Early 2012 Schedule

The year has started nicely and we already have a nice line-up of events. Thursday a week ago saw the iBestuur Congress in the Netherlands the winners of the Apps voor Nederland competition were announced. I’m pleased we managed to shape the data and developer programme of this national event and how it turned out. See a write-up of the winners over at the Hack de Overheid site. Future plans along the same track are already being worked on.

There are two upcoming events at which I will be speaking that bear mentioning here.

There will be an evening in Pakhuis de Zwijger to celebrate the Nederland van Boven television series that the VPRO produced in the Netherlands ((Borrowing conceptually from Britain from Above among others.)). I will be joining the esteemed panel there as a board member of Hack de Overheid to talk about issues of democracy, participation and truth in cartography.

The week after that there’s “Social Cities of Tomorrow”. I will be speaking in a brief timeslot about Apps for Amsterdam about how you can create a data commons for your government of organization and where to take it from there.

Parliamentary Interruptions

Last week Sargasso had procured a dataset of interruptions from politicians in our House of Representatives. With the counts from which politician had interrupted which in debates they had made some nice infographics and a couple of blog posts. I thought this was the ideal opportunity to put all of the data (aggregated by party) in the D3 example chord diagram.

Never having used D3 before this was an ideal excuse to learn it and a near ideal dataset to employ. The result is as follows (click through for the interactive version):

This was featured on Sargasso the next day.

The graphic is not directly clear, but the data is deep and interesting enough to afford some exploration and it yields insight into the behaviours of various political parties during the reign of this cabinet. And what seems to matter a lot to people: it looks quite pretty.

With regard to D3, I think I will use it more often. It works quite similar to Protovis with which we have done some stuff before, but it feels much more current. Protovis itself is discontinued in favor of D3 according to a notice on the site and D3 seems a very worth successor.

Introducing Arjan Scherpenisse

It is my pleasure to introduce here on Monster Swell a new collaboration and a spectacular piece of work. Arjan Scherpenisse of Miracle Things will be collaborating with us in the field of data visualization.

Arjan is that rare breed of artist né programmer formally trained in both but picking neither side. He is active on the most innovative edge of software as well as building physical interaction projects and schooling others in programming be it in Erlang or some other language.

The TIMEMAPS project written up just before this post is the first of we hope many forays into data visualization for Arjan and we look forward to collaborate on many such projects in the future.

Foursquare Map for Leidse Square ‘Entertainment Area’ in Effect

Finally got around to go the AUB Ticketshop at Leidse Square during the daytime to view the Foursquare Display we setup in action (previous blog post).

A video of the screen:

The screen in context:

It is a welcome refresher from the static posters and the static videos that usually litter these high profile locations. The foursquare coloured view of the area is always fresh and shows a view on the local flavour and the people that visit the venues around.

From an urban development point of view it may be odd to draw more attention to the already highly crowded Leidse Square area. But it comes to reason that new developments such as these will be tested on high density locations first. We would be very interested to create augmentations in public space to make locations in Amsterdam’s periphery more appealing.

Hackathons as gateways to more and better open data

There is a piece up on O’Reilly Radar by Andy Oram about the sustainability of applications built during hackathons. I am involved in Hack de Overheid and we have organized (Apps for Amsterdam) and still are organizing (Apps for Noord Holland) several hackathons and I thought it would be good to add our experiences to the fray.

First: I do not agree with the premise that most apps created in government challenges are quickly abandoned. I have not done a tally of our Apps for Amsterdam contest, but the completeness and polish of most apps submitted was impressive. I still use several of the apps from that contest regularly. Snelstepontje.nl for finding out which ferry to take is a godsend just to name one.

Maintenance is indeed an issue. It is my personal experience that if the app is deployed to a suitably robust platform (Google App Engine is a notable one), it may continue to run unsupervised for many years.

But yes, I do have my own doubts when it comes to the sustainability of apps from app contests as I have stated in my review of Apps for Amsterdam.

Data quality is the largest issue on all levels and it needs to be addressed. From gathering data, to publishing it, to responding adequately to issues. Most datasets that are released for contests are not of the highest quality due to time constraints. And after the contest is over they are seldom kept up to date by the publishing office. When it comes to sustainability, government should first turn to itself and start releasing their data in a way that is sustainable.

Besides releasing the data in a proper format, a very important consideration is the licensing. Re-using data should happen under conditions as liberal as possible (CC0 preferred) as not to deter companies from investing in using that data.

But even then creating apps that are successful and sustainable at scale may be too lofty a goal. Productizing apps in a professional way implies conceiving, building and expanding a startup company. If one or more such initiatives come out of a hackathon that may be called a resounding succes. But what of the rest?

Well, communities of practice are built on exactly that: practice. Data does not overnight become readily at hand and usable. It takes a lot of hard work from all of us.

Having organized several hackdays we are seeing an increase in number of people attending and their proficiencies as well as a wider awareness of the possibilities of data in journalism, government and politics. Those are exactly the things we need if we want to make open data (and not just applications) the foundational fabric of our information society.

NoGIS on a fortress: Apps for Noord Holland

I have written here before about the need for web developers to learn more about GIS technologies and how to either work with or work around the traditional geographical software packages and data formats. There is a lot of synergy to be achieved in working together.

In the summer lull over at Hack de Overheid we are organizing a day of programming at a fortress which in itself already is a unique event: Apps for Noord Holland. But during the day the people from ESRI will give a workshop about geo data which we think is very worthwhile for any programmer who wants to get started in this field.

So if you want to spend a day on a fortress learning about GIS and programming, go right ahead and register. It promises to be a terrific day.

10’000’000 Foursquare Users

Somebody brought to my attention again the Foursquare user adoption animation they created in honour of their 10 millionth member. A great achievement for Foursquare and just the beginning of many more awesome things I am sure.

In the animation, if you look at the still at August of 2009, you see the US gaining some traction and this flare across the pond. That is Amsterdam where at the time Foursquare was being adopted hand over fist.

The story behind that is somewhat interesting and has been told, but this graphic does make it poignant again. Having visited SxSWi that last March, Robert Gaal and myself saw the launch of Foursquare and quickly got hooked. That was the year that location had not been played out yet at all, Latitude was fresh, Fire Eagle was still relevant and Brightkite was being used. Location was on the cusp.

Back in the Netherlands we quickly got in touch with the guys to get the service launched here. We thought waiting would probably result in the Netherlands being served last (as usual). After some back and forth we got everything up and running and Amsterdam was the first international city on Foursquare. The rest is history as can be seen in the graph.

Statlas: beta release

It’s been some time in the making but today we are proud to do a very early beta release of Statlas, the project we have been working on these past months. The Dutch Press Innovation fund funded this project and we collaborated with Fluxility and Alexander Zeh on this version. So please do check out: Statlas

There are several similar tools out there that help you create your own map but we feel that they are not as easy as they should be and most all of them are created in Flash. Statlas is built on Polymaps and therefore fully compatible with the open web. Creating a map is a simple as painting by numbers.

Our initial explorations set us on our way to create the easiest and most generative atlas tool we could imagine. Statlas is setup to allow you to choose a group of regions and for each of those regions enter a value (numerical, color or other) to create a map coloring. That map can then be shared, printed, embeded wherever you want . But anybody can also take a public map and edit it to improve upon existing data or to express their differences with them. It is also possible to export data to CSV, use other tools to collect statistics and re-import them back into Statlas.

Feedback

This initial release is geared towards the Dutch context as we have been developing it with the Netherlands in mind first. We are going to quickly add more regions and we are solliciting requests for regions you may want to add. If you have ideas, requests and or Shapefiles, please send them our way so we may add them.

This is a most preliminary beta release of a functional piece of software. We are envisioning much more data heavy and live updating views in the near future, but a project of this scope can balloon too easily. We’ve heard no end of people who wanted to use it for one cause or another and we wanted to show something first. After this release we’ll see which direction is most in demand of pursuing.

Apps for Amsterdam

Tonight the Apps for Amsterdam awards ceremony takes place and stage one of the Dutch open data trajectory will be completed.

Last year at the end of summer I helped Thijs Kleinpaste and Stefan de Bruijn co-author a proposal to sponsor open data within the municipality of Amsterdam. This proposal was accepted near unanimously by the commission in November (full write-up) and it started a roller coaster ride for open data in Amsterdam that is now starting to have far wider effects throughout the Netherlands.

Hack de Overheid (Hack the Government), the soon-to-be foundation I’m in the board of, partnered with the City of Amsterdam and Waag Society to realize the competition and a series of events. This series culminated for us in Hack de Overheid #3 an inspiring day and hackathon for over a hundred developers who built civic apps.

The completion of the contest tonight and the sometimes stunning applications —many of which display excellence in cartography and visualization— submitted to it mark another high point I am proud to be a part of.

What’s next?

But as I said this completes just the first stage of what is bound to be a long and tortuous road. As we speak there are local initiatives being formed to open up data in at least Enschede, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven and the Hague. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that and if some of the smaller cities may in fact outpace us here in the capital.

But we need to do more. Recent questions about privacy violations in data releases make it more than a little obvious that there is a massive issue in data literacy. I wholeheartedly agree with Adam Greenfield if he says that data and its affordances need to be a core subject starting from school onwards. We need to explore materials, interventions and processes that allow us to teach data literacy and that allow others to teach it for us if we ever want to spread this knowledge at scale.

Literacy is required not only in school children but also in decision makers in business and government right now if we want to keep the momentum we have right now. Future developments run the risk of being hamstrung by backlashes against the malignant consequences of data or open data being unused because the ecosystem is not in tune. There are still lots of issues to be resolved around ownership, privacy, responsibility, licensing and business models.

From a commercial point of view, the sustainability of many of the applications in the contest is doubtful. Creating proof of concept apps for the data is a more than a good start, but it is by no means enough. The real need is for open but comprehensive systems where open data is a given. That data needs to be technically excellent and fully engrained in the fabric of our information society so that everybody can use it to enrich their app/site/discourse. Data owners and producers need to participate and be accountable for their data to accept feedback from the public both in the specific and in the general case. Such a system cannot be built or be static, but needs to be grown and evolve continuously. The only thing we can do is plant, nurture and weed.

So tonight will be fun, but let that not distract us from the massive amount of work still ahead. We are ready for it. Will you join us?

Upcoming public speaking

The agenda is filling up again just before the summer break. Alper will speak at:

1. May 24th – Technical review of city dashboard concepts at HvA
   A brief bit of teaching with design and technical critique of city visualization dashboards developed by students.
2. May 25th – Apps for Amsterdam Awards Night
   Judging and attending the awards for the Amsterdam open data application contest.
3. May 27th – What Design Can Do
   Presenting an engaged data-centric approach for designers’ benefit (blurb).
4. Update: May 27th – Participating in an expert meeting on the topic of Cities, Games and Data organized by Virtueel Platform (our entry).
5. June 6th – Spring Break Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers
   Going to demo Statlas live for the first time at the congres of the people who funded it.
6. June 20th – Expertisedag Journalistiek
   Giving an introduction to data journalism to a large amount of journalists.

And Kars & Alper will be attending the Alice Taylor lunch lecture this Thursday in Hilversum. Talk to us at any of these events if you are present.