I had the good fortune to be one of the organisers at a recent govcamp held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Continuing from where we left off last year and adding some inspiration from across the pond, we managed to host a two-tracked event.
Track 1: A Geek coding track which concentrated on creating a few sketches in code that produced improvements to public services or political transparency including a competition.
Track 2: A Barcamp on government for those who could not code. People followed their feet to whichever discussion they wished to participate in.

At the end of the day, 6 prototypes were presented of which three were awarded prizes. (You will be notified as they become usable. It’s hard to perfect a web service in 4 hours. I’ll tweet something as they get more functional. @hackdeoverheid ). Two government ministries also chimed in to offer an amazing double bonanza of money available to entries of prototypes with prize money of 25,000 Euro per ministry on offer to clever developers coming up with new ideas. You can still submit ideas here.

Gold: Afvalhuis Vuilkalender, a refuse collection service. Type in your postcode and find out when all different types of rubbish will be picked up in your neighborhood. It also syncs with i-Cal or gCal. A simple idea, which by one vote, sealed this software sketch as the top dog! Well done Menno van der Sman(@mennos) and Patrick.

Silver: OpenKvK by Steven de Koning (Renato Valdez - graphic design)which was able to scrape company information from the Kamer van Koophandel (a sort of Company House for the Netherlands) and republish it with a search input field. Usually the KVK charges you some euro cents per search query enabling spamming or direct mailing. OpenKVK allows you to do this now for free (keep reading, as I’m not saying that i support spam). The Kamer van Koophandel registers new businesses and allows for inquiries about them in the Netherlands, while offering an outreach service to support entrepreneurs. The problem they have is their business model. They are hired by the government, but are not the government. Companies in the Netherlands pay a flat fee to become a registered company, BUT they need to repay this amount every year with the only benefit being that they receive a newsletter (often unwanted) and keep their name listed on a database for another year (which obviously would not cost the amount each entity is charged just to be present on a server for a year). OpenKVK frees the company information and lets people search through listed companies. Someone suggested that the complete list of dutch companies and organizations should be submitted to a no-spam listing service so we all were saved from unwanted spam. My own personal plea is for someone to please make it so! (at this moment i can’t think of many positive uses of spam, although someone probably knows one).

Bronze: Android kenteken app. created by Ronald van der Lingen that lets you enter a car license plate number and pulls information on the car registered with that license plate back.

Honorable mentions go to:
- Polirazzi by Breyten
A customized search on politicians tracking what has been said about them across the web
- Trackchanges by Paul Vereiken
A tool for journalists to see recent changes to government documents which they can easily subscribe to
- iPhone radar by Martijn Pannevis
An iPhone app tracking weather, pollen count, air pollution and any other publically available info feeds that might affect traveling around NL.

photo by - Anne Helmond

For more insight into the day see ton’s posting which includes some presentations by participants. For insight into the project ton and i did for the ministry of interior on open data, see this link.

(”It’s your neighborhood so you can decide”)

1) I got invitited to a residents meeting in the Dapperbuurt
I live very near a street market where we’re being asked to come and crowd-judge some idea proposals for improving the neighborhood. They have 180,000 euro budget to spend on making the ideas real. The text on the flyer says, “…the amazing thing is that residents decide where the money will be allocated. You will view some presentations. Grab the opportunity! At the neighborhood meeting you’ll get more information and you can also suggest your own initiatives…”

2) I received a bit of a formal letter from the city about a new initiative, and later i got another letter with an invitation code to join www.buurtleven.nl, a social network and news channel for Amsterdam intended to improve social cohesion. “Buurtleven.nl (neighborhood life) keeps you up to date on everything that’s happening in your neighborhood. You can find neighborhood news, a calendar and a 2nd hand marketplace and a notice-board with calls to neighbors”. The project owners, a group of large property developers say that buurtleven is a non-profit. I spent some time looking through and it’s simplicity actually makes it pretty useful. On that journey i found a relatively near enough neighbor who wanted her dog walked on Sundays, people offering cleaning services and a few local new announcements. Looking forward to seeing how this develops. I personally like the promise of things local, but due to the nature of networks, i’m not sure which one of them will serve me best in offering me the best(most insightful/beautiful/powerful instrumentation to manage my hyper-local affairs. I wouldn’t mind a crack at designing an even more local service that starts from inside your apartment so i guess something hyper-local.

1. Interaction Design and strategy work for .gov
I started work on a project with the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs. I’m working together with Ton Zijstra which is proving to be a pleasure. It’s all about making government data available in more accessible and reusable ways where possible. On the current list of what we’re delivering are a set of guidelines on how to go about doing this, (It’s gonna be a mixture of a cool flow-chart and explanation) plus a few examples of some government data that we’ve opened up. We’ll serve government data up in multiple formats, including an API. Alper will support this project code-wise (he’s already been hacking away at widgets that reuse gov data for some months, as well as doing an interesting mash-up with Kars in 2008).

The guidelines will aim to address any government worker or team asking the question “How do i open up some data?”. Hopefully we will translate this into English following our Dutch version. We’ll also fully document and make available the open government data examples and ideas for services that might ride on top of them too.

Alper and I recently visited GovCampUK in London which was inspiring again. Good to touch base with people like FutureGov, Open Knowledge Foundation, Rewired State and of course MySociety.

2. Less than a month till NARB launches on March 7
Tijs Teulings and I were fortunate to get funded back in September 2008 to develop NARB, a new software service (a web platform, an iphone app. and a mobile website) that helps people find and comment on art.

The good news is that we’re kinda almost there! Last week we did our first beta test at Museum van Loon. We’re doing another one this week and if you have an iPhone and want to join let me know.

We’re officially launching NARB at Rotterdam Museum Night, March 7.

Here are the slides to my own talk on hacking tax forms (I did these back in 2003 so they are quite dated). My approach comes from an citizen experience design angle. Where are touch points in relation to power and legitimacy for citizens interacting with government?

I decided to work on adding interactivity into the taxation process as taxation is following the money trail, it’s where policy ends up, in spending money on values and action. I don’t like election campaigns although they are still a vital part of the democratic process. I wander how corrupted they are and the disconnect between promises before and after the elections. Maybe I’m a bit too cynical here.

Tax Choice and Tax Report - a nation state scale approach to participatory budgeting
You can elect where a slice of your tax goes and the government is responsible to report where that slice of tax money was spent. As the tax forms are small inside this slide share you can open then as images here. Tax Choice & Tax Report

| View | Upload your own

The tax forms above are as much provocative as their potential consequences ill-thought through. The question is, whether allowing citizens to control government spending would be negative or positive or both? Would the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ principle prevail? I believe it would be interesting to attempt some kind of pilot program, maybe even using just 1 percent of tax collected to allow us an ‘in’. If that were a step too far then we should at least take the principle of Tax Report and use this as a back channel for government and citizens to have a conversation on where money was spent in the fiscal year.

Back to the BarcampGovNL. We did end of an active note, with Ton, Arjen and I starting work on inventorizing data sets held within dutch government institutions as a first step before requesting robust APIs for civil society and business re-use. Let’s open up that data safely.

I’ve never been one for talking in public and making sense. In the past i saw myself as a bit of a whaffler, but it’s quite apparent that that has changed and thank god! The main reason, I’ve forced myself to get up in front of people and practice, practice, practice. This was the 2nd time this year and from peoples reactions seemed really well received. The subject matter was of course ubiquitous computing, the oft-mentioned ‘internet of things’ while more specifically delving into the micro-space of that larger domain through the vehicle of roomware as a domain space and our open source, Roomware Project. My intention was to introduce the audience to understanding new behaviors and use cases arising within the space of a room.

Bit of late post, but the little bbq we hosted at Katie’s place was a real winner, a poutpourri of the NL tech scene. We made a few ironic Silicon Valley comparisons seeing as it lightly rained throughout the event. Still this did not keep 40 eager people showing up at what we thought would be a washout.
The food was quite delicious, with a special mention to Peter of BubbleFoundry for his ribs, (which weren’t sponsored) and to Stormhoek for supplying wine, which was much appreciated.

Guests included people from Joost, Wakoopa, TheNextWeb, Forrester, Wired, New York Times, Alchemyst, TreasureMyText, XoloTV and more!