I recently founded VURB together with Ben Cerveny and Juha ‘t Zelfde to further explore the past, present and future of cities and the people that live there. This talk was meant to briefly cover urban computing and then focus on the rise of informal network cultures especially barcamps, freelancers and geeks.

Above is the slideshow to a talk given at ECOMM and draws from my work on government data policy and service (re)design, peer based practises and research into connected environments. It was good to meet with the people that came up to me in the break and the brunt of questions concerned privacy issues and how people will experience these new phenomena. So, definately food for thought for joining the Mobile City crew at their ‘Sentient City’ workshop.

A more in-depth version of this post will appear on the p2p foundation blog.

I recently met Anu Määttä, a developer from Finland, who was able to connect me with Smári McCarthy(Iceland) and Petri Kola(Finland) who were able to report of projects, companies and intiatives from Iceland and Finland working with government data.

Finland:

Finnish Data Catalog (their data.gov)

“Finnish public institutions are unprepared for making real APIs for their data. The data catalog is at the moment more about piloting open data related administrative proceduress and juridical questions Software projects which need budgetting will be needed for really opening up data. Unfortunatelly the data catalog will not be updated anymore before the competition deadline. But we are very happy that we have been able to create ownership for open data among highest Finnish administration! We will continue lobbying for open data after the summer hollidays. Lobbying and the competition is a multi-year commitment for us.”

Mindtrek competition (apps for democracy)
“The “Apps for Democracy Finland” is your chance to wow the world with your ideas; your chance to build better systems on top of public data; your chance to demonstrate the value and the power of public data when it is let free; your chance to take public information and display it in exciting new ways; and your chance to walk away with a range of prizes.”

Iceland:

Skuggaþing (Shadow Parliament)

“is a collaborative law editing system with built in direct and proxied voting. One instance of the software currently resides at
Skuggaþing where it is copying data in real time from the Icelandic parliament and presenting it in a much improved way (despite the fact that we still haven’t done graphic design!)”

The crew behind skuggathing are doing some nifty work in providing videos of parliamentary debates online with a host of social tools (ratings and commenting) to let citizens see what’s going on at any time.

- “DataMarket is a for-profit company organized around the visualization of data in general, working very specifically on government datasets when available in an effort to increase government transparency.”

- Framtíðarsýn Þjóðar” evaluates group value satements using psychological approaches and statistical analysis.”

- Hugmyndaráðuneytið“, or The Ministry of Ideas, is a collective of people working towards redefining Iceland, which organizes mass efforts, brainstorm meetings and other events which influence open governance.”

Smari McCarthy is working on opening governmental data up in Iceland and direct democracy software projects

Petri Kola is a researcher at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and is working on / coordinating Mindtrek Apps for Democracy Finland Competition in Helsinki.

We’re looking for other European gov data projects
Do you know of any other similar projects where you live?

Ourdata.eu is a collaborative site for everyone initiated by Ton Zijlstra and yours truly whose aim is to collect and share interesting projects working with government data from across Europe. Sign up and report what you spotted or send us a link. (while functional, we know the graphic design needs a triple bypass. Fix coming soon. Also we’ll pump out a tutorial on how to use the platform as it’s not immediately clear. Signup>> CreateCountry >> givetagofcountryname >> createblogpost for examples >> tag these with for instance mashup,countryname,etc >> publish)

Picnic conference just passed, and it was good to see some old friends return and a few locals come back from their holidays. Ben gave a fantastic talk on “Play”, while Robert did a great job on the “portable social networks” session which was packed. Let’s hope after all the hubbub dies down that the crews from Jaiku and Twitter follow through with their promises and others continue to focus on making some kind of protocol to enable portable social networks to become a reality!

This last week has been a chin-down-get-on-with-it kinda time to complete all outstanding work and clear the decks for leaving for a small vacation. For those of you who don’t know, i’ve been working on:

Fuga
Where i work 2 days a week as an interaction designer and usability guy, where we are working hard on solving supply-chain problems in the music business as it digitizes rapidly.

Actics
Yes, the graphic design kinda sucks, but ethics as social objects combined to issues, people and groups is a proving a fascinating design challenge. Again…wishing/praying the web-design improves over there.

In the works is also an update for BeroepsEer. This is a network site that is helping support public sector workers across different sectors deal with continual change. Many people serving the government are feeling undervalued and their skills underutilized. It’s a place for them to drop their knowledge, report problems and suggest ideas.

There’s also a buzz running through our Roomware project. Really excited to see where this leads.

Enjoy the autumn leaves. I’ll be doing that too, and see you all soon!