lifesized » data

Chokepoint Project wins [next idea] category at Ars Electronica 2011

James Burke — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:01:18 +0000

For those of you that don’t know about the Chokepoint Project, go visit the site.

Personal informatics meet-up

James Burke — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:09:44 +0000

I have been thinking about the self-tracking space for quite some years so it was a pleasant surprise when Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf started their eponymous Quantified Self site and meetups. This site, lifesized.net, used to contain the by-line,”Measuring hearts and minds”. It therefore seemed a natural fit to want to connect with QS global and host an event here in Amsterdam, which thanks to reaching out to Joshua Kauffman and Alexandra Carmichael is now confirmed for September 20th. It’s a collaboration between myself, Maarten den Braber and Joost Plattel.

This first in a series of NL based “show & tell” meetups is for people interested in self-tracking, personal informatics.

Quantified Self is a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking.

This is a regular show and tell for people taking advantage of various kinds of personal tracking – geotracking, life-logging, DNA sequencing, etc. – to gain more knowledge about themselves. Come share what you are doing, and learn from others. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Chemical Body Load Counts, Personal Genome Sequencing, Lifelogging, Self Experimentation, Risks/Legal Rights/Duties, Behavior monitoring, Location tracking, Non-invasive Probes, Digitizing Body Info, Sharing Health Records, Psychological Self-Assesments, Medical Self-Diagnostics.

We are actively looking for people who:
- are building or have built hardware or software
- have a story to tell of their own self-tracking

Open Government Data Poster

James Burke — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:15:36 +0000

open gov data poster (Dutch) >> page 1 page 2

open gov data poster (English) >> page 1 page 2
open gov data poster (Deutch) >> poster pdf
open gov data poster (Francaise) >> poster pdf

It gives me great pleasure to finally complete a design project i’ve been tinkering with for months, the “how to open government data(and how not to)” poster. It forms the last part of Ton Zijlstra and my research project on open government data for for the Ministry of Interior Affairs (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties). Special thanks go to BUROPONY for the design of the poster and to Ot van Daalen from Bits of Freedom for filtering legal and judicial elements and the general flow.

The poster was intended to provide a lightweight and easy to understand visual explanation of the issues around open government data for civil servants. I set one design parameter, “let’s make it printable on most office printers”. At the same time, we wanted to release it for reuse hence the Creative Commons license. So if you are a civil servant reading this, print it out and put it up in a public place. Hopefully it will encourage a discussion which can reduce fear around the subject and help with a data census and important data sets getting published correctly.

The open data posters are currently available in English and Dutch as a PDF. If you want to translate the poster into another language, fire me an email and i can send you the source files.

Interviewed by Juha of Non-Fiction

James Burke — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:14:08 +0000

Here’s a recent interview of me with Juha van ‘t Zelde of Non-Fiction. Looking forward to doing something cool with him at de Verdieping in exploring data flows, vizualization and the city. Control panels incoming, p2p all the way;)