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.

Foursquare map display for Amsterdam nightlife

For the Amsterdam UIT Bureau and I Amsterdam we created this Foursquare map designed to display nightlife activity around the Leidseplein (entertainment) area with recent checkins, specials and current mayor and photographs of a selected group of venues. We strongly believe in creating autonomous displays that take cues from the environment —in this case using Foursquare— and deliver clear actions to the audience as well as a sense that the area they are in is alive and all they have to do is go out and connect to it.

The project is live at its own URL and in an iframe on the IAmsterdam site.

Technically we used Foursquare’s OAuth2 API which is outstanding. To be able to share one token across all requests we employ a file based PHP cache that relays the necessary requests for us. Main technology was created in collaboration with Panman Productions.

Mapping voter sentiment in the Netherlands

We ran a major update to the previous concept we did for the Dutch Labour Party using their canvassing results for the previous elections. The previous version crammed all the interaction into a tabbed balloon on a Google Map. This update turns that inside out and creates a full blown site called: “PvdA – Altijd in de buurt”.

The site shows canvas results tallied per city to show the biggest positive and negative issues according to constituants and their perception of politics.

It got some attention on various weblogs: Arnhem Direct, Sargasso, PvdA.nl, Johnny Wonder

The potential for a data driven approach to politics is tremendous. A site like this in effect gauges the sentiment in any given locality and in an ideal scenario it would also give people and politicians ways to collaborate to improve the situation. Any improvement realized can then be recorded and used to rally voters at subsequent elections.

PvdA Canvassing

The PvdA (the Dutch Labour Party) has sent campaigners to canvas neighborhoods and ask inhabitants their opinion on area and the direction of the country.

We imported over 10’000 records collected by volunteers into a map and aggregated results by city and by postal code. This makes it easy to browse through and drill down into the surveyed areas and see what the local issues are.

PvdA Survey Website

Attention: NOS.nl

Process: “Online campagnes — Canvassen voor de PvdA”

Creator: Alper Cugun

Vervuilingsalarm

Vervuilingsalarm is an aggregator of particulate predictions for a series of measuring stations in the Netherlands. The data is scraped, aggregated, plotted and graphed and also sent out to sensor hub Pachube.

Creators: James Burke, Ton Zijlstra, Alper Cugun, Buro Pony