I liked Ton’s format of review for his year and had been considering writing something. Here’s a list of the course of events in a rough chronological order covering the gamut of personal, family and work life.
- In January Michel Bauwens, Chris Pinchen, Franco Iacomella, yours truly and a few others decided to set up a cooperative, to grow businesses around the fringe of the non-profit knowledge communities and commons of the P2P Foundation. Paperwork was cleared and projects did come in throughout the year. That said, we had considerable growing pains, with Michel’s insane speaking schedule(4 times a year zig-zagging from thailand across Europe to South or North America and then back again), all coop members separated by continents (South American, Asia, Europe, N.America) and noticed that face to face communication had a large impact on teams. That said, Chris and I did well with starting Chokepoint which you will see further down this list.
- In Febraury, i visited Berlin to support Juha who represented VURB at Cognitive Cities. It was also wonderful to meet friends like Alper, Kars and Alex along with seeing Ton give yet another a great talk.
- During the same month i tried out playing some Starcraft 2 as RTS games are rather wonderful. It was a weird transition from old LAN gaming into gaming where to play a game you can only do by being logged into your account for the game in question online. Obviously this is a way to secure payment, but LAN was more robust and flexible for players stopping things like games needing to be restarted if internet connections were lost or latency going through the roof. The big change was witnessing audience participation via live streaming and the casting and replays posted on YouTube channels. Check out what i mean over at Twitch.TV. In Feb i was a total noob, while in December, watching a game of Hero vs Puma has become a new staple relaxation medium, beyond picking up a book or staring at wildlife and seeing friends.
- February was also the 2nd edition of Quantified Self Amsterdam at Mediamatic. I presented “CVS for the Self” alongside 5 other speakers. 80 people showed up.
- Late February, early March a group of researchers from the P2P Foundation started a NextNet workgroup focusing initially on mesh networks, resilience and various strategies on how to not let corporate or government powers coopt the network. The ongoing Arab Spring uprising had recently taken everyone by shock in January and added an extra sense of urgency around these issues. Mubarak had turned off the Internet and Senator Liberman was contemplating a ‘kill switch’ in the US. As a response and together with a new collegue and now friend, Chris Pinchen, we conceived and launched a new effort working on human rights issues over the Internet, focusing on monitoring the entire Internet to detect abuses. The Chokepoint Project’s support and response since that time has been unprecedented, from articles in New Scientist to being shipped halfway round the world to Rio de Janeiro to show what we have been working on. The work is mainly concerns building an early warning system to detect corporate or government restrictions, attacks across the Internet for journalists, activists, researchers, governments and citizens caught in the middle of natural disasters. The other half of the project is focused on teaching digital network literacy through tangible workshops (we wrap people in string and put funny labelled clothing on them in the process as one part of a modular kit for teaching). We’re focused on kids and reaching the political classes, who managed to fail on many occasions in 2011 if you see all the ant-copyright legislation in the pipeline and SOPA. Sadly i would not surprised if SOPA passes which will be a sad day for freedom of speech.
Video of ARS Prize (in Deutch)
(Beside this slightly odd presentation where it seems Chris and I are pitched as baby Julian Assange’s, 2011 was also a record year for getting dubbed into German!)
- In March i moved house from a run down apartment in Amsterdam Oost to Westelijke Ijlanden. Having a view over the water from your balcony and living on yet another peaceful street, although this time in the city center is a luxury which will not be wasted. The rent is stupidly affordable.
- I spent considerable time earlier in the year helping Hack de Overheid, an organization we co-founded grow. Early in the year i organized a workshop for the Dutch BBC, VPRO for working on their recently aired TV series and web platform, ‘Nederland van Boven‘. We organized numerous hackathons.
- In June and August, Chris and I went on tour with Ruben and Gustaf, new team members of the Chokepoint team to Chaos Communication Camp near Berlin and to Linz for Ars Electronica as we had won the next idea category award. We met so many amazing people which took the project forward. Throughout the year we were in Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Linz, Utrecht and Rio de Janeiro.
- Quantified Self Europe took place. Having founded the Amsterdam QS group, the Europe event was a massive step up from servicing 70-90 people for 4 hours on a Monday evening to leading a 2 day event with 350 people, bringing QS-ers from the United States, the core team over and attracting lots of new faces from across Europe.
- Lots of client work throughout the year included doing strategy, UX and IA work for campaigns and many mobile and tablet apps for Ice Mobile, INDG, VGZ, Strawberry Frog. This was spread out throughout the year. The most fun of these projects was being able to do some service design for a early-stage sleep monitoring product that uses radar to track movement and breathing.
- In October, i started playing squash.
- In December Hack De Overheid and Het Nieuwe Stemmen commenced fusion, preparing the ground for a new organization in 2012. Prepare for a more formal public announcement in the coming months.
- Dominique and I visited my mother and step-father in Arizona, where it was warm in direct sunlight over Christmas. They live in North Phoenix. Apart from the harsh jet-lag, we ate too much great food, shared stories and were happy to be able to be together as this happens only once every 1-2 years given the distances. Also was able to spend some hours exploring Skyrim which is probably the most beautiful RPG i’ve ever had the chance to play. At the same time team members of the Chokepoint Project were presenting and meeting people at 28C3 ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ in Berlin.
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.
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.
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.
Moved operations for Lifesized over to this new site. Just needed something new after having an old site which showed mainly Flash animation work and general design stuff. So what’s new? Well i’m an information architect and a “how to make our site more social” kinda guy.
Here’s a few ways how i might be able to help you
- Information architecture
- Designing and developing an online platform
- Blogs/wiki’s explained
- Building for the Internet of Things