Saturday I went to visit a meet-up of Project Roomware:
The Roomware Project is an open-source framework for interactive spaces. It allows developers of multiple origins to enhance any venue or event using technologies such as BlueTooth and RFID.
“Roomware” is an application running in a defined space. For instance: linking people’s photographs to the screens of a club, sharing musical tastes with the DJ, finding other interesting people on your mobile phone, a photo booth activated by the entry tickets of two people, etc.
That’s all pretty awesome. On top of that, it’s free software, done by nice people and they even do fun geek stuff such as playing with glasses that track your motion…
Last week I realized that I couldn’t remember when exactly I had not been going out at night. Amsterdam is great. So many people to meet and spend time with. Last Thursday I met up with Niels Fermont, whom I hadn’t really seen the last 12 years or so and whom I found on Hyves a while back. It was great to bring back memories from primary school. We had a very tasty dinner. Unfortunately I suspect the forest mushroom pie to have ruined my digestive system up until today. So I wasn’t able to head down to FOSDEM in Brussels. The up side was that I finally had some time to go through my drafts folder, where emails end up that I still have to write.
Besides all that I am feeling mostly happy with my MacBook Pro. There are some issues, such as the lack of decent shortcuts but it’s a relief to not be forced to keep on tweaking and twiddling settings. I hope some company will be able to create a similar experience based on Ubuntu.
This week I’ll be moving to an awesome apartment and tomorrow I’m expecting a friend I haven’t seen for 1,5 years. And Hyves is moving to a new office.
Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I’ve been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February.
There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux.
This weekend there will be a party in Trento. I’m moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.
Last week Anu wrote me about a workshop in Amsterdam about federating social networks, when I completely did not expect to be in Amsterdam…
The workshop was interesting. I didn’t attend the entire day but I sensed that it could lead to interesting results. The workshop was the first stage towards a practical framework. A myriad of protocols related to anything social (e.g. XFN, FOAF, hCard, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) was discussed and the intention was spoken out to have a proof of concept and running code available for the conference on February 9th and 10th (SNES). There’s definitely enough momentum. Twitter and Six Apart were present and are actively supporting the effort. Hyves, a Dutch social network that just celebrated their 5 million member party, was mentioned a lot.
I have one constructive remark about organizing a workshop: Try to have some wiki space available before the workshop starts. This way you don’t depend on people sending you their notes later on, and editing wikis in a social setting can lead to interesting (and blizzardly fast) results. Temporarily use another wiki, or even permanently, if there is an existing wiki which has goals that are similar enough. Of course, first ask permission from the community (if there is one) and try to get them involved in the workshop as well, during and after.
I was happy to talk to James Burke again. I recognized some more familiar faces and while brainstorming about a name for the project (and checking out translations into African languages) we found out that we had met at What The Hack, an outside festival for hackers two years ago where I spoke about the Bambara Wikipedia. I’m totally enjoying Amsterdam…
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