photo by Ton Zijlstra

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.

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.

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.

This last weekend i arrived at my girlfriend’s house and as i walked in the door i noticed she had a box sitting on the stairs. It was sports monitoring gear to help her in the gym or running. It monitors your heart beat and then can create a series of workouts based on time. I tried it on and could get the watch to register the heart monitoring belt. I wanted just to see my beating heart registering on the watch screen. After pressing a few buttons, i was still unable to get my heart beat showing. Pissed off i scanned through the manual which was complicated with no entry on “press button to see heartbeat”. Perhaps i am stupid user, or perhaps the kit was just too complicated. What i would like is my heartbeat delivered to me all the time.

All the time. Yes, all the time. Why do i want a continual stream of data that contains my heartbeat? Well, after discovering heartbeat sensor technology, it dawned on me that there is presently a distinction between autonomous body data and that produced via cognitive processing(taking pictures, writing text, saving links, search, responding in speech). The data feeds that we have only very recently been able to create are in 99% of occasions processed via the brain. Where is the body? When was the last time you had to remind yourself to breathe?

The obvious choice for a body feed or bleed, would be the heart. We have reasonably cheap technology to measure it. Wait. It’s still locked up. Well sort of. A brief google later. Most heart monitoring kits (sensors and software) are embedded within medical or sports contexts . Only one company i found was porting this to the web, although there must be many more. I suspect that hospitals are using some kind of tool to record heat beat and blood pressure wirelessly. Will anyone help pipe us our heatbeats in a feed format? Sure it will need some hardware but please lets bring it out cleanly stripped from any specific context. Let’s see what people would do with that. It starts to get interesting when we overlay out heartbeat feed over the rest of our attention-stream. Hmm.

(thanks for the CC-Sharealike pics people split-milk radek reks rev dan catt)

I just received some mail, from a group called glasvezelamsterdam (glass fiber). They tell me that my neighborhood is getting an infrastructure upgrade and that i’m viable for glass fiber, allowing me to reach speeds of upload and download 10x faster than broadband today, up to 100 Mbps theoretically. I went to their site and found a list of companies selling fiber connectivity in multiple forms from single(Internet connection) to double(+telephony) to triple(+iptv) play. What was interesting was to see their prices and also compare these to my present dsl provider.

So right now i spend:
8 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload speed – 55,86 euro/month
telephony – one phone line – 12,56 eur/month
tv – 16.80 euro/month

So with new services i could get:
20 Mbps up/down – 35 euro/month
telephony – 5 euro/month

So i could already save about 30 euro a month and get double the speed, a huge improvement in speed all round. The truth is that i don’t really experience a huge lag in download times right now. Although perhaps if i were connected to an internet tv experience that might be so. It would be fun to try out a fiber connection. I’m actually more interested in trying WiMax as that allows for all my mobile devices to be connected using just a wiMax box at home to send me my own bandwidth to up to a few kilometers away. Shazaa!