Here’s a recent talk i gave at Quantified Self Amsterdam #1.

James Burke – Applying analytics to relationships from Quantified Self Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Quantifying relationships can sound creepy, although in this case it was not. My girlfriend and i started a weekly ritual while waiting for dim sum. As a couple in a LAT relationship, the weekly review seemed somehow an organic way to keep up with each other next to phone calls or the occasional meetup. At some point later, we started a new behavior, adding an event or situation on a piece of paper and then each of us awarding or subtracting points. We were still relatively early in getting to know each other, perhaps at a place near stage two of Sara Shultz’s model that inks out the various phases couples generally encounter and transition through in relationships. The quantification aspect was really enabling each us to share our individual perceptions in the vessel of our weekly review. This led to both of us acknowledging and then modifying (in some cases) our behavior. We continued this practice for a transitory 3 months.

Here are the slides.

I’m now thinking more about the models of relationships which necessitates digging into the research rather than a 5 minute google search, to uncover academic insights on human personal relationship formation. At the same time, i’m keeping a healthy sense of disbelief and analyzing my own thoughts and feelings to discern whether other filters or metaphors would shed new light on how we look at our personal relationships? Having given this talk, I’ve caught myself and dominique, adding and subtracting points from each other yet again. What is the medium to longer term impact of this practice on our time together? Is there a healthy future for analytics and incentive structures of the digital kind when applied to personal relationships? Will the adverse affects, on average, outweigh the benefits?

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

Contact us via this site’s contact form or via the QS in the Netherlands site.

Here’s an update on what i’m currently doing mainly for those of you that i don’t see that often.

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.

It took a little longer than expected, but last Saturday was the first Barcamp Gov in the Netherlands. Barcamp Gov is an extension of the Barcamp concept for a meet-up. Around 25 people came, 7 who worked inside the government. Thanks go to Peter and Mieke for helping me into making it so. I wanted to create a govcamp for NL since i went to the one in Londonwhich was amazing.

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!

Just to update readers of this blog. Last week, Alchemyst with the Roomware Project picked up a golden Spin Award, for best mobile concept. A lot of thanks goes to the whole team behind the Roomware Project.

Tijs presented to a unexpectedly large audience and jury at the Spin Awards inspiration day. He was actually expecting to talk to 3 jury members in a small room. Surprise!

We were nominated in the category, best mobile concept for our Roomware Hyves Party application. This event driven application was put together to help celebrate Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, reaching 5,000,000 members. You can see some pictures of it here and here, with some video here.

We realized we needed to have fine-tuned our presentation more towards marketing then technology. The jury was made up of experienced marketers who really wanted to see passion and impact reflected in numbers (how effective campaign or action was). Hopefully they picked up on the fact that we just demonstrated a way for advertisers to link with Hyves in a powerful new oblique way. Companies are just crying out to mine the power of social networks. It’s of course how you do this that is important. No-one likes getting spammed. As for Alchemyst and the Roomware Project and speaking for myself. I’m into creating collective experiences in physical spaces, something i predict we’ll be seeing a lot more of.

Last weekend i was with friends visiting the opening of the 5-yearly art festival called Dokumenta that takes place in Kassel, Germany. For those of you not up with the program in contemporary art circles, this event is a big deal. Something to do with it being one of the oldest and first major art events. People call it the 100 day museum. Ok now that you are orientated on with this post.

This Dokumenta which is the 12th, one of the world’s most innovative chefs was asked to come and present his work, Ferran Adria. This was mouthwatering in that it was a chance to see what he would do at such an event outside his modus operandi at his restaurant in Spain. It was also a good way to profile art that is outside the normal framework of what we are used to. He has contributed to the culinary arts and will probably go down in history as a modern day Escoffier for his contributions. So shock horror, arriving in Kassel, i find out that he is no longer coming. A day later at the press office i asked what had happened. The official version of their story was that he just “couldn’t make it” and to make up for this, random people would be selected and send to his restaurant for a free dining experience and that this would happen throughout the 100 days…(not sure how many people would end up there). I heard that there was more on this covered by Der Spiegel

I was disappointed and have a few thoughts of my own for the Dokumenta organizers. I realize that the huge crowds that come to this event make the idea of food as an experience there quite daunting, but there is a way to do it. The organizers could have made this work with the right planning. I don’t accept any excuses for this not happening short of family deaths, the usual serious reasons why people pull out. Let this be a challenge to future art curators, to make the necessary preparation to pull of what i believe needs further attention, the culinary arts contribution to contemporary art. The show was a feast for the eyes and there was also a lot of lackluster work on show. At least let our tongues and brains be challenged rather than wearing out our eyes.

It’s another tuesday morning and back to my usual duties which as most of you probably know means working part-time for independentip on their new Fuga platform. So onto my report of the Reboot

The conference was quite different to any other i have yet been to. This was due to their being a clever, “boring people” removal filter. no middle managers. The other was the format. Instead of the usual 90% keynote/10% open submission, reboot was 55% keynote/45% open. Their website was running an instance of Mediamatic’s social engine. It was the most socially good feeling and interactive conference site i have ever used, allowing me to make a profile, add friends, add talks i was interested in, and leave comments on the event pages created for each talk before their speakers even got on stage.

What i really enjoyed were the workshops. These were conversations led by a host. Anyone could join in. These proved to be interesting, emotional and exploratory journeys into the subject created by all those at the event. I left these sessions having raised questions and received responses and back and forth engagements between us all. These experiences firstly stayed longer in my memory and left me with new questions and learnings which somehow stay with me unlike the keynote speeches. Keynotes are a special case. They are great with an authentic and effective communicator who makes it easy to want to listen while teaching you something entirely new. Unfortunately nothing was new enough for me, maybe reading too many feeds to blame:)

I also decided to host a conversation on “personal relationships – an un-Dr Phil approach“. Hey, the theme was “human”. I had to do something. We basically shared, and the framework we used was the stage of a relationship you are in. So first your are single, then in the early phase and then in a mature phase. I’m writing a separate report on the workshop.

Tijs and I also demonstrated our project from the Roomware team in NL, a server and application, Flickr_Pickr, which makes a slide-show from people’s photographs scooped from people’s Flickr accounts and “discovers” people via blue-tooth. Change your phone’s blue-tooth ID to you Flickr ID and you just added a part of you to the experience.

To keep things short as i’m short of time, i met a lot of great people and enjoyed Copenhagen,