012

After that I rushed over to Markthalle IX for the book launch of A Smart Guide to Utopia.

Most of the weekend after that was spent preparing my presentation for NEXT this week.

Week 267: Hack and Tell, Thinkup, Gesellschaft im digitalen Wandel, Taobao and Gallery Weekend

2012-05-01T16:47:09Z

I got a bunch of accessories for the office among which a bike stand:

On Monday I also finished the Thinkup hack I wanted to present at the Berlin Hack ‘n Tell.

Tuesday was another long sprint on saba and then off to the event. The presentation went quite well and I think I managed to hit both the technical rationale behind the hack as well as its longer term implications.

On Wednesday I wrote up the Thinkup thing over at Monster Swell: “A full Twitter index in your Thinkup” and requested my full history from Twitter.

More saba. On Thursday I went to a book presentation by Jonas Westphal at the FES about the society amidst digital change. It is good that these kind of books are being written to make palatable the socio-technical changes to people not so well versed in these developments. I have several similar reports like this at the studio by the WRR, RMO and by Rathenau.

I also embarked on my first experiment in Taobao shopping (inspired by Jan Chipchase). If this is succesful, I’m quite sure this will be the first of many more.

And finally on the weekend it was the gallery weekend here in Berlin and I took the chance to visit half a dozen in half an hour.

Week 266: Django, iPhone programming and Quentin Meillassoux

2012-05-01T22:03:40Z

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

On Tuesday I went to the Django meetup which was a lot of fun:

On Wednesday I spent the whole day hacking Thinkup and after went to see Brecht in the Schaubühne.

On Thursday I went to a lecture by Quentin Meillassoux which was terse but interesting. Meillassoux circumvents the problem of the correlational circle to access the absolute by taking the circle itself to be the absolute. That absolute is the contingent nature of everything (contingent, to fact to artifact). What there is is only discoverable by experience. Meillassoux wants to demonstrate that the empiricist is absolutely right.

And I spent most of the weekend writing:

Week 265: Tatort debate, presentations, writing about theater, reading

2012-04-23T11:33:27Z

The week before last (I’m running one week behind), was a good weak. Easter Monday was spent cleaning up the house which is now finally fully operational and fit to live in.

Tuesday was spent getting back on top of work.

In the evening I got tipped of by Mathias Schindler that there would be a talk in St. Oberholz about the value of free knowledge. I visited it but it was more of a free for all with the writer spouting their well trodden arguments (and quite a bit of gibberish) and Mathias doing much of the same.

I have written before about how copyright in Germany is locked up in a fierce protectionist policy that benefits only those that have something to lose and not those with something to gain. Germany’s cultural production is not even that interesting for the world at large, but the biggest reason to maintain it: it employs a lot of people. The debate right now is strangely being dominated by ‘Tatort-autoren’ which is odd since the show is on public television and quite dull.

The transition to more dynamic (i.e. not as strictly regulated) copyright is underway and the more the powers try to protect copyright, the more they expedite its demise. It still must be painful for the Tatort man and all those in his camp to be so very much on the wrong side of history.

Also, I’m going to talk about our agency working model —the “Heist” model— at an upcoming Hybrid Talks.

Talking about copyright, on Wednesday the Pirate Party hit 13% in a national poll. I’m also going to present about open transit data in the Abgeordnetehaus Berlin alongside Stefan Wehrmeyer and other notables on an invitation by the Greens.

At the end of the week I went to DAM to see the Blind Sequence Trust exposition by Joan Leandre. I wrote about my impressions of that exposition which is very much recommended seeing.

I also wrote quite a bit about theater that week it seems. A piece about what you should see in the Schaubühne and a piece about the German/Dutch theater debate I attended at the Deutsches Theater some time ago.

I also fixedbetter Tijs’s version of the Anobii to GoodReads exporter and moved my books over there where you can find my reading. And I wrote a bit about how Jan Chipchase’s experiment pertains to the design of withdrawn objects.

The end of the week was marked by an impromptu visit by prof. Scheiber to Berlin which was celebrated with pints of Augustiner and Korean food.

Designing in the Face of Defeat

2012-04-15T15:41:32Z

Jan Chipchase’s ‘Red Mat’ design experiment is brilliant by itself, but is goes much further than being just a design experiment.

The opening of the essay that sets the contextual framework for the project is for me the most interesting part:

By now there are very few people left on the planet that aren’t in some way impacted by globalisation – as producers and consumers – those few who make a decision to opt-out must do so consciously. Yet our touch points to this interconnected system that churns out ever more, ever faster inherently limits our understanding of the whole. We can talk about globalisation, buy into it, buy from it, demonstrate against it, but for most of us its scale and complexity defies comprehension. Part of the machine is dedicated to designing, prototyping, testing and pushing to market connected products and services that know more about us, than we ever will about them.

It’s as if we were standing on the top of a hill and are now running at full pelt into the fog below – not quite knowing what lies ahead, letting gravity and momentum carry us, and doing our best to avoid the silhouettes of objects as they loom into view, chased by the fear of stopping.

We are living in an increasingly interconnected, and increasingly automated world. The consequences of our actions may be road-mapped, extrapolated, scenarioed, but ultimately, at best it is smart guesswork.

Chipchase posits products and services as withdrawn objects that are unknowable to us by their scale and complexity but both of those are just symptoms of the unknowability of objects in general. This is in line with most of the current thinking on objects in speculative realism.

For us designers, makers the question then is: given such a bleak view of knowability in the world at large and of objects in particular, what are successful strategies for creating these products and services. More succinctly: How do we design in the face of defeat?

The writing about the new aesthetic that has reached a tipping point in the last week is one way of dealing with —or at least cataloging— the algorithmic complexity in the world around us, but as Chipchase’s welcome mat shows, all objects carry with them so much weight that even the simplest ones become unfathomably complex.

I’m mulling over how to proceed. One preliminary idea: we should do away with all strategic design and business theory and just make things. But then again, we were already doing that.

Blind Sequence Trust

2012-04-12T17:03:52Z

De serie video’s Blind Sequence Trust van kunstenaar Joan Leandre speelt in DAM nog tot en met 5 mei.

Leandre is een kunstenaar die al decennia lang bezig is met het gebruiken van computer 3D engines van allerlei vormen om verhalen te vertellen en emoties op te roepen. Het werk zoals dat in DAM te zien is, is lastig te plaatsen, maar zowel de beelden als de muziek zijn bijzonder goed uitgevoerd waardoor dingen die niets met elkaar te maken lijken te hebben, toch weten te boeien.

De geavanceerde 3D engines die nu beschikbaar zijn maken het ogenschijnlijk makkelijk om complete werelden te schetsen en te manipuleren. Werelden die zich alleen niet houden aan de regels van de werkelijkheid maar er zelf eentje creëeren waarin alles kan. Leandre put uit science-fiction en de natuur voor zijn werk en maakt daar uitgebreide bewegende collages van.

Het hergebruiken van deze 3D engines zorgt voor een verwarrend resultaat. De artefacten van 3D engines zijn terug te zien net zoals de billboards waarmee bomen worden gerendered en de particle systems die normaal gesproken zorgen voor explosies, rook en vuur. Buiten de game-logica geplaatst krijgen deze effecten een totaal andere lading.

De artiest zelf geeft in dit Rhizome-interview allerhande verklaringen voor zijn werk maar zoals zo vaak bij dit soort dingen, klinkt het naar wartaal. Beter is het om zelf naar het werk te kijken en je te laten meevoeren.

What the Schaubühne is about

2012-04-11T13:11:28Z

Yesterday night I went to see Maß für Maß (Measure for Measure by Shakespeare) at die Schaubühne here in Berlin and it marked the first occasion where I saw a play directed by the intendant of that theater Thomas Ostermeier himself (see this Guardian piece for a bit of background).

Picture by Arno Declair

Up until that moment I had seen lots of pieces by other directors at the same house which were —I’m afraid to say— quite boring, almost all except for this one: Die Macht der Finsternis by Michael Thalheimer. The dance pieces that Falk Richter makes together with Anouk van Dijk are also very much worth watching, but not theater really.

Maß für Maß has its issues of course but as said it is astonishingly better than the other plays at the same venue. It is one of Shakespeare’s predictable problem plays. So predictable in fact, that you could remove the final half hour and you would not want for closure in the story. At times this performance is too much aimed at the aged and distinguished Schaubühne audience whose tastes and sense of humor diverge somewhat from ours, but that is to be expected. What was most refreshing was the uncompromising physical brutality of several scenes. A welcome breath of fresh air, not to mention the splashes of water, in a local theater climate that prides itself on stuffiness.

A Dutch theater debate in Berlin

2012-04-11T17:48:10Z

A week or two ago I attended a discussion at the Deutsches Theater ‘Holland in Not’ that was organized because of a recently published book “Der Kulturinfarkt, vom Allem zu viel und überall das Gleiche” that proposed to close half of all theaters in Germany.

That prompted quite a bit of debate in the German cultural scene as well as the discussion at the DT. The event hosted by the Deutsches Theater brought together notables from the German theater scene and invited Alize Zandwijk (head of the Ro Theater) and Johan Simons (intendant of the Münchner Kammerspiele) to explain the Dutch situation to the gathered Germans.

What had to be laid out again for the audience is that German and Dutch theater are organized very differently. In Germany the theaters have their own ensembles that play a broad range of repertoire in their own house but seldom or never visit other houses in Germany. That means that in a certain area you know what you will get, but you will also never get anything else. In the Dutch situation, groups are separate from theaters (though some have their home venues) and each play is performed on tour through the Netherlands. Theaters are free to program whatever they want. When it comes to funding and entrepreneurship, the Dutch systems is already operating quite lean with a lot of free groups and experiments creating a lively theater scene (most of which is going to disappear). In Germany theater is concentrated in monolithic houses that are endowed lavish budgets.

Explaining just those differences, which some panelists also had to come to terms with, took a lot of time. The rest was filled with rallying the known entities against the barbarians outside of the gates. No amount of misrepresentation or reassurance was spared to achieve that goal. Alize Zandwijk and Johan Simons played their role of cultural asylums seekers well supported by the Germans proclaiming loudly that they will never let it go so far.

What happened in the Netherlands (the Times has also picked it up) was inevitable in retrospect. I wonder if none of our artists have ever read The Art of War. It stands to reason that if you neglect your allies, let your supply lines wither and do not maintain your fortresses, you open yourself up to attack from any rag-tag band of marauders that happen to be in the area (or in government). That is what has happened to an arts sector that had become utterly complacent and lax thinking that they were beyond dispute. Such arrogance will and should be punished.

Things move much more slowly in Germany and abrupt cuts will probably not happen. Some budgetary restrictions and reorganizations might well benefit the theater landscape here if employed with vision but even that seems unlikely. The Dutch example is useful to scare off critical discussion of the scene here.

Alize Zandwijk made a defeated impression and was quite incoherent. Simons remarked that as an intendant he enters into a dialogue with the city, develops a discourse and as such has a lot of authority but if he has to leave, his institution will not be diminished. The intendant of the Deutsches Theater showed that he is on the ball and wants to nip sentiments such as the ones in the book in the bud.

However well intentioned the debate was, it did at no point leave the realm of cliché and touch the real issue at hand: the devaluation of authority everywhere in society. Authority that intendants in Germany are used to having and will probably have for decades to come because of inflexibilities built into German society. In the Netherlands that same authority has evaporated and none of our culture heads know what to do without it.

One panelists said the audience based grants that are planned in the Netherlands will be the purest form of commercialization of the arts. You could call it that, but you may just as well call it a democratization that has been long overdue. Not trusting people to be able to make the right choices is rarely a good idea. Telling them that you know what is best for them based on an authority that is no longer justified in this day and age is a sure fire recipe for disaster.

As if to emphasize that notion, the gathered audience —having listened to over an hour of turgid debate— was not allowed to interject afterwards. With such an attitude the fortresses of high culture in Germany may be stormed as well.

Post Scriptum

The last couple of years I have seen an insane amount of theater compared to everybody I know. I should be one of theater’s staunchest defenders but having seen so much with so little change, risk and openness I find myself being their biggest detractor. Simons mentioned that the Brandhaarden they played in Amsterdam had been fully booked. If anywhere in the Netherlands there is still a market for the arts and left liberal politics it is indeed there.

From that same festival I had recommended the Kane trilogy to a friend but given it’s rather high ticket price and the fact that theater is a hit and miss affair, I found myself advising spending that time and money playing Mass Effect 3 (at the price of two theater tickets) as a better investment overall.

It is no secret that I think games are the most important cultural carrier of our age but my issues run deeper. A sector that says it creates culture of societal importance, but that cannot mount a viable defense for itself refutes the premise. It shows that what you pay for as a spectator and a tax payer is not much more than self-importance.

Week 264: playable prototypes and Open State

2012-04-10T15:36:05Z

Last week was crazy hectic, notwithstanding the fact that I was ill at the same time. Sickness and deadlines are not fun, but thankfully both were survived.

What had to be done was the prototype iPhone app for the first playtest of saba. Which was finished in the nick of time with programming sprints that ended later and later into the night.

Then it was a train on Friday to Amsterdam for the Open State board meeting followed by the more general strategy day on Saturday. A lot of fun was had and important things were discussed during the weekend (see this write-up by Natasja Trifkovic), which makes it all worthwhile, but some downtime would be welcome at this point.

Week 263: short trip to the Netherlands

2012-04-02T19:23:50Z

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

The face of Rotterdam is changing massively and visibly right now with the construction of a new central station that is going to be architecturally impressive:

Glad to see so many friends out for the event it was great to present a new aesthetic, algorithmic design (& peril) presentation to the audience of Rotterdam designers.

Wednesday it was off to meet a client in the Bijlmer and then a workday at the Coop.

Thursday I called at Utrecht among other things to celebrate the first anniversary of The Village Coffee and Music. Their continued presence makes working in Utrecht more than bearable.

The other pleasure is hanging out all day at Hubbub base where a lot of things are on the burner waiting to get shipped.

I got to play Hokra at Tweetakt which is one of the social games that are programmed there. The other Joust is pictured below and got a lot of play time:

[unnamed] is the best kept secret of Berlin

2012-05-07T20:52:07Z

We live in perhaps one of the nicest parts of Berlin I am finding out. It has every thinkable amenity: highly specialized stores, a diverse assortment of restaurants and cafés with some real gems. Our house is smack in the center of this in walking distance of three major U lines. If you talked to me recently you probably know where this is at, but for the purpose of this blogpost I’m going to play mum.

Tourists are few and far between and those that make it out here seem to have a purpose about them. It was noticeable when I took some Dutch friends for breakfast around here that the proprietors’ reactions bordered on the annoyed. Rightly so. The part of Berlin where I’m living has been doing fine and does not need to become a tourist/expat infested over-gentrified hipster slum.

We invite new arrivals to go to the same places everybody else is settling in —I hear Wedding is going to be the next big thing— and please don’t bother us. We may hold out another comfortable ten years over here.

Culture flat rates are a horrible idea

2012-04-17T09:20:40Z

Culture flat rates are named both in the Netherlands and in Germany as a solution to the problem of copyright piracy.

The idea is to have everybody pay a set amount of money each month so that they can download all they want and redistribute that money among copyright holders to compensate them for their work.

This stems from the notion that copyright holders deserve some payment for their work and that the current repression being employed to uphold the dysfunctional copyright system, is unacceptable.

It is a horribly bad idea on a great many levels.

1. It cedes to the copyright industry that piracy is an actual problem. It is not. Current piracy does not in any way threaten the creation of new works and in many ways is expediting the switch to new ways of producing culture and new business models.

2. A (semi-)government run systems such as this one removes all entrepreneurship from the production of cultural products and in doing so also removes all innovation. The mediocre will be best served by such a system and those who want to go the extra mile or go into wholly new areas will be hurt.

3. A tariff system by its design works in favor of the old and not the new. New entrants will not have made their arrangements to participate and may never do so because of other inhibiting conditions. People creating wholly new cultural works (DJs, mashups, all manner of interactive experiences and games) may find themselves falling outside of the categorizations on offer. This while the old sit back and reap the rewards for efforts form the past.

4. What should be the most important consideration but is usually left as a detail to deal with later: organizing such a system is practically intractable. Who will compensate the Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Brazilian underground movie industry, the bloggers for their writing and the musicians on Soundcloud for their music?

The current organizations tasked with redistributing these tariffs on music played on the radio or in cafes (BUMA/STEMRA in the Netherlands, SEBAM in Belgium) have proved themselves to be mostly corrupt, opaque, poorly organized and exclusionary. It is an illusion to think that a newly established organization will fair any better.

Update: After thinking it over a bit more and reading more misguided German business model ideas for creative production, I think the next three requirements could be used to make a culture flat rate work:

Blanket. A culture flat rate would need to be truly blanket to solve a lot of problems. If it is not, the difference with Spotify or Netflix streaming is zero and it would seem odd to codify into law what is in fact just another business. On the other hand, if the goal is to solve the copyright problem for everybody, a flat rate scheme should ensure that I cannot be sued anymore for any copyright infringement. That was after all the problem to be solved. With current international intellectual property and trade treaties this seems unlikely to happen.
Voluntary. A flat rate should be voluntary. I should not be forced to pay into a scheme I don’t want to or which is of no use to me (like the GEZ). Styled this way, the flat rate would be a kind of legislative insurance for users to prevent getting sued for nonsense and the funds collected could be used to support a couple of starving artists. Though there seem to be altogether too many of those in Germany. This approach would also demonstrate actual market fit of the scheme.
Cheap. A hard requirement on any scheme would be that a flat rate needs to be cheap, cheaper even maybe than the current tv license. That is the only way to ensure incentives for creators to create new products and new business models. If the flat rate is set too high, it risks becoming a cash cow for a sick industry and further stagnate developments in an already conservative country.

Will any of those happen? Reading the proposed business models on an upcoming event, I’m rather pessimistic.

Racism at the border, or not so Schengen after all

2012-03-31T14:11:24Z

The train just had its stop in Bad Bentheim entering Germany. At that stop we usually get a short break, a new locomotive and the German border police checking the train. Border police? Didn’t the Schengen Agreement abolish checks at the signing countries’ borders?

It did, but these informal spot checks are still being held by some countries. Even worse, they are not random by any degree. The German Bundespolizei deliberately checks those with a dark skin and hardly any others. Normally such an observation could be attributed to me being cynical. Here it unfortunately cannot.

It is a practice being supported up until the administrative court of Koblenz where a case relating to this policy came to trial recently. The judge maintained the obligation of the police to use ‘situational insight’ and ‘relevant border police experience’ (‘entsprechende “Lageerkenntnisse” und “einschlägige grenzpolizeiliche Erfahrung” zugrunde zu legen’). Lawblog.de writes it up with the obvious title “Der Neger ist verdächtig” and the post has over four hundred comments.

I didn’t get checked this time but sometimes they do check my passport. It probably depends on how foreign I happen to look on a specific day or if I have shaven recently. I can shrug it off easily as probably most people can who don’t deal with racism on a day to day basis. But when I see a black family of four traveling and being checked as the only ones in the compartment, I wonder what kind of an impression that gives their children about the justness of the society they are growing up into.

Week 262: native iPhone development, gentrification clashes, Fraunhofer, Deutsches Theater and fixie riding

2012-03-29T23:27:36Z

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

I created a template to send invoices from German. Unfortunately at this point the amount of text that needs to be on there (numbers in both languages, custom phrases for the tax service) makes any attempt at whitespace impossible. I’m just glad if everything fits onto one page and I can send that.

There was a flurry about the BMW Guggenheim laboratory that was supposed to call in Kreuzberg on its world tour. Some extremists threatened it with violence because they have issues with gentrification, see Peter Bihr’s write-up. The most recent news that reached us was that it was rescheduled for Prenzlauerberg, but now there is yet another piece in Freitag about the lab.

If the goal of the lab was to provoke discussions about the future, it has been quite successful at that, though probably not in the clear-cut fashion that its organizers imagined it would. The discourse about gentrification is often hijacked and skewed and lacks representation and realistic courses of action. Anybody who has read their Jane Jacobs would say that it is inevitable that neighborhoods change. You can prevent them from overheating by releasing development pressure to other areas with targeted development. Freezing time is not a solution. Neither is socialism.

I attended a work session at Fraunhofer FOKUS about a report on open data in Germany. We touched upon most of the points that I have discussed about in the UK an the Netherlands already these past years so with all of that prior art, the Germans should be able to follow a clear path to open data.

Phonegap development continued in earnest but it turned out on the iPhone DOM manipulation is ridiculously slow even for the simplest of operations. Instead of trying to optimize a dog of an application I switched to native iOS development which should be a challenge, but the clear definition is a refreshing change from the relativity of web development.

On Friday I received a shipment of tyres and I could build up my bike again to tear through the city. That was a beautiful day.

Friday night I attended a discussion at the Deutsches Theater about the culture cuts in the Netherlands and how they could/would be applied to Germany. I piece about that is forthcoming as soon as I get around to writing it up.

Week 261: Phonegap, Gobsquad and Hohenschönhausen

2012-03-26T20:35:59Z

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

On Monday development for saba started in earnest and there was much hacking in Phonegap. Or Cordova, or whatever the project is called these days. By now we have abandoned that approach for reasons that are forthcoming but it was fun while it lasted.

On Tuesday I went to Gobsquad’s Kitchen mostly on a recommendation from Kevin Slavin. That was a very entertaining show.

I finally found a Steuerberater here who seem to be good at what they are doing and friendly.

On Friday I accompanied Alexander and Ernst-Jan who were visiting Berlin on a tour of the former Stasi remand prison in Hohenschönhausen.

Hack de Overheid now has a Google Group where everybody can have their say. It still needs a bit of a startup, but these things always do.

Week 260: books, games, keynotes and Koolhaas

2012-03-18T17:36:56Z

Work continues apace. New websites are forthcoming.

With some heavy lifting in the U-Bahn, I managed to reassemble my library. I eagerly anticipate when I can digitize everything here and not worry about the physicality of my external brain anymore.

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

The Apps für Deutschland price winners have been announced. We had nothing to do with this competition, but it is interesting to see how this develops alongside the Netherlands.

On Wednesday I went to co.up to watch the Stevenote:

I got to catch Jeroen Visser and Robert Jan Verkade in Berlin after they had just given a workshop. Dutch website all-stars if ever there were some.

After which I went to the Mart Stam talks in the Dutch embassy in Berlin. Getting a tour of Koolhaas designed building was a nice addition to the event.

The tour made clear two important parts of the building about which a lot probably has been written but which I’ll add here nonetheless:

Our tour guide continued to explain how unpractical various quarters in the building were, how they were not used as much as you would want or expect and how a lot of things had to be patched up after delivery. During the tour one of the very nice looking skewed doors fell apart as if to emphasize this again. In more than one place cables were added because the normal connections were not suitable or were too hidden away.

That very unsuitability for human inhabitation and work is a form of power projection. The fact that a government can afford to place an exorbitant impractical building in the middle of another nation’s capital to sit there and impress guests is another form of functionality, though at considerable expense.

Add to that the Germans’ reactions to the modernity of the building. Many of the (old) people on the tour were very vocally amazed with the material use, furniture and architectural tricks in the building. The building is radical departure from the Berlin tendency towards historicist architecture. Taking both those points, the embassy is ultimately an elaborate joke played by the architect on the German and Dutch people.

Last week also our company names (all three of them!) were mounted on the wall at the office which gives our residency in Berlin a more official air.

Toneelgroep Amsterdam – Husbands

2012-03-13T13:35:12Z

Last weekend I saw Husbands by Toneelgroep Amsterdam director Ivo van Hove in the Schaubühne in Berlin. I was not unequivocally enthusiastic about the play, though it has a boisterous quality that has stayed with me these past days.

Picture © Jan Versweyveld

The Germans on the other hand have not deigned to give the play five minutes before deciding it is trash, see Jule Löffler for Freitag and Sascha Krieger. They stumble over each other and their poorly worded mischaracterizations to denounce the play, calling it boring, grotesque and poorly founded.

This seems to be another case of German traditionalists having a hard time dealing with modernity. Husbands is more entertaining than quite some plays I have seen at de Schaubühne —some of which were ordeals to sit through.

The play is an adaptation of the movie by John Cassavetes which most of us will never get around to seeing. The stage design is in the modern style that we’re used to from Versweyveld and the ensemble gives it a high octane raucous (as in ‘fuck yeah!’) treatment.

Each actor also has a head mounted camera that is displayed intermittently above the stage, translating the cinéma vérité to the theater. Translating it so well that for me the first person view on the screen was more compelling to watch than the overview below.

Music, especially music by Bruce Springsteen, also plays a large role in this adaptation. The Boss perfectly exemplifies that feeling of being a son of the most powerful country in the world that also happens to make the best music in the world. You would think Germans were more familiar with this American Exceptionalism even if from the receiving side.

Being in that position and then confronted with mortality offers some hints to the husbands’ behaviour but they seem mostly the mannerisms of old men. Main stage theater in the Netherlands seems rather obsessed with the middle-aged. I couldn’t care less for them, but theater seems as shaped by market forces as anything.

Yael Ronen and Company – The Day Before the Last Day

2012-03-07T15:21:34Z

Yesterday evening I saw The Day Before the Last Day in die Schaubühne as a part of the F.I.N.D. festival.

The Company plays a straight-forward critique and pastiche of religion that covers a broad swath but mainly stays in the realm of non-complicated comedy. The opening in particular is a miserable slapstick routine that seems to hit a chord with the German audience. Fortunately the rest of the play is better.

What ‘The Day Before…’ amounts to is a series of entertaining religious sketches interspersed with some more serious notes. Some of them are really good and manage to hit home, but given the theme the treatment is rather tame. Maybe this is risqué in Israel or Germany (with the obligate Nazi joke), but with this theme and YouTube to draw from (as we can see in the projections), a more visceral exploration of religion and humanity should have been possible.

Biting off a theme of this size does give a lot to chew on, too much probably. Add to that the piece also adding meta commentary to itself and the demands on the writing become ridiculously high. Demands that are not met. The internet is incorporated and provides a rich source of material but it remains at arm’s length. Given the contemporary nature and theme of the piece, a higher degree of network realism should have been possible. Tuning the sketches to current events should not be too difficult and it would have added a much needed poignancy.

Surprisingly entertaining but the content falls a bit short of the ambition. (3/5)

Week 259: office work, publicity, copyright and liquid feedback

2012-03-07T14:54:29Z

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

We put a small Tumblr called “Ramen Hunter” online on which we document our peripatetic consumptions of the Japanese manna called ramen.

Also the news that I will be speaking at NEXT Berlin on a topic near to my heart “Love in Times of Gamification”. Not only is that turning out to become a huge and important subtopic within gaming, it is also going to be a lot of fun. The Dutch newspaper NRC featured an article (link for subscribers) about the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference in which I am also quoted talking about Hack de Overheid and Apps for Amsterdam.

Another German copyright issue arose because Open Köln republished a series of government documents on their own website. I wrote up the chain of events and the chilling effects that are bound to follow.

I went to an event called Zukunftgespräche about the future of creative and innovative work in the city. That was mostly a disappointment with commonplaces being trodden over and Zeit articles being quoted near verbatim. It seems these kind of events in Germany are too institutional and manage to invite exactly the wrong people.

The rest of the week was spent hauling my library to the office, writing up some proposals and Skype-ing with the homefront. I also submitted our research initiatives from Open State to Virtueel Platform. And I could finish off the week having a beer at Soundcloud Rebase which turns out to be a pretty good way to end a week.

On Sunday I read up on the Liquid Democracy software platform used by the Pirate Party to decide upon their points of view (read a good Spiegel overview here: “Web Platform Makes Professor Most Powerful Pirate”).

Technologically I have quite some issues with the implementation which is brilliant at places and patchwork on others, but those are mostly besides. It works and it does what it needs to do. The main Pirate Party implementation lives here: https://lqfb.piratenpartei.de/ and is publicly browsable. A cursory glance reveals a lot of interesting things.

First and foremost, it is interesting and essential to build a web native application for the processes of politics. Most parties if they would start anew today would not end up at this exact point, but this is obvious if like the Pirates your pedigree is digitally native. Being able to participate in a more accessible and equally footed arena, without having to go to party congresses is something other parties should learn from and the open democratic process is reminiscent of the Occupy general assemblies. Even more importantly, codifying the democratic process in software and opening that up for evolution by means of open source contributions, looks like the the future of political systems in the digital age.

More worrisome are the non-digital points of view proposed on the platform. Besides a proposal for Open Government Data being approved there are also proposals for a base income for everybody and many other wish-list utopian social measures. None of those seem to be predicated on fiscal solvency. Many of the measures rely on more government to improve society. That is oddly reminiscent of the modeling paradox: a better model does not guarantee better outcomes. The same with government, the current government here is not very small but already rather dysfunctional.

The free for all democracy of Liquid Feedback might easily lead to a California-like situation where proposition after proposition has lifted taxes so far that it has bankrupted the state. This is the biggest risk with general assembly and other referendum type decision making processes. It is too easy to demand everything if there are no consequences attached to it. Thankfully the Pirate Party will never hold a majority in German government because if they did, they would probably bankrupt the nation within a week.

Week 258: Madrid, RIO

2012-02-27T17:33:36Z

A bit shorter weeknotes compared to last week’s. I spent most of the week in Madrid to do some fact finding and relax in the sun. I hadn’t expected the internet in the hotel and various venues to be as disastrously poor as it was, so I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped to. So the week was spent mostly lounging in the Madrid sun, eating various things.

The hotel was next to the Madrid RIO park, so I managed to do an intensive investigation of the terrain.

My visit was just too short to attend the Madrid Hacks and Hackers chapter but I did meet-up with the organizer Ana Ormaechea. Talking about the Spanish situation with regards to openness and participation it was clear the country is on the cusp of a transition.

I was back home at 01:00 late night on Thursday so the following Friday was a bit broken, but I did manage to catchup a lot of stuff and do the necessary Skype calls.

Administrative No-ops

2012-02-27T11:37:08Z

Last week Peter Robinett sent me a link to this Times article that would seem a bit far fetched if it wasn’t mostly true. The headline (“a Limp Domestic Economy”) doesn’t really cover the article because it describes how massively things have improved in Germany. If I can believe stories, the situation here used to be far far worse. That however is no excuse.

Rule fucking (the Dutch ‘regelneuken’), protectionism and arcane laws still apply and add up to create:

This economy is overregulated, intended to insulate insiders from competition and deeply resistant to change.

But mostly we’re ok. And there lies the exact problem. If indeed the current positive climate preempts further reforms, that will be institutionally stupid.

I was mostly going to blow this off until last week upon returning from Spain I got a letter from the Finanzamt asking me why exactly I needed a Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer (USt-IdNr.). I had submitted a form for my personal incorporation here in Germany and checked the box that said ‘I need a USt-IdNr. for doing business within the European Union’.

Then, as if the fact that I checked that box would not be enough reason by itself, as if there is a scarcity of natural numbers (ℕ) in the German administration, as if both the people working at the Finanzamt as myself have nothing better to do than spend time on these minutiae I had to get in touch again to confirm that ‘Yes, I really want and need that number.’

This is shameful and if the German administration manages to complicate even the simplest of interactions, I don’t want to know what they do to the rest.

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

2012-02-19T16:34:27Z

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.

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.

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 us. 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 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.

Week 256: Agora, HIIG, Nederland van Boven and ice-skating

2012-02-15T13:48:30Z

Last week was cut a bit short by a commute to Amsterdam at the end (touching on that in a bit).

Monday I settled in at the Agora Collective for the week to work from there. I mentioned before that I really needed a fixed studio space to work from. I wasn’t really aiming for a coworking space, but Agora is a great place to be at.

I spent more of the week in XCode and playing around various iPhone development ins and outs.

Wednesday I viewed an office at Kottbusser Tor and then made my way to the HIIG for a discussion on how the internet changes democracy (about which I wrote ‘A deeper simulation fever’).

Thursday I had to go to the Netherlands early to attend the closing event for ‘Nederland van Boven’ a VPRO series featuring aerial videography and data visualizations. The production team spent a lot of time getting at data to be able to show it on television. I was invited to debate for the cause of open data alongside Alexander Klöpping against the sceptic positions of Marleen Stikker and Arco Groothedde.

On my visit I briefly dropped by the Open Coop and on Friday morning I skated a bit across the canals of Amsterdam before jumping into the train back to Berlin again.

A deeper simulation fever (at the Berliner Gespräche)

2012-02-14T16:07:16Z

Last Wednesday I was at a gathering by the Institue for Internet and Society here in Berlin in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk called “Berliner Gespräche” about how the internet influences society.

What struck me mainly was that both a professor from the panel and a commenter from the audience held the position that the internet is in fact nothing new. That it is just another medium/channel for people to communicate through. Citing Clay Shirky, I would say that more and faster information flows are in fact different. More fundamentally the internet is the manifestation of a vast new kind of object that interacts with other objects (such as us) in a myriad ways. That alone makes it something new and very significant.

I was asked by somebody from Deutschlandfunk to comment on the proceedings of the evening and I gave them my superficial outsider’s view about privacy and journalism and how the status quo of both is vastly different in the Netherlands.

On the way home what stuck with me most is that every online entity comprises within itself a subjective view of how reality works and how it wishes to interact with that reality. Facebook has notions about the desirability of privacy that permeate through all of its interactions with its users. This is the same for any websites. They are simulations that run on a subjectively chosen subset of reality just like games do.

The tool that we often employ when talking about games is Ian Bogost’s concept of ‘simulation fever’ that says that subjective simulations cause people to either accept or reject the simulation based on their position. The critical alternation (or altercation if you will) between acceptance and rejection puts the user in a moral frenzy termed simulation fever.

The subjective values that websites impose most clearly on users right now are their views when it comes to privacy but there are a slew of other values that are inherent in any web application which users may or may not accept when using them. If you must generalize —as a populace— the Dutch mostly accept those subjective realities while the Germans mostly reject.

The Dutch use sites as means of communication and self-expression while grosso modo ignoring the consequences of corporate ownership. While Germans forced by social pressures to use sites such as Facebook, try to mitigate their complicitness by employing sabotage and other defensives strategies.

There is in both countries a minority of people who are aware of the issues and use these services critically. For any meaningful discussion about the internet, they the most likely people to turn to.

Amsterdam Culinary Desert

2012-02-09T13:14:10Z

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 meal 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 meals.

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 week, 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.

Week 255: Games, hacks, art and coworking

2012-02-07T15:15:04Z

Last week featured some taxes, and a write-up of our gamejam efforts in nrc.next post-published on Bashers: The Making of Nakatomi Rider.

On Tuesday I went to c-base for Hack and Tell which featured some rather interesting hacks, a low douchebag count and some nice pizza.

On Wednesday I did the last work on a project from last year. Then I went to see a shared office in Kreuzkölln before going to the Games Culture Circle (sort of similar to Gamelab in Amsterdam).

On Friday I went to see Agora based on a tip by Peter Bihr and I decided to setup shop there for the time being. Having a studio increases my productivity some four times. The rest of the day and weekend was spent getting back into XCode and into the iOS deployment process.

I also blogged about the 2012 Q1 events schedule both personally and professionally.

On Saturday I did make it out to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt to get a taste of the Transmediale, but I was a bit overwhelmed by the quantity and unclarity of the program so I didn’t do more than take a look around. I think the entire obscurantist tendency surrounding net art is highly problematic and negates any relevance the field may have. I did catch the Graham Harman keynote on the live stream which would have been worth admission by itself.

Week 254: game designing, data journalism, django, Praxis and game jam

2012-02-05T14:06:18Z

Last week started with recuperating from the second massive move we did getting massive wood furniture from Saxony. That was spent with a long overdue first visit to the Barn here.

The next day I peeked in a bit with the game design process at Hubbub.

Then I went to the Django meetup in Berlin organized by Jannis Leidel over at The Maker’s Loft.

I was also pleased with this write-up by Kevin Slavin of the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference over on his Tumblr (which is pure gold by the way).

The event Social Cities of Tomorrow is also intended as an alternative to the increasingly popular idea of ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ cities.

It is good to see our friends from the Mobile City to be so well attuned with the international cutting edge when it comes to smart city rhetoric.

Wednesday I visited the Daten & Journalisten meetup at the taz headquarters here in Berlin and I presented some of the data journalism projects we did both with Hack de Overheid and with Monster Swell.

On Thursday I dropped by Praxis, the office of Rainer Kohlberger and worked there for a bit. That day also marked the awards ceremony for the Apps voor Nederland contest and the success allowed us to get our minister of economic affairs to side with open data on television.

On Friday I was off to Friedrichshain to receive my team for the gamejam and that ended the week. Results of the gamejam are in this event write-up.

Early 2012 Events

2012-02-03T10:54:58Z

The year has started nicely and the event line-up is already brimful.

Thursday a week ago saw the iBestuur Congress in the Netherlands where the winners of the Apps voor Nederland competition were announced. I’m happy to see this last app competition to a succesful end and I look forward to what more we can bring. See a write-up of them over at the Hack de Overheid site.

Last weekend I was joined here by fellow game makers from the Netherlands to participate in the Berlin Global Game Jam. We fought hard and managed to crank out the unparalleled Nakatomi Rider. Niels wrote it up for the papers (available over at Bashers).

This week in Berlin the Transmediale takes place to which I hope to go in the following days. I have a difficult relationship with art, especially when it is in the domain of media, but watching the Graham Harman lecture tonight and the introduction to it, it was clear to me that Transmediale is as on top of current developments and artistic relevance as they can be.

Upcoming

There will be a night in Pakhuis de Zwijger to celebrate the Nederland van Boven television series that the VPRO produced in the Netherlands. I will be joining the esteemed panel there as a board member of Hack de Overheid to talk about issues of democracy, participation and truth in cartography.

With Martijn de Waal happily having gotten his PhD, it’s now full steam ahead for the conference he is organizing together with Michiel de Lange called “Social Cities of Tomorrow”. I will be speaking in a brief time slot about Apps for Amsterdam and how data commons happen.

I will probably be attending LIFT to see a certain person speak.

Finally in the near future there is also an undisclosed Berlin event for which I will be speaking which will be my first abroad since I left the Netherlands.

Working theory regarding bureaucracy

2012-01-31T14:10:43Z

I’m revising my working theory for Germany based on experiences from last week and other things that have happened. My old one on Germany’s attitude towards modernity still holds, but talking with open government activists and my experiences with government here, have prompted the following.

One of the biggest mysteries for me is why Germany is so far behind when it comes to open government compared to the Netherlands. With Hack de Overheid we have been on a roll last year with nearly every institution coming forward and pushing towards more openness. We even got Minister Verhagen on television to pledge to our goal. All of this does not mean we have won yet, but it does show a momentum into the right direction.

The German situation in comparison beggars belief. The very fact that it is a good thing for government to open up their data in a machine-readable fashion, still seems to be up for debate in many circles. The open government movement itself is denied outright and not heard in official proceedings even when it would be total common sense to take their input.

I have no clue how in this day and age such an opinion is tenable, but I will wager two possible explanations:

German goverment is hideously complex. There are tons of layers of government because of the federal system and the scale of the country. There are also parallel governments and institutions that are similarly layered, so for each and every query you have, you may be pointed any way up, down or sideways into the hierarchy. This is a very easy way to get sent in endless loops and for the entire system to hold itself in gridlock.
This one is more subtle: German government is very bureaucratical. The promise of open data and open government is ultimately to replace well defined bureaucratic systems with automation. At a point it no longer matters whether you send a physical form into government for human processing or whether you fill something in online and a computer performs the same operation.
Whether they realize it or not, by filibustering openness in government, the civil servants are ensuring that they will still have a job in twenty years’ time.

And before you say the above is an unfair characterization of the ruling elites in Germany, you only have to read this recent missive by CDU Bundestag member Heveling (outtakes by Peter Bihr here) to confirm the ruling class’s difficult relation with the internet. Heveling has caused quite the uproar here. Though I wonder if the German twittersphere may let themselves be baited too easily. If we in the Netherlands went batshit crazy every time somebody from the CDA said something stupid about the internet, we would get nary a thing done.

Week 253

2012-01-25T11:17:31Z

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

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

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

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

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

Starting up self-employed in Germany

2012-01-18T14:29:14Z

I’m reading up on German tax and trade rules because I’m going to incorporate here this month and most of the things I read do not make me very happy. They look like they are more suited to a 19th century gentry than to creative workers in the multipolar 21st.

One such thing is being a Freiberufler. The Freiberuflich status, which means you work in a free profession, strikes me as an archaic oddity.

In the Netherlands we had the same for doctors, engineers and other learned individuals which meant you did not need to register at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. You could just apply for a VAT number at the tax service and be in business. In the Netherlands this status got abolished and everybody was forced to register at that terrible excuse for an institution: the KvK.

In Germany being Freiberuflich rests on the same foundations but it also means you get a special tax cut (you don’t pay Gewerbesteuer) that other self-employed don’t get. This would seem to be along the division between people who create stuff from their knowledge and people who work in manufacture/trade.

That tax cut means that the Finanzamt examines your status a bit more stringently, because more people try to apply for the Freiberuflich status. There are a bunch of bizarrely outdated catalogue professions for which the decision has already been made. These number: blood type tester, ship compass rejiggerer and various other untranslatable things. In the digital professions the divisions are not very clear. A designer (in most cases) seems to be free, but a programmer (called by the humorous EDV —Elektronische Datenverarbeitung— term) usually not.

There are mainly two things wrong here.

The tax cut and the mostly arbitrary divisions that it entails seem unnecessary to me. For any enterprise, the difference between the cost you incur and the amount of money you can turn your time into, is your value add for which you already pay a VAT. Why then complicate matters with another tax designed especially to hurt the lower educated?

More principally, the division between being a free profession and not, at its core rests on whether somebody has undertaken higher education. Something you do for which you have been educated may be a free profession, while if you don’t have the education for it, this may become an issue. While in most cases, upon examination it won’t be an issue at all, the fact that this division exists and could have repercussions for your tax status, potentially has a chilling effect. It implies that your tax system and in effect most of your society is not based on merit, but on if you managed to pass this or that (university) gate. That strikes me as a very unhealthy signal.

Week 252

2012-01-17T11:51:04Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whither the theater?

2012-01-16T11:27:34Z

Talking to two young theater makers yesterday, I remarked that the majority of the Dutch plays I see don’t deliver the relevant and socially engaged experiences I would want them to. To which they asked why I still bothered going to the theater, a question I hear regularly from those in the more modern performing arts. They themselves hardly ever go and they make participatory theater, not the stage dramas that first come to mind. That is a response I get more often: that theater is boring, irrelevant and really ‘Why would anybody want to go?’

I often think the same on my obligatory trips to the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam and other venues. What I need in theater is a visceral quality, acute social relevance and deep street savvy. One of those is hard enough to find most of the time, let alone all three. I went to 33 plays last year and only a handful of them delivered. The few that did, redeemed the boring, too long, too simple plays I’ve been to, but I think that there are irresolvable obstacles preventing the quality of theater from increasing.

On most of my visits I’m struck by how narrow a demographic (by age and social-economic status) frequents most theaters. This cannot but influence the performances to cater to the audience. The audience’s wishes notwithstanding, artistic autonomy would require boundaries to be pushed, but that too doesn’t happen all too often (see also ‘De studio uit, de wereld in’).

Having said that, the theater makers I would go to blindly in the Netherlands are:

Theu Boermans
Thibaud Delpeut
Eric de Vroedt
Ivo van Hove

Now having just moved to Berlin, I’ve seen a bunch of plays at die Schaubühne but nothing very titillating yet. That may be in part because I am yet to see something by Thomas Ostermeier, but it does beg the question why a theater would stage such wildly varying material and why the room still is full most of the nights. Answers to those questions are forthcoming after a more thorough sampling.

Week 251

2012-01-13T18:06:57Z

Last week was my first week in Berlin in earnest and I was more than a bit eager to get back on the horse. On Monday I visited four coworking spaces, on Tuesday I met Marguerite Joly from the Hybrid Plattform and on Wednesday I visited a bunch more. Like I write over at Hubbub, I am looking for a studio space and much much more here in Berlin.

On Thursday I booked a spot at the beta breakfast at Betahaus through Gidsy where I met old friends and some interesting new people.

On Friday I had lunch with Rainer Kohlberger and then worked at betahaus for the rest of the day. I ended the week with drinks with the Gidsy and Third Wave crews.

Regain your privacy through bureaucracy

2012-01-17T15:51:31Z

Going over the list of services that the municipality of Amsterdam offers this week, I couldn’t help but notice this:

the option to change your date of birth (without a foreign certificate)

This is a very interesting option. I am not aware of the reasons one could assert to change their date of birth, but the fact that the option is listed, says something. In any case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a reason that fulfills official requirements.

Why would you want to do this?

I am reasonably sure that most statistical inference methods on databases are pinned fairly rigidly on the fact that somebody’s date of birth never changes. The various parts of your name can be mismatched, but if you do not have an id for somebody (like a social security number), the date of birth is your best bet to reduce the number of possible matches.

If you manage to change your date of birth if only by a day and re-register with that everywhere, you will have shed your privacy tail and can start anew. That by itself, struck me as a hopeful thought. Now just to have somebody try it out.

Post scriptum: I talked about this with Rejo and he suggested I FOIA the number of times this occurs and the reasons why it happens. I put that on my list, for some time in the future.

Work in 2011

2012-01-09T17:01:46Z

In 2011:

I taught a minor in data visualization at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
I built bespoke cartography for the PvdA and for the AUB.
I presented at /dev/hague, ODEC, CHI sparks, Ignite Amsterdam.
I presented on cities and games for Virtueel Platform.
I gave several radio interviews.
I ran workshops at the ROOSdagen, the RIVM and the NOS.
I taught at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
I published a book review in Vrij Nederland.
I wrote a handful of game reviews in nrc.next.
I visited dConstruct, FOSDEM, the Infographics congress and Playful.
I got an iPhone 4.
I made journalistic visualizations for de Groene Amsterdammer and Sargasso.
I moved house twice, once across the city and the next time across Europe.
I launched a web store with the freshest graphics in the Netherlands.
I judged one app competition and chaired the proceedings of another.
I learned iOS programming.
I participated in a pilot for a interactive design television show.
I went to the Alps for the first time.
I joined the Next Speaker.
I raised funds for Bits of Freedom.
I created a glanceable display for transit in Amsterdam.
I wrote code for a theater play.
I moved studio from Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Coop and got the keys to another.
I taped a video report on the Utrecht game scene.
I was cured from my infatuation with Android.
I participated in a workshop with Manuel DeLanda.
I went to Berlin five times, the last time for good.

We launched the new Hack de Overheid site.
We created a large scale serious game for organizational change called Code 4.
We conceived and ran: Apps for Amsterdam, Apps for Noord-Holland and Apps voor Nederland
We created a bespoke platform for cartographic visualization called Statlas.
We organized five hackathons, among which Hack de Overheid, Nederland van Boven, a hackathon on a historic fortress island, an Open Data Bazaar and Code Camping Amsterdam where hundreds of people came to program dozens of civic applications.
We went to Cognitive Cities and rocked Berlin.
We merged Hack de Ovenheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen into a new entity called the Open State Foundation.

Cultural Consumption 2011

2012-01-05T16:51:59Z

I dived into my log to make the yearly tally of what I did and saw. All in all 2011 has proven to be a good year.

It was a bit of a slow movie year though. I only saw 56, the best of which were: “Drive”, “Melancholia”, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”, “Blue Valentine”, “Norwegian Wood”, “True Grit”, “Almanya”, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Kosmos”.

I went to 32 plays in 2011. The best ones:

“Die Macht der Finsternis” in die Schaubühne
“Het meisje dat teveel van lucifers hield” by NTGent in Frascati WG
“Songs at the End of the World” by Wunderbaum in SSBA
“De Russen!” by Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Holland Festival
“This is how you will disappear” by Gisèle Vienne in Stadsschouwburg Utrecht (back at the Kaai in February!)
“Langs de grote weg” by de Vere in Frascati

I read 21 books in 2011. The most notable of those were:

“The Life and Death of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs
“The City & The City” by China Miville
“De kaart en het gebied” by Michel Houellebecq
“Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart
“Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell
“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
“Unit Operations” by Ian Bogost

I started tracking the games I played around halfway through the year, so this is not an exhaustive list, but five games I really enjoyed last year were: “Where is my Heart?”, “Nidhogg”, “Space Alert”, “The Binding of Isaac” and “The Resistance”.

Week 249

2012-01-01T17:08:36Z

In the beginning of the week I spotted an interesting dataset on Sargasso, requested to play with it and got the following visual published the next day (our write-up).

Then it was off to Berlin to finalize things with the appartment and prepare the move.

My review of “Where is my Heart?” was also published in the nrc.next that week (tweet):

Finally my proposal to present on the Apps for Amsterdam project on the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference was aspected and I will be attending and presenting at that conference in Amsterdam. Data commons are a topic that is very near to our practice and I look forward to exchanging ideas with those attending.

Week 248

2012-01-01T16:55:59Z

Some remaindered weeknotes that have been the casualty of an international move.

This week marked a strategic planning session for the coming year out of which a lot of opportunity flowed. I also finished ‘Where is my Heart?’ for an upcoming nrc.next review. It is a spectacular piece of work and a total mind altering experience. A well deserved five stars.

Next we did some project planning for a fun little thing (saba) we’re going to build in 2012Q1. And then we played Quarriors which I won against all odds.

The rest of the week was spent actually writing the review. A lot of time goes into writing a good review. Too much for the regular press to do much of it as I’ve written here about Cultural Criticism. I was very pleased with Niels’s criticism and how the thing turned out (though it would of course have been better with another week spent on it).

Thursday I went to the Dialogues House to see Yochai Benkler present on his work and books. The clarity with which he presented complex concepts of value and organization was expected but still good to witness. The Dialogues House though situated a bit unluckily is really a vibrant and creative place.

Then on Friday it was tying off some odds and ends (I added a view back and forward for Fast Moving Targets year end project) and preparing for the Open Coop party.

Scepticism on the Filter Bubble

2012-01-01T15:19:30Z

I think most of the thinking around The Filter Bubble comes from people who are not very procedurally literate to begin with. That is to say they are not very adept at understanding the rules that govern interactive systems nor are they well equipped at reconfiguring them to suit their ends. I touch on this because the same tired argument was parroted in this Zeit interview with Miriam Meckel, a leading German communication scientist. It starts off with some very sensible sentiments but then it quickly derails on the topic of algorithms and concludes on several sidelines.

There is a clear need for caution when it comes to algorithms, as has also been expressed by algoworld expert Kevin Slavin in his TED talk ‘How algorithms shape our world’ but there is no need for the undue fear being mongered by Eli Pariser and his pack. Meckel says the following (as also remarked by Basti Hirsch):

Es gäbe keinen kritischen Diskurs mehr, und damit würde unser System auseinanderfallen. Informationen sind der Kitt, der unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. In meinem Buch treibe ich diese Idee auf die Spitze: Die Menschheit schafft sich durch die Perfektionierung der Algorithmen selbst ab.

Bei manchen durch Algorithmen betriebenen Werbeangeboten hingegen bekämen Sie diesen Artikel gar nicht erst zu sehen.

While deploring the extremism prevalent in German discourse on the topic of the internet. She herself now takes an extremist and poorly nuanced position herself. The Filter Bubble argument that is currently in vogue (see this treatment by Alexander) is mostly hollow and it creates understanding on the back of fear. I work for the internet and I am sick of hearing this nonsense time and time again.

The Filter Bubble contrasts a previously filtered situation of redacted mainstream media with the new filtered situation of personalized online content and plays off of people’s fears. There are two main differences in the new situation.

The first difference is that the filters personalize content spheres for each person. I don’t think this is all that problematic. Having trained machine learning algorithms myself, I have seen how coarse they turn out no matter what amount of training. Training which is somewhere between a dark art and trying to hit a subjective target somewhere. Algorithmic filters resemble fractal surfaces more than they do smooth bubbles and personalization will never provide a perfectly sealed off environment. This means that as soon as you get into the technical details the whole thing very quickly falls apart.

The second difference is that filters are being applied by algorithms instead of editors now. Both are enigmatic creatures, but judging from the cold reception algorithms get, it seems that the traditional humanities are better equipped to deal with human entities than they are with the algorithmic variety. There is nothing new under the sun. Large scale social segregation and associated detrimental effects also happened using traditional media with people logging into their own newspaper or radio station. One of the most visibly polarized societies right now is the USA where the ‘debate’ between the right and the left is raging on talk radio, 24 hour news networks and, yes, also online. If anything the filters may help by making the groups of like minded people too small and too busy to be harmful to society.

My second problem is that while complaining about the lack of technical literacy in the general populace, her discipline and her research does not come over as very technically literate. She says:

Unser Land ist tendenziell eher technikfeindlich eingestellt.

The interviewer then adds that she draws from literary and philosophical sources. Those are interesting but hardly enough to thoroughly treat a subject. Deep talk about about information technology should draw from philosophy but it should also bring a literacy of the field itself. That means knowledge of its technical workings and affordances, the design practices inherent in the creation of technical artifacts and the procedurality and interaction that is so key to them.

So yes I very much agree that we need to instill a large scale procedural, data and media literacy in people and we may well need to start with the humanities. That may be the only way to fix their relevance problems when it comes to digital things (see also Ian Bogost’s two part essay ‘Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground’ on that).

So with those skills in hand, we could discuss the filter bubble drawing from applied research. One finding I would like to see is a technical assessment of the feasibility of trapping people in filter bubbles and measurements of the amount of information isolation that can be achieved. Another would be to research real life internet users and see if in fact they shut themselves off more from other influences and how far this affects their world views. Only with a praxis firmly based in reality can we talk about this subject in a way that is not gratuitous.

Update: This review of the Filter Bubble by Olga Goriunova in Computational Culture mostly vindicates my argument and I agree that we need more writing, not less to bridge the gap of literacy that stands ahead of us.

Cultural Criticism Without Borders

2011-12-26T00:22:25Z

When I just got into Germany we managed to pin point something I had noticed before. It is striking how conservative people in Germany are when it comes to the internet and especially people who work in cultural positions. Compared to that, the Netherlands of the past five years has gone through a rather tumultuous revolution.

This was prompted a bit by responses are to the new play “Edward II” directed by Ivo van Hove at the Schaubühne here. I am yet to see the play, but I hear it’s pretty good. Judging from the set pictures and the trailer it is one of the more modern pieces at this particular theater. It seems to have been rather poorly received in the papers, which have treated it not really on merit, but with thinly veneered hatchet jobs where critics employed their position to jab at this or that enemy in the German cultural landscape. One particular critic even projected his own frustrations and personal perversions onto the play in a national daily. Germany still seems to be that place where personal gripes are written down and nailed to a door somewhere.

The modern look of the play seemed to draw particular ire and especially the liberal use of video projections on the stage (a staple at Toneelgroep Amsterdam). It seems that German theater viewers cannot deal with mixed media and are either confused on where to look or too closed minded to accept projected images alongside the action happening live on the stage. This is one symptom of a lack in media literacy.

Ivory towered gentlemen with a strangle hold on culture may be one extreme, in the Netherlands we suffer from the other. Reviews of works of culture in the papers are oftentimes as thin as the paper they are printed on. Usually they superficially treat a work and tack on a bit of buyer’s advice. It is painfully obvious that they are written by people who have to write twenty such pieces a day lest they are fired. I write video game reviews in Dutch periodical nrc.next myself, but looking for my piece in the paper one day, I read a review for a movie I’d been to that was so bad, it brought tears to my eyes. Theater reviews have held their own, but they are hit and miss and you’re better off reading only those written by Simon van den Berg.

As I see it a piece in a newspaper treating a work of culture should be some parts of either a review or a critique and probably a bit of both. A review is a brief summary of a piece without giving much away, explaining how it will fulfill the expectations of a prospective audience so they can decide whether to go/buy/use it or not. A critique should be a deep diving treatment of that piece, how it compares to all other works and how it is relevant to society in any subset that the critic deems relevant. Such a critique should contain judicious amounts of post-modern literary theory, internet savvy remix, unit operational analysis and it should bridge clefts of continuity, medium, style and social stratum. Above all both reviews and critiques must be entertaining to read and they must bring something new to the table.

I get to write 80 words or so for the paper and in that little space I try to do the above because we want to further discourse around video games in the Netherlands. As we see it procedural media are busy upending the entire traditional cultural landscape and strict divisions of any kind in culture and art will not be tenable in the future. The institutions are crumbling and that is a good thing. This is unfortunately a radical notion even in the Netherlands, I have no clue how it will hold up in Germany where institutions are even more conservative and society is much more stratified.

In any case we cannot fill the entire newspaper by ourselves, nor should we want to. We can only strive to educate and elucidate by writing and talking about media in this particular way and hope that it catches on. I’m interested to see if my notions are at all true and if the German or Dutch discourse can be inched forward in the coming year with some choice interventions. Help to achieve that or explanations in how I am completely wrong are always welcome.

Working theory for Germany

2011-12-24T14:46:58Z

I have been in Berlin for a couple of hectic days now and I’m trying to come to terms with my surroundings. I have got a new working theory to use for the foreseeable future. Let’s see how well this holds up:

Germany has not quite recovered from their catastrophical experiment with modernism in the ’30s-’40s. This caused them to fall back and get stuck in a sort of classical romanticism. This stuckness has caused them to skip post-modernism and the developments that came after and is the main reason why its cultural velocity is slow. Some individuals have modernized to a greater or lesser extent and the developments of ’68 have had an effect, but the institutional parts of the country remain firmly entrenched in the past.

As I said, I’m new here and this is two days’ worth of rumination thinly sliced. Comments for amending it are very welcome.

Cameratoezicht conclusie

2011-12-24T13:29:50Z

Ik zou nog schrijven wat de conclusie was van het cameratoezicht op mijn gestolen fiets uit het vorige bericht. Daar stond al hoe je voor dit soort zaken van het kastje naar de muur gestuurd wordt. Ik had nagelaten dit op te schrijven door drukte en frustratie met hoe het gaat in de stad, maar gelukkig herinnerde Rejo Zenger van Bits of Freedom me eraan.

Bijkomend voordeel is dat ik met behulp van ThinkUp mijn tweets van toen kon terugvinden en het verhaal weer aan elkaar kon puzzelen.

Ik had het een beetje opgegeven. Ik moest mijn aangifte afmelden bij een hulpzame agent van het lokale bureau. Toen ik hem vertelde dat er een camera op het plaats delict stond stuurde hij even een patrouille langs die ‘eyes on the scene’ deden en navroegen bij Stadgenoot.

Kort daarna wist hij me te vertellen dat de camera wél van Stadgenoot is ondanks dat Stadgenoot dat ontkende. Alleen volgens Stadgenoot was de camera niet aangesloten en hadden ze dus ook geen beelden van de diefstal.

Daardoor konden we niet anders dan mijn aangifte onverrichter zake sluiten. Als je ergens een fixie ziet met een doorgeroeste Paddy Wagon wielset en eventueel twee spoke cards van de Pariah alley cat, dan is die van mij.

Vragen die blijven naar aanleiding van dit incident:

Waarom vertelt Stadgenoot in eerste instantie onwaarheid over hun camera (tweet)? Is dat omdat ze niet beter weten? Hebben ze geen zin in gedoe? Of is het kwade opzet?
Kan iedereen een camera plaatsen die gericht is op de openbare weg en dan erbij zeggen dat deze niet functioneert? Wie controleert dat de camera echt niet aangesloten is en blijft (tweet)?

Wat blijft:

Er is geen register van camera’s in de openbare weg en wie ze beheert. Dit maakt het makkelijk voor instanties om je van het kastje naar de muur te sturen zoals Stadgenoot deed.

Elke camera die op de openbare weg gericht is zou een vergunning en registratie moeten hebben of deze nu werkt of niet. Aangezien de functionaliteit van een niet door het normale publiek te controleren is.

Week 246

2011-12-14T14:02:28Z

Forgot to post the notes for week 246, so here they are briefly.

Code Camping Amsterdam was featured in the news:

Article text

Then I was off to Berlin to house hunt and visit our friends over at The Makers Loft and Mozilla and I hung out with some Berlin Game Developers.

Week 247

2011-12-11T17:49:26Z

Another week and another change at the office. One thing that does define the Open Coop is that everything is in a constant state of flux adding jitter so none of us remain stuck in a local optimum. The global optimum we are shooting for in and around our location in North is rather ridiculous but best not shared in public.

I flew into Amsterdam on Monday morning (takeoff Schönefeld at 07:20) to a rather broken working day. My locative transgressions leaving at least Peter Robinett confused enough to do something about it. He built me a personal glanceable: Where’s Alper? (write up). That is the best reason to build software: because you need it.

Attended to it by my speaking agent Tessa, I submitted a talk brief to NEXT12 about Love in Time of Gamification. And I registered at Hybrid Plattform in Berlin, looking to see what kind of collaborations come from that.

The rest of Monday and Tuesday were spent preparing a workshop for the Dutch broadcasting corporation the NOS on the topic of data visualization using off the shelf tools. The course was mainly focused on Google’s tools such as Motion Charts, other charts APIs and Fusion Tables but we also managed to touch on some theoretical and ethical questions during the workshop.

For me it was great to see how far Google’s Fusion Tables offering has come since last I looked at it, becoming a proper tool for big data analysis and visualization for those with the right skills and inclination. Though the data import/export as well as the ties to Google are problematic for corporate customers. It is also very promising how a web savvy group of people as those at the NOS can use the data they have at their disposal to create public facing interactive products. That is the aim and I am very curious what comes out of the NOS during the next year when it comes to data.

After the course I got the obligatory television studio tour and despite having foresworn television some years ago, I could not help but be awed by the studios, the proceedings and the massive disconnect between what happens in physical space in Hilversum and how it is experienced throughout the country. The process of media power at play is an impressive thing to behold.

I met with Erik Kroesto talk about the intersection of photography and the internet. And then I went to a lecture in the Facing Forward series by Amber Case and Manuel DeLanda. I had read this piece about Case before and the talk contained not much new and DeLanda who I had got pointed to by Matt Jones very recently took his time to introduce us to genetic algorithms as form finding functions. A laypersons introduction to genetic algorithms for me does not contain anything novel either, but DeLanda delivered it with intelligence and wit, which made it still immensely bearable.

Most surprised I was still at the relative novelty the audience experienced for material that has been old hat in my social sphere for the last couple of years. Tellingly in a room of hundreds there were only a handful of people who had even mentioned the event on Twitter let alone who participated in any kind of discursive backchannel.

I was and still am more interested in DeLanda’s book on simulation. The next day I participated in a workshop in W139 where DeLanda gave me and a bunch of art students an introduction into Realist philosophy as opposed to the other branches.

We ended the week with talking about the communications plan and the merger for Open State (the future foundation into which all of Hack de Overheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen are to be combined).

This was accompanied with a bunch of festivities among which a Coop party on Thursday, constitutionary drinks on Friday and then off to Utrecht for the Hubbub studio warming. Kars Alfrink has crafted himself an ultra fine place of work and I count myself lucky to be allowed to work there from time to time.

Occupy hoger onderwijs

2011-12-08T22:53:42Z

Kevin Slavin klaagt op onnavolgbare wijze het bestuur van zijn universiteit de Cooper Union aan waar hij tegenwoordig ook les geeft.

De Cooper Union is een topuniversiteit in de Verenigde Staten waar het onderwijs altijd gratis is geweest (zie Wikipedia). Dit gratis onderwijs werd gefinancierd door donaties en rendement op het eigen vastgoed. Nu is door schimmige beleggingspraktijken en een intransparant en waarschijnlijk corrupt bestuur de voortzetting van dat gratis onderwijs niet meer zeker.

“So as an investor, I challenge you, President Bharucha, the Board, I challenge you to find the real and sustainable resources — transparency, communication, trust, and integrity — resources that can be renewed endlessly. I’ll break my back to build on those and I know that’s true of everyone here.

Do not allow our investment to fail.” —Kevin Slavin

Het lijkt er nu op dat vastgoed-hobbyisme niet alleen in Amerika een nevenactiviteit van universiteitsbesturen is geweest. Bij mijn oude universiteit, de Technische Universiteit van Delft is iets soortgelijks aan de hand. Het NRC bericht dat het goed mis is met de integriteit, de beloningen en de vastgoedportefeuille. De universiteit antwoord met ontkenning en spin (én slechte PR).

Het verbaast ondertussen niemand meer. Het gebrek aan integriteit en transparantie bij mensen die aan de top van grote instituties staan lijkt zich door de gehele samenleving te hebben uitgezaaid. Ik ben afgestudeerd en niet meer persoonlijk betrokken bij mijn alma mater. Maar jammer is het wel.

Week 245

2011-11-30T15:24:38Z

On Monday we ran through the day’s schedule for Code Camping Amsterdam and I did a bunch of work on guadalupe.

That night DUS had an evening about re-imagining architecture at the Coop.

Tuesday I worked at the Brainsley offices and went to the Bits of Freedom drinks in the evening.

The Next Speaker now also carries my English profile if you need a speaker on the overlap between technology, design and society.

I submitted a proposal about data commons to the conference on the Social Cities of Tomorrow by the Mobile City.

Friday was for the final preparations for Code Camping Amsterdam (write-up here), our largest Hack de Overheid event to date. We had the entire day hacking at the derelict Shell Tower —I wrote about it before— across the water in Amsterdam with great food and coffee and a party at night for another several hundred people.

Week 244

2011-11-26T14:46:00Z

I had a great time last week working at the Makers Loft in Kreuzberg while our friends of Gidsy were out and about in San Francisco.

It was interesting arranging stuff for Apps voor Nederland from Berlin, but eminently doable thanks to modern communications.

I also went to see the play ‘Einsame Menschen’ at the Schaubühne. Which was an interesting experience all in all.

I also had an experience with Android that probably forever cured me from the platform. What a horrible mess that is. Tuesday evening I took the train back to Amsterdam while making two presentations.

Because on Wednesday I did a project presentation at the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers and after that the same night I did an Ignite on Hack de Overheid at Mediamatic (see this picture of me speaking about transparency and see the picture on the projector). Both presentations went very well.

Mediamatic is currently doing studies in fungus of which this wall is an example:

Thursdays was a bit more of a slow day after the 12 hour ordeal of the day before, starting off with doing e-mails at the Village, my favorite hangout in the Netherlands.

I asked Vlambeer about any indie game developers in Berlin and they came up pretty short on that count. Anytime I inquire about the Berlin game scene I get Wooga and if people really know what they are talking about they mention the great people at Spaces of Play. In any case, the Berlin scene seems thin and ripe for disruption.

After that it was off to Lieke’s viva. A smashing display of science if ever there was one:

Friday we did some business development for Hubbub with Kars Alfrink visiting over at the Coop and we paid a brief visit to the Super Mario Experience.

And oh yeah, on Sunday I moved my office from the Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Cooperatie which has already been my main base of operations for a while now, so I thought I’d make it official.

Code Camping Amsterdam Imminent

2011-11-18T16:57:49Z

I’m incredibly proud of the team and events coming together in our organization of the biggest Hack de Overheid feature yet. Looking back on the past year, it has been an incredible ride with the various Apps for… competitions and no small amount of personal and professional changes.

At the end of this month, on Saturday the 26th, we’ll be holding a Hack de Overheid event like you’re used to with some notable additions that are going to blow everybody’s mind. The event is called Code Camping Amsterdam, it is part of the Apps voor Nederland program in collaboration with Waag Society and you can register on the bottom of the page.

We’ll be having three internationally renowned speakers whose work alone speaks for itself, let alone their presence on our event. Marietje Schaake is our most favourable representation in the European Parliament but as far as I know a politician of her stature has never before spoke in front of an audience of Makers in the Netherlands before. Marius Watz‘s visual art inspires awe and wonder and I have used his software on several occasions in my work for Monster Swell. Matt Biddulph‘s work and shipped products have been used by most of the people I know and inspired me and I think many more programmers to build more and better.

The location in the derelict Toren Overhoeks is a culmination both of convenience and inconvenience. Just across the central train station, but without any facilities left in the building it exemplifies a once and future state of our cities. Remnants of an age gone by where hackers gather with makeshift facilities to create something better.

After the event there is going to be a party by the Eddie the Eagle Museum a formation famous in their own right for holding the most out there awesome parties in the city. It is a privilege working together with people this competent when it comes to fun and so creative when it comes to convention. See their party description:

The future has found us! And its leader is a code. Our digitally hypnotised desire has led to a world without mistakes, governed by spyware and malware. Humanity is an experiment proved inferior. Let’s crack the code to correct it. Enter the Hackathon and exuberantly celebrate a world without errors! With high, low and no-tech, we are the new Trojan Horses marching in, ritually erasing the failings of the past. Let’s roughly and frantic lose our last human bit with a codefest in the Tower of the Shell.

Finally as I have hinted before, the currency for application contests is diminishing along with the consolidation of the open data platforms and the publication of more and more datasets. If after Apps voor Nederland is over, you follow-up with another cookie-cutter competition, that would be missing the point. That also means that this competition is the best moment to get your datasets out and get attention for them in the ecosystem as it is right now. What will be next? We have some ideas, but we don’t know anything for sure yet. The only thing that is certain: you’d better be there next Saturday!

Week 243

2011-11-17T12:12:01Z

It has become even easier to find your way to our office in the Coop. Just follow the ~~green~~ yellow line.

And we are accruing more and more birds:

The start of the week was busy with preparing and presenting at the RIVM, the Dutch institute for public health and the environment about their consumer portal Kies Beter. Kies beter is effectively a public resource for authoritative healthcare information. It will be interesting to see what role it will play in the coming process of opening up such data. It was a great opportunity to talk and work with the team and see how they see their role.

Also the movie I shot for Fast Moving Targets with my quick note from the Dutch Game Garden was published:

I met with Jaap Stronks of Johnny Wonder and with some friendly people from Dutch broadcasting company NCRV all about the open data revolution and how it can work for them.

Apps voor Nederland continues apace and the event is rapidly approaching right now.

I am in the process of liquidating my superfluous effects in the Netherlands as well as my office in the Volkskrantgebouw. It’s an odd coincidence that just with my leaving (and with the announcement of the re-development of the VKG as a hotel in a couple of years) a bunch of friends and esteemed colleagues are landing in the building. I would have loved to have shared the building with them for the past two years but for me it is onwards and upwards!

I had a chat with Casper Koomen who is very active with Pachube’s Dutch development efforts. Among other things with an event this Friday called “Breathe Amsterdam”. And I’m preparing an Ignite presentation for next week.

Also my long form review of Phone Story which had been published in the newspaper before has now been published on Bashers in Dutch: ‘Phone Story – Gamedesign als kritiek op onze gadgetlust’ The comments are predictable but I had wished for a bit more in depth response to the problem I see where platform builders as Apple become governments of the space they created. Which is problematic in this case because they tightly regulate expression within their platform that would be legitimate in any other public space.

The winter sun hitting the backyard of our North office, makes for some striking pictures:

And then it was off to Berlin to make some more arrangements for the move over there come the new year.

We strolled from Neukölln to the South back to Kreuzberg’s Südstern and Bergmannkiez via the former airport of Tempelhof. That part of Neukölln is developing but before there is anything approaching a comfortable urban fabric, it will be another five years.

Tempelhof Airport itself is becoming a great example of how creating a hole in a vibrant urban area can make space for all kinds of impromptu and impermanent use. The urban gardening plots are just one example of that. The business on a Sunday even with winter approaching is massive with al kinds of wheeled and/or wind based activities taking place.

There seem to be plans to build along the airfield, but that would be very bad obscuring the current urban views into the emptiness. If building is necessary, I would propose to put the buildings on stilts so we can still peer into the Loch.

I deleted my Klout account after reading the polemic by Charlie Stross:

A blue button

2011-11-11T22:25:44Z

That moment where you’re texting somebody for the first time and the Send button turns blue. The expectations conveyed with that small indicator about the time to response as well as the type of person on the other side.

Week 242

2011-11-10T15:53:45Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bericht uit de Game Garden

2011-11-07T17:45:24Z

Ik doe recentelijk een stukje over games voor Fast Moving Targets en wat beter te vertellen dan mijn ervaringen uit de Dutch Game Garden. Het is een leuke plek in Utrecht, waar veel gebeurt, maar wat in Amsterdam bijna niet aankomt. Een poging om een brug te slaan:

We doen het in het vervolg elke keer uit een andere studio (dat moet ook wel lukken met 30 game bedrijven) met korte interviewtjes.

Week 241

2011-11-04T16:40:35Z

Apps voor Nederland continues apace as it keeps on doing.

Talks about open data and data journalism are ongoing at a number of Dutch parties. After last year’s attention, it seems that this year various parties are indeed getting serious about it.

Then I went to a talk by Michael LaFond at ARCAM in Amsterdam about the Berlin co-housing movement that he started in part. All the more interesting because I am moving to Berlin in January of next year and we’re already registered at several projects on Wohnportal Berlin, the site he setup. Several of the projects he showed during the evening also have our attention as prospective Berlin living space. My notes for the evening and a more elaborate write-up of the Q&A are up on this blog.

I built a next iteration for guadalupe that is indeed becoming more playable as we speak. I am very eager to invite more people to that play experience sometime soon.

Wednesday we announced the first speaker for Code Camping Amsterdam: Matt Biddulph. We’re really excited to have Matt come over to Amsterdam again.

Went to Booreiland to work on culiacan.

At long last I posted the pictures I took of people visiting our office with my Yashica medium format camera.

My review of The Binding of Isaac was published in nrc.next.

Sunday we had a marathon meeting for the constitution of the merged foundation that is going to be the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Hack de Overheid and Het Nieuwe Stemmen. I am very excited for the potential of the new organization.

Week 240

2011-11-01T15:30:20Z

This was a short week. Work on Apps voor Nederland and then off to Playful.

Nice to see that Peter Robinett is running AMStransit in his office on a spare screen:

Hack de Overheid announced Code Camping Amsterdam which is going to be our biggest event yet in a derelict office across the IJ in Amsterdam. Everything is in full effect to organize that.

Playful was great and it’s always nice to be in London for a short stretch. It was a while that I was last in Conway Hall but it was nice to be back. Niels and Kars have written detailed accounts about the day on Hubbub and Bashers.

Then in the same weekend (flying into Schiphol in the morning, directly in the car to Germany) it was off to the Ruhrgebiet in Germany to visit among others the Jahrhunderthallen and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.

Awards and Power

2011-11-01T14:45:27Z

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

awards handed out by its organiser who wants to be seen handing out awards to people who want to be seen receiving them. It’s a simple formulae, but unsustainable in a world where more of the demographic that attends communicates over the back-channel. —Jan Chipchase

Geeks of @ouroffice

2011-10-29T19:11:39Z

This summer I shot a roll of color film I had lying around using my trusty Yashica D medium-format camera. The subjects were passers-by in our Amsterdam office. The results were better than expected.

Ties shines on this classic laptop shot (the stickers do add a nice touch):

Martijn in a similar stance has a razor sharp glance (and curls):

James’s essence is captured quite nicely in this picture:

Peter came out a bit under-exposed but turned out nicely with some brushing up (and burning):

The tallest of former coworkers Tim comes out nicely too:

All in all, that is five usable frames from twelve shot which is a more than decent score. It looks like I should shoot more portraits. Any volunteers?

De studio uit, de wereld in

2011-10-26T15:08:56Z

Ian Bogost, videogame-filosoof, publiceerde een tijdje geleden een kritiek op de geesteswetenschappen (http://bogost.com — “Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground”) die moeite hebben uit te leggen waar ze voor dienen (deel 1) en niet weten wat ze met het internet aan moeten (deel 2). Bogost rekent af met academici die zich afzonderen in de ondoordringbare vestingen van hun vakgebied en te weinig relevant zijn voor mensen daarbuiten. Bas Heijnes recent verschenen essay ‘Echt zien’ past eenzelfde redenering toe op de ‘zieke’ roman. Het is nuttig om deze twee redeneringen tegen de kunst- en cultuursector aan te houden. Na de debatten heeft die zich teruggetrokken maar —het lijkt— geen echte lessen getrokken.

De kunsten staan onder druk en hadden bij de bezuinigingen net zulke moeite om hun bestaan te rechtvaardigen. Betogers kwamen niet verder dan waardeloze tautologieën “Een samenleving zonder kunst is geen samenleving.” Onzin die alleen werkt bij mensen die dat al vinden. Echte maatschappelijke of economische waarde voerde niemand aan omdat die vaak ontbreekt of omdat kunst die nuttig of populair is, niet serieus genomen wordt.

Bogost stelt in zijn redenering dat de geesteswetenschappen het publiek minachten. Dat had je over de kunsten niet kunnen zeggen tot de ‘Mars der Beschaving’ plaatsvond. Die liet pijnlijk zien hoe verziekt de relatie tussen de sector en het brede publiek is. Een kleine groep mensen wil blijven doen wat ze altijd al deden zonder daar verantwoording over af te leggen tegen de samenleving waar ze afhankelijk van is.

Verder heeft niet alleen de roman moeite met de (digitale) media zoals Heijne beschrijft, maar vrijwel alle instituties. De kosten om dingen te maken en uit te proberen zijn nog nooit zo laag geweest. Iedereen kan optreden en zichzelf presenteren hoe ze maar willen. Natuurlijk is dat amateuristisch, maar vaak is het wél goed of goed genoeg voor de betrokkenen. Het is niet meer te verkopen dat een kleine groep de artistieke middelen monopoliseert en daar weinig meer mee doet dan een iets grotere elite te bereiken.

Als de kritieken passen, ligt het voor de hand dat de oplossingen dat ook doen. Bij beiden is dat dat kunst die zich wil beroepen op maatschappelijke waarde met beide benen in de samenleving moet staan en daar relevant moet zijn. Kunst moet de geheimen van de wereld blootleggen en ons dingen leren over onszelf. Daar heeft het helaas te lang aan ontbroken.

Een correctie was noodzakelijk maar dat die zo hard aankomt ligt meer aan de sector dan aan de staatssecretaris. Het lijkt erop dat mensen er liever voor kiezen om irrelevant te worden dan om met hun tijd mee te gaan. Maar een culturele bosbrand is gelukkig geen ramp. Waar er mogelijkheden zijn zullen behoeftes altijd vervuld worden. Des te makkelijker zelfs zonder de drukkende last van het verleden.

Week 239

2011-10-26T15:39:07Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ianus
!ianus keller There’s hope for @alper we need people to interpret big data @ Geertekerk http://t.co/GI8egdhO
Oct 14 via InstagramFavorite RetweetReply

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

Michael LaFond – Berlin Co-Housing

2011-12-24T13:47:56Z

I was at an event organized by ARCAM tonight concerning co-operative housing projects which are already very popular in Berlin but are rapidly expanding to other cities. Amsterdam is busy launching its own initiative and Michael LaFond from Berlin presented their experiences with this way of building.

It was an interesting evening to attend. The slides were poorly visible from the back, but I managed to jot down a large part of the Q&A where most of the action was. It is interesting to see how eager for knowledge the Amsterdam crowd is. It strikes me as odd that building a house yourself would be novel, but given the market as it is, it is. Also: the Dutch with their capacity for trade and organization should be pretty good at this thing. If that will be so, remains to be seen.

Notes first quoted:

Muni of Amsterdam is going to emit a bunch of self building plots

There’s going to be an event this weekend in Houthaven for the first batch of plots.

Michael LaFond, American Architect living and working in Berlin
id22, Institute for Creative Sustainability

started Wohnportal-Berlin

focus on co-housing, community organized housing projects

daz – köpenickerstraße

local innovation, community
baugemeinschaften, hausvereine

emphasizes participation in cooperative and community oriented designs
organize Wohnportal, platform for architects and housing activists to get their project out there

last year: started working with people in other European cities

organizing a tour of the creative sustainability projects around the city

An increased demand even in participation.

Berlin:
1.9M housing units / 3.5M residents
1.82 person/unit
70m2/unit
40m2/person
Weak presence of corporations on the market though everybody leases.

Since 2009 Berlin offers land to Baugemeinschaften at fixed prices.
The best concept and not the highest bidder wins.
Criteria:
1. Neighborhood and community orientation
2. Architecture and urban design
3. Sustainability and ecology
4. Financing

Change in economy and demography forces Berlin like Amsterdam to look at the concept of building houses yourself.

Baugemeinschaften started in Tübingen and Freiburg

List of examples among which:
* Möckernkiez, public access
* Spreefeld Berlin, secured a road to the land and got the land cheap from the Federal Government, some of the best architects in Berlin
* AH+, outside of the city center, buildings will produce more energy than they consume

Baugemeinschäfte are growing larger to the 100 and more houses per project

Co Housing Cultures book due to be out

blok0.nl
amsterdam.nl/zelfbouw

Manifestation this weekend with the release of 300 plots.

Initiator of the Vrijburg Project, landscape architect also present.
Vrijburg has failed in collaborating with Nuon to create sustainable energy projects.

Now the questions as much as I could transcribe them:

Q: How do you manage people who want to rent? Or people with unequal incomes.
LaFond: 3 of the projects are affordable housing, some in re-adapting existing buildings. People pay €5-6/m2. There are examples of non-profit cooperations. People that really don’t have any money, can’t live there.

Q: The real-estate market in Amsterdam is rather transparent. Transactions are being done between housing corporations, developers and the city. Can co-housing create more transparency in the housing market? So that fairer pricing of land becomes a possibility?
LaFond: By making the scale of projects smaller that becomes easier. For democracy, the equal distribution of land is very important.

Q: The self-build aspect? Who carries the risk if the plan fails?
LaFond: You can have affordable houses from non-self-organized projects and vice versa. People that do have money: a core group forms and they look for a piece of land with or without an architect, or they apply to a city land auction, with a group facilitator. They identify the concept and organize a Baugemeinschaft. People bring their own money and they need to go to the bank themselves for credit. The ones without money need to get support from a foundation or other organization. The main reason that projects don’t succeed is because they can’t find any affordable land.

Q: How important is the role of the architect?
LaFond: If you want to emphasize the group or community, the focus should be with them. There’s always the combination of the future inhabitants, the architect and the moderator. The most important thing in Berlin is that people adhere more strictly to the division of roles and don’t try to play multiple parts.

Q: Do the architects design the energy systems?
LaFond: Almost always there will somebody extra working on that.

Q: How do people find it?
LaFond: There’s the website. The events where people come together and word of mouth about the project. Some architecture firms have their own waiting lists for people who want to be on the next project.

Q: What’s the role of the moderators?
LaFond: There’s no investor/developer for these projects, that’s why they are more affordable. Btu that’s also why it demands more intensive participation. They need to understand people and organize them. Manage relations. Sometimes have to protect participants from the architects. There are not that many people who can do this and want to do this. Most architects can’t or don’t want to do this. (There seem to be companies specialized in this.)

Bob van der Zande (stad Amsterdam, Zelfbouw) also present.

Q: Is the municipality thinking about social housing in the next 10 years?
Van der Zande: We are hoping that there are so many different houses being planned that the option of social housing will materialize.

LaFond: Some of the co-operative projects will give people the money they invested back but they cannot sell or speculate on the house themselves. This changes the house from a property on the market into something that is there to use. More projects like that are needed to guarantee affordable housing in a city on the long term. If people can make money on their property and there’s nothing to prevent it, it is not odd that they will do so.

Q: How is the other obstacle (that of financing) being tackled?
LaFond: Constructions take some time to develop. Umweltbank and GLS bank are very important for these projects. They make less money from the interest and they have a greater desire to support ecological and social projects. It happens that people can collectively apply for money to get credit so not everybody needs to have the same amout of money. GLS is the best example in Germany. They offer different kinds of Burgschaften, you need to have a combination of money, income, property, or a relative who has money. Now also Kleinburgschaften: 25 people can all risk €3000 to join together and cover the risk. Das Miethäusersyndicat (started in Freiburg) exists to help housing groups to buy their buildings and renovate them. Because they have so many buildings now they can get credit to do more buildings. These structures took 20 some years to develop.
Stiftung Trias and Edith Marien Stiftung don’t like private ownership much. They work to take land away from the market. Community land trusts.

Vrijburg architect: In Amsterdam one bank is interested in these projects: the Rabobank. All the other banks are running away.

Wat moet je doen met gamification?

2011-10-18T13:54:12Z

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

2011-10-17T10:17:42Z

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Cameratoezicht op mijn fiets

2011-10-13T13:57:29Z

Onlangs zijn de wielen van mijn racefiets gestript toen deze over het weekend geparkeerd stond op de Korte ‘s-Gravezandestraat in Amsterdam.

Ik heb aangifte gedaan van de diefstal en er staat een camera op het terrein van Stadgenoot gericht op de openbare weg waar mijn fiets staat. Ik probeer te achterhalen van wie die camera is om te zorgen dat die beelden bewaard worden en beschikbaar zijn voor het politie-onderzoek.

In principe ben ik tegen camera’s in de openbare ruimte maar als ze er hangen ben ik wel voor transparante en heldere informatie over van wie ze zijn en wanneer je bij de beelden mag. Dat het hier slecht gesteld is met die informatie bewijst de volgende rondgang:

Stadgenoot ontkent dat de camera van hen is en zegt dat bewoners niet zomaar camera’s aan hun huis mogen bevestigen. Ze zeggen dat deze waarschijnlijk van de politie is.

Het politiebureau dat erover gaat zegt ook niks te weten van deze camera en verwijst door naar de gemeente.

De gemeente weet na herhaaldelijk bellen en talloze malen doorverbonden te worden uiteindelijk te achterhalen om welk stadsdeel dit precies gaat en dat team handhaving van stadsdeel Centrum zou moeten weten van wie die camera is. Dit team is ‘s ochtends tussen 9 en 10 op kantoor waarna ze de straat op gaan. Dus morgenochtend wordt dit vervolgd.

Stop Kicking the Creative Class

2011-10-15T13:50:03Z

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

The documentary shown last weekend “Creativity and the Capitalist City” by Tino Buchholz actually showed an interesting and nuanced picture of urban development. Unfortunately this was marred by the rabid and insubstantial left-wing outings of the movie maker afterwards. That discussion did oust a lot of resentment that I think needs to be addressed more openly and more honestly than it currently is.

As was remarked in die Zeit recently about the same issue in Berlin: the only thing worse than gentrification is no gentrification. The debate is a lot more heated over there because of the massive influx of hipsters and their friends from all over the world into an impoverished city. A trust fund takes you a lot further in Neukölln than it does in Bushwick, but it also sparks xenofobic pamflets and immolation of vehicles.

I am a part of that same creative class —if you want to use a blanket term— and probably also a cause of gentrification. But I am sick of apologizing for our success. We picked a profession, we worked hard, we created value (we are not bankers) and now we are winning. Well I can tell you: it feels good to be winning.

It is perverse to rest the blame of society’s ills on those people actually doing something with their lives. I have had this problem before. If you’re a successful migrant in the messed up social debate in the Netherlands, you were nearly forced to apologize for your own success to the rest who were not. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do that. The only solution is to ignore the naysayers. It always is of course.

I can do what I am doing because of a lot of hard work and perseverance. The field of study I got a Masters in is definitely not one of the easier ones at my university but it does guarantee you a job in a wide number of techno-creative fields. For some strange reason people still are not lining up to go to technical universities, and most that do go do not finish it. Complaining to somebody else must be easier than actually working to secure your own future.

It is hard enough already in the attention starved world to stay up to date with your close ones without having to take into account every other person. Even more so if your outlook is international and you want to participate and compete on a trans-national level. A rare enough thing as it is. Should we do stuff for our neighborhood? Sure, but who should bear the onus? Shouldn’t the people who want to do stuff, maybe start something themselves and see where it goes?

Working in a creative profession is subject to taste but it is in many ways also highly meritocratic. Those with affluent parents and large networks will divide a larger piece of pie among themselves. But if you work hard and put in the effort with just a spark of vision, it will most certainly amount to something in the long run. If it doesn’t, change yourself and try something else. Keep trying until you find something that works. Is that difficult? Maybe, but it is also the only way.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.” —Thomas Edison

There are a ton of jobs in technology right now. Amsterdam cannot find itself enough interaction designers, interface designers, front-end engineers and programmers to fill current jobs. The shortage is large enough that a lot of growth opportunities are being hampered by it. Literally all comers will be able to get a job. So get at it. Teach yourself something, find a course and persevere for a couple of years. You may strike gold.

“You can tell yourself anything is too difficult, or you can just do it.
You just need to be hungry.” — http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/i-went-back-to-the-land-to-feed-my-family.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

We, the employed, already pay taxes. As a base that should be enough. If anybody out there is failing to keep up their end of the bargain, it’s the government we are paying the taxes to. They are bailing out the rich and keeping the poor ignorant with well meant institutional schemes that rarely amount to anything (just look at the Wire). Government should change and if the recent occupy movements serve as a wake-up call to do that, all for the better. Though experience does not make me very optimistic on that front.

If there is anything we shouldn’t do in the Netherlands, it is to pretend that things here are as bad as in the US or anywhere in Europe. We have the lowest unemployment in the Eurozone. We have an egalitarian society, cheap education, social security and mobility. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous and self-serving. You can do pretty much everything you want in this country and I say that not being white, not being privileged. I sincerely believe all it takes is for you to get out and make something. So do it.

Week 237

2011-10-09T16:47:21Z

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

Work on Apps voor Nederland and culiacan continues apace.

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

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

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

Do your bit!

2011-10-06T08:59:53Z

Mensen die mij kennen weten dat ik nooit echt dingen retweet en me bezig hou met goede doelen. Alleen één keer per jaar maak ik een uitzondering voor Bits of Freedom omdat ik wat ze doen echt heel belangrijk vind en omdat ik weet dat ze het heel goed doen.

Bits of Freedom komt op voor een open en vrij internet in Nederland en Europa en ze doen dat buitengewoon effectief. Als je je privacy wilt bewaren en een ongefilterde toegang tot het internet wilt houden ga je vandaag naar “Do Your Bit!” en doneer je €5 in vijf minuten. Je krijgt een t-shirt en een goed gevoel.

Victims of Extremistan

2011-10-03T14:05:13Z

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

Software is what we write to extract information from data. The worse your data model is, the more software you have to write.

The fact that we will not enter a Golden Age of Reading because of corporate control, may be the greatest loss (in opportunity cost) the digitization of books will bring us.

I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to hack with that kind of data. What could you build around community reading groups, formal education, adult literacy? At the very least it would save me the chore of ticking homework diaries. But I doubt we’ll get that chance.

The following is one of the reasons that privacy is not going to be salvagable in the future.

The most important issue for user experience people to grapple with is informed consent. More and more web services are dependent on user contributed content and data. Every time you make a contribution (explicit or implicit) you’re trading convenience for privacy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s something we do everyday in real life from mobile phones to loyalty cards. But as the web moves out of the browser and into smart objects, the trade-offs we’re making need to be made explicit so people can make informed choices about when to get involved and when to back away.

Because Amazon are light years ahead of the game we think we’re playing.

With the digitization of everything and the scale required, we are becoming the victims of Extremistan or rather of its overlords: Apple, Google and Amazon.

De science-fiction van nu

2011-09-27T13:29:23Z

Ik probeer mijn literaire vrienden aan het verstand te brengen dat door de technologisering van de samenleving science-fiction een niet meer te negeren onderdeel van de cultuur aan het worden is.

Boeken zoals ‘Super Sad True Love Story’ van Shteyngart en ‘De kaart en het gebied’ van Houellebecq zijn feitelijk al science-fiction. Aan de andere kant is er science-fiction die de rand van het nu mogelijke bewandelt en ons laat zien hoe de nabije toekomst eruit zou kunnen zien.

Die ‘edge’ science-fiction is de leukste en elk jaar is er wel een boek te vinden dat precies het nu vangt. Vorig jaar was dat Zero History (mijn recensie op de Republiek, fragmenten) en dit jaar is het dankzij de Londense rellen The City & the City van China Miéville.

Kars heeft er voor zijn praatje op dConstruct ook stevig uit geput. Ik moest het toen nog lezen maar heb hem vorige week in anderhalve dag (3 uur en 35 minuten volgens Readmill) doorgeknald.

Het boek gaat over twee steden Besźel en Ul Qoma die gescheiden worden niet door fysieke barrières maar door conventie. Beide steden liggen op dezelfde plek waar sommige delen grond bij de Besźel horen, en andere bij Ul Qoma.

Waar het ingewikkeld wordt is dat er delen grond zijn die gearceerd zijn, die bij allebei horen. In Miéville’s boek negeren mensen die zich op zulke gebieden bevinden de inwoners van de andere stad. Dit is geen keuze, maar een sociale conventie die diep geworteld is van kinds af aan en ook bekrachtigd wordt door een speciale politie-eenheid genaamd ‘Breach’.

Mensen zien de inwoners van de andere stad lang genoeg om niet met ze te botsen maar ontzien ze dan direct (letterlijk). Bewust zijn van wat er in de andere stad gebeurt is een strafbaar sociaal taboe. Beide steden zijn uit elkaar te houden door hun eigen kleuren, architectuur en lichaamstaal die je wel mag zien maar toch ook weer niet.

Wat dat betreft is het een dankbare achtergrond waar allerhande allegorieën zich opdringen. Maar we hoeven niet terug te grijpen op Berlijn of Baarle. We leven effectief al in de meeste grote steden op de manier zoals beschreven door Miéville. The City & the City is een amusante detective-roman met samenzweringen à la de Illuminati en het verlies van één man. Maar belangrijker nog zet het zoals goede science-fiction hoort te doen aan tot denken over de wereld waarin we leven.

Nu aan het lezen Rule 34 van Stross (naar het meme) en daarna Reamde van Stephenson.

Week 236

2011-09-27T13:39:38Z

Monday

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday

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

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

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

Wednesday

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

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

Thursday

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

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

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

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

Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dual national flag

2011-09-22T22:07:26Z

An idea I had while browsing through Instagram and easily executed, a Turkish Dutch mashup flag:

Apps voor Nederland

2011-09-15T19:25:50Z

So this was announced: A Netherlands wide apps competition called Apps voor Nederland was announced by several ministries today at PICNIC. Minister for the interior Donner delivered a video message as well.

The organization I’m involved with, Hack de Overheid will be organizing two events end of this year with the first one being an open hacking event on October 4th and the second being a Code Camp in Amsterdam end of November.

The message I am promoting is that this is the time to get on board and get your data out and start building civic apps. This is the last moment in the cycle that any of this is going to be at all special, innovative or unboundedly fun. After we’re done with this event most of the ground will be covered, hearts will be won and anybody talking about open data will be hailed with a ‘Been there, done that!’

Of course there will still be a dozen years of hard work for a great many people to change our institutions, build businesses on top of usable humane applications and educate a populace. There may even be fun to be had here and there, but you would be a fool not to get on board right here right now and help us kick this off.

See you October 4th.

Week 234

2011-09-13T11:46:36Z

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:

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

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

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

Democracy on a fortress

2011-09-07T13:49:47Z

The weekend before last we were on a fortress (part of the defense works of Amsterdam) to spend a day on hacking civic data for Apps for Noord-Holland.

During that day I was interviewed by Netwerk Democratie about open data and digital democracy. The resulting video is here below:

Week 233

2011-09-06T08:06:51Z

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

On Monday busy finishing a bunch of stuff and exercising my bureaucracy muscle by writing different varieties of administrativa.

Got started using Amen which is a ridiculous amount of fun. Any such service that relies on human input will need to be fun to start with to garner any amount of critical mass. I have some invites left for those that want them.

Also saw this zombie themed ARG running in Amsterdam throughout the week:

Tuesday saw the happy celebration of the Eid al Fitr (in our language called the şeker bayramı) along with work on culiacan.

This video regarding the internet and physical shutdowns of the SF BART is not to be missed:

Note the concept of a common carrier which is something we should have in Europe as well.

Also found this fab produced bike fender the “Fendor Bendor” (by Wit Industries) at the other office sitting in a rack:

Wednesday saw a day in Utrecht preparing for the trip to dConstruct to see Kars Alfrink speak about the Transformers.

Regarding the discussion that came back again: I do think that designers should code, but that answer should be a bit obvious seeing as I am a creative technologist. It does deserve a blogpost of its own.

Thursday saw travel to the UK with a direct transfer to the Moo party taking place in Shoreditch. The expected group of hipsters and old friends had congregated on a parking lot (which was more fun than I make it sound right now). Met some interesting people doing similar things in the UK as we are over here (such as the organizer of the Mozilla festival).

Also read the shocking announcement that the prices for Google App Engine are going to increase some 30 times when the service goes out of preview (they call it a ‘new pricing model’). It was a formidable place for quickly developed applications that need to run solidly with little attention. I even gave a presentation how it is *better* than Django for a certain class of developer needs. Now I do feel forced to cancel any subscription I have running there and to stop investing in that particular platform because running any serious application would be unsustainable at current pricing.

Bashers launched a linklog Beat for everything game related, which is worth browsing through on occasion.

On recommendations from highly regarded friends I bought The Information by James Gleick though I already get the feeling that I am not going to read a lot of new things in there (seeing as our history of informatics, science philosophy and information theory classes in university were pretty thorough):

Upon entering the UK I was hit by some encounters still reminiscent of the social problems that just recently plagued London. That and the general grittiness of the parts of London we went through gave me a lot of misgivings about the city. I am pretty sure I’m not going to go to London ‘for fun’ anytime soon and I found myself very glad to be living in Amsterdam.

dConstruct contained some gems and some platitudinous talks as was expected. Me and my friends appreciate a different talk than the agency based web people that also attend which must put conference organizers in something of a bind when programming.

It was a lot of fun to hang around with my crew of Iskander Smit, Taco Ekkel and Kars Alfrink (who gave a terrific and hard hitting presentation) and to meet people such as Ben Bashford, Sjors Timmer, Marrije Schaake, Albert de Klein and many others I forget to name.

Saturday was spent recuperating from the trip and on Sunday more of the same. I celebrated my fifth Twitterversary and both of the offices I keep in Amsterdam (the Volkskrantgebouw and the Open Coop) were featured in the Parool magazine:

Ik ben bereid

2011-09-05T18:36:35Z

Je gaat een verlaten loods in waar je verwelkomd wordt. Je mag de ontmoeting met de ander aangaan voor een persoonlijke ervaring en voor een hoger doel. De bedoeling wordt gaandeweg duidelijk en het uiteindelijke aanbod is lidmaatschap van een club, van dé Club.

Veel mensen worstelen door het wegvallen van traditionele structuren met vragen over zingeving en hoe we de samenleving moeten inrichten. Met de crisissen waar we de laatste tijd door geplaagd worden zijn die vragen urgenter dan ooit. Elke moeilijke tijd heeft mensen nodig die nieuwe dingen verzinnen en uitvinden hoe het verder moet. De Club is een mengvorm van kunsten, mensen en thema’s die hen zoekt en verbindt.

Elke avond is anders. Iedere deelnemer haalt eruit wat ze erin stopt, op de avond zelf en daarna. Wat het wordt, dat weet niemand maar de uitnodiging staat open en de noodzaak is duidelijk. Het enige wat er te verliezen (en te winnen) valt is een alternatief.

De Club speelt zich nog tot 25 september af in Roest Amsterdam en daarna in Eindhoven en Gent. http://de-club.nu

Week 232 – extended

2011-09-03T07:30:35Z

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

Had a meeting for tlaquepaque to finalize the starting details of what is going to be an exciting roller coaster for Hack de Overheid. Also did some sketching on tlalnepantla.

The increased activity on Hack de Overheid also means that we will be working together more tightly and on location more often. The fact that we have a brilliant office space in the Open Coop in beautiful Amsterdam Noord does help.

Culiacan is moving forward steadily.

Met with Tessa from the Next Speaker and whipped my /about and /speaking pages into shape to be a bit more representative.

We had Hack de Overheid drinks near the office for people that have made an app in one of our contests before and after that was dinner with Chris Taggart.

The friendly people from DUS architects that we are sharing an office with won the most important Amsterdam art award and held a party to celebrate:

And then finally on Saturday we celebrated Apps for Noord Holland or we could better say: ‘Apps on a Fortress’. It was a great event on a superb location with a full roster of people present. Solid progress was made on hacking civic applications and we are curious to see what the final entries in the contest will be.

I made two small sketches for Monster Swell visualizing some of the released data sets and chaired the demos of the days hacks.

A visualization of vacant office spaces in and around Amsterdam:
NDW measurements files we got (this is a very obtuse goldmine):

Elsewhere on the internet:

Talking about app contests, I came upon this old piece by Andy Oram about the sustainability of app contests: “App outreach and sustainability” to which I wrote a reply “Hackathons as gateways to more and better open data” without knowing that it had already been replied to at Radar by Alex Howard: “Everybody jumped on the app contest bandwagon. Now what?”

The same issue was touched upon here in Londen as well. People are wondering what sustainable results have ever resulted from a hackday/unconference other than some incidental learning. The learning itself may already be a good thing, but the expectations that are raised are somewhat higher. There are at least movements going to merge several initiatives to try to get at least some programmers working together with designers and product manager type people to create a viable offering. On the other hand we are working with Hack de Overheid to persuade government to be more open to adopting these initiatives.

The issues of gentrification and how a city’s development can work to stifle itself was touched upon in several pieces last week. The Times article “Revelers See a Dimming in a Capital’s Night Life” tells how the nightlife of Paris is being banished by its new affluent class of complainers. A similar movement is going on in Amsterdam now again under the moniker ‘Jordaanoproer’ where people who have bought dearly into one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods expect some peace and quiet at night (to little avail). And there’s a story in Taz “Das Leben ist kein Ponyschlecken!” that counterbalances the current gentrification panic by calling the people writing those stories ‘hormone guided journalist moms and dads who want to raise their children in a Bullerby idyll.’ A large city will inevitable have some rough edges that should not be exaggerated (and Berlin is producing some nice stuff).

Adam Greenfield wrote the great: ‘Perilous asymmetries: Playing with trust in the “smart city”’ which is well worth reading:

Our wager with Farevalue is that a relatively minuscule informational intervention — amounting to a single line of copy, presented in the right voice, in the right place and time — has disproportionate power to transform our encounters with the pervasive networked infrastructure that now undergirds so much of urban life.

I saw the new movie by Nuri Bilge Ceylan: “Once upon a time in Anatolia” and wrote a small review about it.

Ian Bogost writes an interesting reflection on the digital humanities: Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground part 1: The Humanities in Public:

Humanist intellectuals like to think of themselves as secular saviors working tirelessly in the shadows. But too often, they’re just vampires who can’t remember the warmth of daylight.

And part 2: The Digital Humanities:

The digital humanities must decide if they are potting their digital plants in order to prettify the office, or to nurture saplings for later transfer into the great outdoors. Out there, in the messy, humid world of people and machines, it’s better to cast off elbow patches for shirt-sleeves.

Bogost’s thinking is I think also highly applicable to the Dutch culture scenes and recent protests against the cutbacks. As with the humanists all too often you get a sense that they bear active disdain for their audiences or the general public and that they are far too little oriented towards the public and active participation in the world:

The humanities should orient toward the world at large, toward things of all kinds and at all scales. The subject matter for the humanities is not just the letters and arts themselves, but every other worldly practice as well. Any humanistic discipline can orient itself toward the world fruitfully, but most choose to orient inward instead, toward themselves only.

Just like Bogost says that humanists should be private educators and public spies, the arts should be critics of the human condition both in the small and in the large. To do that, they need to be a bit more relevant and inclusive than they have been thusfar. Both pieces are well worth reading and its staggering how far the analogy keeps.

The article about plastic surgery in Brazil is not to be missed: “A ‘Necessary Vanity’”:

This notion of a right points to a potential problem with rights during a period when consumers are becoming a more powerful political force. When a good life is defined through the ability to buy goods then rights may be reinterpreted to mean not equality before the law, but equality in the market.

It’s interesting to see how in the run-up to hurricane Irene the NYC government’s site buckled but the office had enough web savvy to switch to proven scalable websites such as Dropbox and Facebook to be able to continue spreading disaster information to the general public. Government should have its information services in order but being able to switch flexibly in the face of adversity is definitely a bonus.

This API to the displays on Times Square is hugely exciting from an interactive displays point of view. If you want to learn how to program for such a thing, you could do worse than start off at the courses from Codecademy.com.

De Club (we do not talk about the club) is doing a run of performances these weeks in Amsterdam. I don’t know what it is about yet, but still I think you should go if you’re into gripping theatrical experiences.

New year, new about

2011-08-25T10:49:07Z

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:

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.

Film: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

2011-08-28T17:21:06Z

De film “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” begint met wijdse Anatolische vergezichten over de zo herkenbare landschappen van mijn jeugd waar drie auto’s zich over dorpsweggetjes van bron naar akker begeven.

De kwestie waar het om draait is het vinden van een lijk. De vermeende moordenaar zit in een van de auto’s omringd door een dokter, twee agenten en een chauffeur. De dikkige kale mannen die de auto vullen en hun banale verhalen over yoghurt en andere alledaagsheden zouden het een knusse rit maken als het een ander doel betrof.

De dialogen tijdens de zoektocht en de koddige situaties hier en daar doen denken aan de karakteristieke scène’s die Tarantino en de Coen broers hebben neergezet maar met meer dan een vleugje mystiek. Nuri Bilge Ceylan zet een typisch Turks platteland neer met zinsnedes die er niet om liegen (en matig vertaald zijn). De wijdse shots over het landschap en het licht ‘s nachts zijn indrukwekkend waar de scène’s overdag een beetje flets bij afsteken.

De lijkvinding schiet niet op net zoals de films van Ceylan. Tergende traagheid lijkt zijn handelsmerk, al is dat in deze film nog draaglijk. In langzame shots van dromen, rollende appels of simpelweg close-ups van de hoofdrolspelers worden dingen gevat die niet in woorden uit te drukken zijn.

De missie zelf lijkt hopeloos en verzandt in een dorpsklucht. Ondertussen doodt men de tijd met verhalen, het uiten van klein en groot zeer naar elkaar, het stelen van groente en fruit en het mijmeren over de wendingen die het leven genomen heeft.

Er is een apocrief verhaal dat de naam Anadolu (Anatolië in het Turks) een samenstelling zou zijn van ‘Ana dolu! Dolu Ana!’, wat zoveel betekent als: ‘Moeder vol! Het is vol moedertje!’ Een groep soldaten was naar verluid door dat deel van Turkije aan het trekken toen ze verdwaald en geplaagd door dorst ten einde raad waren. Ze kwamen op een gegeven moment een vrouw tegen die ze hielp en hun flessen zo ver vulde met water (of ayran) dat ze moesten zeggen: ‘Het is al vol moeder.’

Eenzelfde iets gebeurt in deze film waar de dochter van de burgemeester als een engel in de duisternis licht, thee en cola brengt en alle mannen als betoverd achterlaat.

Nadat het lijk gevonden is, verandert de film en verplaatst de focus zich naar de hoofdpersoon. De film krijgt dan iets tergends, wat toepasselijk is gezien de dodelijke vermoeidheid na een nacht doorwerken. Het echte leven gaat door na de nachtmerrie. Alles wordt afgehandeld, er is ruimte voor compassie maar feitelijk verandert er niks.

Gezien zaterdag 20 augustus in Rialto op het World Cinema Amsterdam festival. In de reguliere Cineville te bekijken in het najaar van 2011.

Week 231

2011-08-22T16:36:10Z

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

Nice to get recognition for writing from long long in the past. James linked to an old piece I wrote about getting stories from your database.

Apps for Noord Holland (saltillo) is this coming Saturday and signups are shaping up nicely. How could they be otherwise for the opportunity to spend a day programming and learning together on a fortress from the defense works of Amsterdam. There are still some spots open, so sign up if you want to make it an awesome experience.

I was over at Utrecht last week just to escape the many meetings plaguing me in Amsterdam. A new rule which I will try to adhere to: I will participate in a maximum of one hour of meetings every week.

My review of the Cat and the Coup (a documentary game) was published over at Bashers and I wrote a short Jane Jacobs inspired piece lamenting the narrow sidewalks of the area I live in.

Sidewalks on the new Marnixstraat

2011-08-20T15:50:50Z

The sidewalks of the newly renovated Marnixstraat:

These are too narrow to accomodate people walking along them side by side, let alone when the sidewalk is obstructed by plants, bikes, scooters, furniture and other things.

“Sidewalk width is invariable sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.” —Jane Jacobs

Add to that the fact that Amsterdam city politics is hostage to the car and you get this.

Week 230

2011-08-18T11:06:19Z

The first week after the holiday and therefore somewhat slow. Some work on Code 4, Choke Point Project and our own internal game project guadalupe.

It was fun to help our friends from Hubbub move into their new offices. A bit bare at first, but shaping up nicely.

Week 227

2011-07-25T13:10:19Z

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.

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:

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.

Jane Jacobs and the city of Amsterdam

2011-07-26T09:45:16Z

I’m right now reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the seminal volume on city planning by Jane Jacobs, for the first time.

The experience is a warm bath unlike any other. Reading the first part on ‘The Peculiar Nature of Cities’ I could not help notice the urban fabric everywhere around me realized by the people that make up the streets here in Westerpark, Amsterdam.

Then reading the second part ‘The Conditions for City Diversity’ brought home how and where those conditions are lacking currently in Amsterdam.

Reading this book was long overdue for me. So many of my own ideas about city planning and urbanism are mirrored, most probably from the osmosis and inspiration I have gotten from friends over the years. It is quite uncanny. But there is still a lot to learn from Jacobs’s book and it should be compulsory reading for all council members of Amsterdam and other cities.

Two issues that are particularly striking right now:

1.

In chapter 13, ‘The Self-destruction of Diversity’, Jacobs talks about how when an area becomes diverse enough that it starts to attract people, the attraction and the increasing prices that generates may price out the very factors that made it attractive in the first place.

This is taking place right now in the central areas of Amsterdam. Most apartments are affordable only for the high double incomes or they are split up into rooms and let out to students and young professionals at a high markup. Along with the pressure that tourism puts on the city center and the lack of attractive areas outside of the A10 perimeter, this makes for high pressure on real estate prices. Where house prices are on the decline pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands, they are sharply on the increase in Amsterdam.

The issue as it is identified by Jacobs is that there is a high influx of people looking to live in Amsterdam but there are not enough attractive quarters for those people to choose from. This puts all the pressure on the city center, whereas vast spaces outside of the A10 perimeter are (rightly) considered unattractive. This is a blatant failing of city government to create a supply of attractive living quarters to service demand.

2.

Jacobs talks about ‘the need for primary mixed uses’ and ‘the need for aged buildings’ to create diversity. Those two needs make it abundantly clear why a city development such as IJburg cannot be a worthwhile place to settle for the next thirty years.

First IJburg contains no necessity for people to go there except to leave the island for work in the morning and to go back home in the evening. Footfall is near zero. I myself have only been there three times maybe in the last two years (and that still is three times more often than most people in Amsterdam). That makes it dead and unattractive for stores and other facilities to open. Those that try, cannot make ends meet and usually close down again quickly making for a rapid succession of tenants and lots of empty storefronts.

Secondly, because it is all new development, rents are too high for many essential neighborhood facilities to take root. IJburg will not have a Turkish grocer or a coffee house because those kind of stores need older, more run down (and therefore cheaper) buildings to settle in. Moving there means giving up access to those tiny neighborhood stores and in fact on lively neighborhood life altogether.

One has to wonder, what were the architects, the council and the developers thinking (if at all)?

Update: Read more playful reflections on the pertinence of Jane Jacobs to the Dutch urban fabric over at Hubbub: New ideas must use old buildings

Week 226

2011-07-18T19:12:14Z

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):

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.

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 225

2011-07-11T15:00:46Z

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

Tuesday I coworked at Hack de Overheid’s offices in the Open Coop in the newly fangled hip(ster)ness of Amsterdam North. Williamsburg it ain’t, but it is a place where one can breathe and build pyramids:

And then it was off to our friends over at Booreiland also in North to finalize work on a fun project we’re doing. See a pattern here?

Wednesday we kicked off an exciting new project that we’re running over the Summer break with Hack de Overheid. Look for some beach side entertainment announced soon.

Thursday it was off to the Open Data Experiences Conference in Rotterdam to serve as a milestone for open data development in the city of Rotterdam. I presented there on a track to supplement the heroic presences of both Toby Barnes and Tom Steinberg over from the UK to witness the great progress that is being made here.

I strayed a bit from the brief to give a hard technical talk and talked more about the open problems that we technologists should be solving. The technologists (developers/designers) I think are our only hope to break open things with functional interventions. I have had my fill of seeing people talk and do nothing much more than talk. There are more than enough thorny interesting problems for us to solve still, so we should be doing that.

On the highest level I identified three moral issues which I think is something of a nice niche on events such as these. I very much hope people took something away from these:

The rationale for opening up data is usually stated in terms of efficiency and effectivity. This may be necessary to sell open data to bean counters, but it is too inhuman a formulation of why we are doing this. We are doing this to see if we can improve the lives of normal humans a bit, to make sure that the uses that open data is being put to create experiences that are interesting, useful and beautiful.
We should make sure that the data that is being opened up and its uses are inclusive in a broad sense. If we manage to open up all of the data we want to and the smartest/fastest/evilest people take off with it and manage to build stuff for their own ends to the (partial) exclusion of others, we will have managed to switch out one power structure (an archaic but institutional one) for a new power structure of cowboys and parvenus. We will seem to have won, but we will have failed.
Finally, the main point that Michal Migurski made at a panel at EYEO about the book Seeing Like a State. That the reductionism inherent in recording data (and the subsequent opening it up) manages to lose the essence of things and creates the high-modernist idea that that view of things is the right view (see also: “All Watched Over: on Foo, Cybernetics and Big Data”). Michal says:

My response to all this is something to the effect that people should help other people to see and represent their world usefully and accurately.

Which I paraphrased to say that we should make tools to help every person see as a state of their own and be able to decide better for themselves and others how to organize their lives, to in effect become better states themselves.

The next day (Friday) we did a big stint in Utrecht to plan things for project SABA and another secret project that is more on our own brief to unite games and television in an interesting way. Look forward to the first playable prototypes for that hitting this week.

As always proceedings in Utrecht are supported by superb coffee (four shots to start the day!) from the fine lads at the Village. Here we’re taking care of their pies:

And as usual Sunday nights are closed off at the kitchen table catching up with the week to come and doing some iOS development:

Week 224

2011-07-07T09:58:02Z

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

Tuesday was another day spent in Utrecht and in between things I pushed out the releases for Statlas with posts in Dutch and English.

Also I managed to bait (thread) Dutch member of parliament Jeanine Hennis on the topic of her party’s (the VVD) entanglement with large corporate interest when it comes to copyright law (or any internet related law). There is a lot more to be said about this topic and I don’t know how effective this is as a strategy, but somebody should do this.

Thursday there was a meeting about game journalism at the Waag (and a flurry of coverage of the topic this week), by Niels and David:

That and other engagements however did mean that I had to miss the Cognitive Cities Salon (though I heard it was most ace).

Friday was spent doing iPhone tutorials all day and night to get up to speed on this medium and to create some interesting interface experiments in the near future.

The entire weekend was spent working unfortunately. Saturday we talked about the potential merger of Hack de Overheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen to formalize an already ongoing collaboration and create a more robust organization.

Sunday I acted as the jury member in a pilot for an interaction design television programme. It’s not clear yet whether it will be produced, but it would be a good step forward popularizing the more functional design disciplines.

Week 223

2011-06-30T10:15:33Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statlas, bèta versie

2011-06-28T12:01:36Z

We zijn al een tijdje bezig met Statlas en het is de hoogste tijd dat een eerste versie het daglicht ziet om te laten zien wat voor iets tofs we hebben gemaakt en te horen wat jullie ervan vinden. Dus voor jullie ogen: Statlas

Statlas is een gereedschap voor iedereen die makkelijk kaarten wil kunnen maken, en verspreiden. Voor een verzameling regio’s kun je waarden invullen (cijfers, kleuren, labels) en er wordt dan een kaart gemaakt die je vervolgens kunt delen, embedden en afdrukken. Een persoonlijk kartografisch platform waar er al meerdere van zijn maar volgens ons nog niet één die zo makkelijk is in het gebruik als deze.

We hebben Statlas gemaakt naar aanleiding van experimenten vorig jaar om geografische gegevens op het internet weer te geven. Die ideeën maar dan generieker en simpeler (en bedoeld als gereedschap) hebben geculmineerd in Statlas. Dit past tegelijkertijd ook in de NoGIS trend om traditioneel moeilijke technologie zoals GIS te ontsluiten via het internet.

Verder praten we met Hack de Overheid geregeld over data-journalistiek, maar waar we steeds tegenaan lopen is dat er niet genoeg gereedschappen zijn waarmee journalisten en andere niet-techneuten uit de voeten kunnen. Wij zeggen dan telkens dat die gereedschappen er gaan komen maar de beste manier om dat voor elkaar te krijgen is uiteraard om ze zelf te bouwen.

Statlas is gebouwd met financiering van het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers, in samenwerking met Fluxility en Alexander Zeh en is uiteraard open source. Voor volledige credits, zie het colofon.

En verder

Deze versie voldoet aan alles wat je zou willen hebben van een simpel stuk gereedschap. We hebben natuurlijk allerlei ideeën om dit technisch voortreffelijker en functioneel spectaculairder te maken maar dit is het fundament. Laten we eerst maar zien welke van onze ideeën het contact met de werkelijkheid overleven en dan wordt vanzelf de richting voor verdere ontwikkeling duidelijk.

Wat er in ieder geval aan toegevoegd gaat worden zijn meer regio’s. Er zitten er nu een handjevol in en meer staan er gepland. Verzoeken voor nieuwe gebieden (het liefst met een idee ook waar we de geometrie kunnen vinden) maar ook andere ideeën, bugs enz. zijn welkom bij ons op Monster Swell.

Week 222

2011-06-20T15:31:43Z

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

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

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

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

Week 221

2011-06-20T12:38:56Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new vision of the public domain

2011-06-14T10:28:01Z

Lifting choice quotes from the proceedings of the Berkman Hyperpublic event graciously compiled by Ethan Zuckerman.

Here about privacy and how it should be a forward thinking discipline instead of a reactionary one:

“I don’t like privacy. It tends to be too closely associated with fear, and it always seems like a rear-guard action against technology.” Instead, we should work on the architecture of the public space and ensuring we architect for private space. —Charlie Nesson and a new vision of the public domain

Throwing my chips in with the reality based crowd

2011-06-11T10:11:28Z

Seeing this presentation in Amsterdam as the culmination of Mobile Monday, was something great. The far reaching vision and reality based optimism Kevin Slavin lays down (his comments) are something we should aspire to. It is worth watching and watching again.

Some choice quotes, though we should just hope that he finishes that essay:

Reality is augmented not when it looks different but when it feels different.

Maybe the aspiration to 3D optical AR starts to feel a little bit like pornography. Like a thin veneer of the actual experience that is flattened for the eye, that’s rendered for the eye which is the one sense most easily fooled to begin with.

Nobody knew better than me and the other people in that room that this was just computer code but it felt like a spirit had moved through the room and knocked all these phones off the table.

For pilots there is no reality except the one right in front of them.

Singular focus in which the eye is looking at rather than around. It diminishes reality. It closes it down. Because as it turns out for the driver as for most everybody here, reality is understood to be the whole world around us, not just that thing in front of us.

They’re inventing new ways to see, rather than new things to look at. And rather than inventing new places to go, they are inventing kind of new ways to travel. Because the whole thing is there’s no shortage of stuff in the world and things to see and enjoy. Reality is plenty, thanks.

Notes about Thoughts on Interaction Design by John Kolko

2011-06-08T11:46:33Z

We read Thoughts on Interaction Design 2nd edition as the fifth book for the UX Book Club Amsterdam and reviewed it yesterday. Here are my noteworthy passages from the book, which is not without its issues, but it does give a credible philosophical foundation for our practice.

p.34 A mature designer respects and embraces the often ill-structured nature of the process and —because he knows to expect messiness during the act of creation— he promptly forgets about it completely. Process becomes innate, and the phenomenon of design intuition takes over.

p.37 This view might be informed by an understanding of culture, or an intricate care and love of society.

p.55 When viewed under the guise of language, these products become the fabric of society and allow people to express themselves, to communicate with others, and tho shape their environment in unique ways.

p.57 designers must both realize and control the rhetoric of their designs.

p.72 Some have become wise to the farce, and no amount of decoration can lure these consumers into the trap. They select only handcrafted objects of beauty, and they’ve learned to judge good design and honest labor.

p.73 Consider, then, that designers can focus on supporting authentic human experiences with their work in a less forceful, controlling manner. Rather than striving to control every aspect of a time-based set of interactions, and rather tan attempting to shepherd people through a contrived set of experience gates, designers can support the authenticity that occurs naturally in life by producing incomplete or partially produced design artifacts.

p.77 A poetic interaction can generally be characterized as having or encouraging, three main elements: honesty, mindfulness, and a vivid refined attention to sensory detail.

p.83 Yet if designers focus only on the low-hanging fruit of functionalism or usability, the human experience with designed objects is destined to a level of banality.

p.88 The pursuit of a creative solution is not an easy activity, yet the difficulty —the sense of accomplishment that occurs when completing a difficult task— can be thought of as one of the main attractors to participants in the design process.

p.88 There is more to life than usability.

Week 219

2011-05-30T11:15:25Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 218

2011-05-29T16:04:10Z

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

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

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

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

Coffee Magic

2011-05-20T13:43:29Z

I witnessed a discussion yesterday that stated that for creative industries to catch root in a certain area there is the need for trendy coffee shops. While that is a necessary condition indeed, it is not sufficient. The coffee produced in said shops also needs to be of excellent quality or at least miles better than whatever most stores in the Netherlands are pouring. The lovely folks over at BERG also have a post about it.

In Utrecht studio proceedings are supported by the Village which may quite well pour the best coffee in the Netherlands. This is how they do it:

Fitbit lost and findings

2011-05-19T14:29:56Z

I lost my Fitbit today. This was bound to happen and I’m surprised I managed to hold on to it as long as I did. So one minute I was getting off the tram and the next I didn’t have it anymore.

Some findings:

The fitbit as a hardware device is very well designed. It works, it’s polite and you don’t have to do anything really. It’s quite easy to get into a habit with it. The website has some glitches and takes a whiles to fully propagate updates here and there, but I have the feeling that’s improving. Everybody I show one wants to get one.

On a negative bent: the entire premise of the devise is offensively US-centric. Everybody here in the Netherlands is somewhat peeved that it does not ‘do’ biking. This is of course understandable when a device has the cultural assumption in it that you take your car to a mall, you plod through said mall and then get back into your car. For genuine global appeal these devices need to be more adaptable still.

Finally: my fitbit was already showing some tears in the plastic and it’s far too easy to lose. I’m too wrapped up in my day to day activities to ‘take care’ of yet another device. It’s all I can do to keep my iPhone in one piece as it is. Also it being so easy to lose or break, needing to get another one at $99 is too convenient a profit strategy. I think I’ll pass.

Week 217

2011-05-17T15:57:21Z

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.

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.

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.

Also some robots, just for good measure: