I noticed 2 very local projects in my mail last week

(“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.

Barely up and running, but boy is it good to get started. I have been working on this project which has been 6 months or more in the making, so it is an absolute pleasure to quietly put out to sea. Curious to see how people respond beyond the initial teething troubles from small bugs here and there. What is it? It’s a social network for people working inside public services. No it’s not got reviews of bands and people playing music, with crazy photos of teenagers pozing in the mirror with a 45 degree facial close up shot. It’s where people working in public services go to hang out and find each other, where they can let off some steam, and share war stories, and of course, find new solutions to fix the problems they face each day caused by bureaucracy (amongst other things) while serving the public. This is a dutch-language and dutch centered service for those of you from outside the Netherlands.

Welcome to the world of BeroepsEer!(translates to working pride in your particular craft)

What it includes for those hungry for the functionality laundry list is:
- profiles
- groups
- events
- blogging (individual, groups, everyone)
- video blog (send us your uploaded video interviews/opinions on your perspective)
- presentation of discussion, people, groups, institutions over location (googlemaps)

did i miss anything?…probably…also we did not build messenging in the first version which is a sort of standard social networking functionality for people to talk with each other inside the network.

Saw an interesting talk by Matt Bidulph at Mediamatic the other night. He presented his latest work for Nature and an overview of how fabrication technologies are easy to experiment with in the virtual universe of Second Life. He was able to take the dataset of a cell tomagraph and get Second Life’s replicator bot to print a huge version of the cell image allowing people on Nature’s Second Life island to walk around it.

This tied in with a BBC feature on a IBM researcher who found a way to connect a doorbell in Second Life ringing, into sending the owner of that door an SMS message to tell them someone was calling.