Here’s a recent interview of me with Juha van ‘t Zelde of Non-Fiction. Looking forward to doing something cool with him at de Verdieping in exploring data flows, vizualization and the city. Control panels incoming, p2p all the way;)
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.
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
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 spotted this work by friends over at nArchitects. They did this lovely light architectural piece made from string placed on the parapet of a French castle. More to be seen here.
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.