New FabLab In The Netherlands: FabLab Groningen

Yesterday saw a great turnout at the FabTable, the regular meet-up of the Dutch FabLab community, held every 6 weeks. Our hosts were Thuur, Bart and Peter at the brand new FabLab Groningen.

They opened their doors March 1st (official opening on the 31st). With delegations from The Hague, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Enschede, Leuven (Belgium) and even Iceland, it was a great afternoon that stretched well into the evening over dinner in the 'Het Paleis' venue where the FabLab is located as well.

FabLab Groningen, Smari McArthy and Thuur Caris in conversation

The beautifully renovated 19th century former chemistry lab of the local University is a fitting environment for the newest FabLab in the Netherlands. The building is populated with lots of different companies and artists, making it into a major hub for the creative industry in the north of the Netherlands. A theater and conference venue, hotel accommodation, rooftop apartments as well as a restaurant make it a great spot in a quickly redeveloping area just a few minutes walk north of Groningen's city center.

FabLab Groningen has a Trotec 60W laser cutter, a Zcorp 3D powder printer and a 3D full color scanner to go with it, a Modela CNC router, a vinyl cutter, as well as a home built vacuum-form (at 50 Euro!), a t-shirt press, and a rotary engraver. Of course they are also connected to the Polycom video-conferencing system (using a software based solution, not the expensive Polycom hardware). The big screen providing a window on the other labs is mounted on a wall that is painted with a world map showing the various locations of FabLabs from around the world.

Conversations, and Polycom screen and cam mounted on wall with FabLab world map

Discussions during the FabTable ranged from business models to our shared efforts around the different websites we run, legal aspects and creative commons for product development, and organizing the Fab6 conference in August. Elmine did a whole range of video interviews for both the FabLab documentary she is making, as well as the FabLab video channel the good people of 23Video provided us with. Over dinner we swapped more stories, enjoying the beer, food and hospitality of the restaurant two doors down from the FabLab in the inner court yard of this amazing facility 'Het Paleis'.

More pictures in this photoset, and FabLab Groningen's own photo stream.

Tags: fablab, fablabgroningen, groningen

Tim Berners Lee on Open Data, One Year Later

Last year Tim Berners Lee made a call for 'Raw Data Now' at the TED conference.

This year he is back, to show the TED audience what has been created with open data in the mean time. A great video to watch and see how Open Data can create value.

Tags: gov20, linkeddata, opendata, opengovdata, opengovernment, opengovernmentdata

FabLab BarCamp Bremen

Last Saturday Karsten Joost and Axel Grischow organized the first meet-up in Germany of people interested in FabLab. There was room for 40 people in the venue, and that number quickly filled up. In fact there was a waiting list for people who would have liked to attend as well. People came from different cities, apart von Bremen, there were people from Berlin, Hamburg, Aachen, Nürnberg and Düsseldorf, as well as from other places.

Creating the programme on the spot

Karsten and Axel had invited several of us from the Netherlands. Peter Troxler (to talk about business development), Bart Kempinga (FabLab Groningen, and how to get from idea to product), Petra Koonstra (creating a venue for the creative industry at Het Paleis in Groningen) and me (Dutch FabLabs as a network, and community building)

In true barcamp style the program of sessions was decided collectively at the start of the day. It was a good an varied programme. Talking both about organizational aspects of starting a FabLab as well hands-on topics, as well as a demo-space where different equipment was available to give a try.

I thoroughly enjoyed the day as well as the cool people. I hope that this may be the start of the emergence of a range of FabLabs in Germany.

My slides on the network effect of FabLabs and community building (partly in German, but mostly in English) can be seen below, as well as the pictures I took.

Tags:

Civil Servant 2.0 Day - An Impression

'Ambtenaar 2.0', Civil Servant 2.0, is a thriving Dutch community of over 3.000 people who are interested in bringing Web 2.0 and its principles in to the way our government and administration works. It started early 2008 and has grown into a multi-faceted community inhabiting different spaces (a main site, an interaction platform, a collaborative workspace, two-weekly open coffee meet-ups, to name some), where many different '2.0' aspects are discussed and experimented with.
It was all started as the voluntary effort of several civil servants, but meanwhile a foundation has been created to serve as a vehicle for different activities, and to make sure those activities can take place without raising issues (integrity e.g.) for the civil servants involved.

Hands on support, and audience during the election for most '2.0' organization

Last week the 'Civil Servant 2.0 Day' was organized. In the space of two months this was event was created without any budget. In 7 streams, 35 workshops were given. Next to that there was a demo-space, and a support-space where you could go with your practical questions regarding web2.0 and get some hands-on help. Also there was an election of the most '2.0' government organization (won by a project from the city of Amsterdam)
All in all 250 people met-up for a day of face to face interaction.
Everything was created by the community itself, all as a volunteer effort. A long list with workshops that didn't make the program was held in reserve as well as a long list of people who were on the reserve list to attend.

It was an excellent day, and a testament to what a community effort can bring. It is good to see that there are many change agents active within our government agencies.
In the first round of workshops I held a session on open government data. The slides are available, but are in Dutch. A recent similar slideset in English can be found below.

(Disclosure: I joined the board of the Ambtenaar 2.0 Foundation last month, also to help push the themes of open government and open government data)

Tags: a20dag, ambtenaar20, community, gov20, netherlands, opengov

An Emblem for Open Government and Open Data

Open Government Emblem

A few days ago the American Sunlight Foundation launched a logo for 'Open Government'. The Sunlight Foundation is working to increase government transparency in the US. In March they will launch a big campaign to get more public government information on-line in real time. The tag-line they are using is 'public = on-line'.

The emblem, a looping arrow, in which you can see both a G for Government as well as a power button, is intended for much wider use however. All the graphics are therefore available for download, and free re-use and adaptation.

With the emblem the Sunlight Foundation wants to strengthen the notion that Open Government is a movement for all who think the relationship between government and their citizens can be improved with respect to transparency, participation and collaboration. For all of us who think government could and should do a better job on our behalf. So, if you work on Open Government, feel free to use this emblem anywhere it is appropiate.

Open Government Emblem

Open Data Emblem
Open Government is not the same as Open Government Data. Open Government is also about transparency of processes and accountability of governance. Open Government Data is more about the free availability and re-usability of any data or information government produces. Open data is an important part of open government, but they are not the same. Open Government is the larger notion, and contains Open Government Data.

Last year James Burke already created an Open Data emblem, as part of our work for the Dutch Ministry for Internal Affairs. It was created so that government departments had an easy way of showing on their website where data can be found and downloaded. This emblem too is available for download and re-use.

Open Data Emblem

It's good to see that both James and the Sunlight Foundation independently came up with emblems that aim for simplicity and ease of recognition, and both use clear symbols in black and white. That way they can be recognized at a glance.

I hope you will be using both emblems widely and often for all your open gov and open gov data projects. I already ordered a sticker booklet at Moo.com so I can go around handing both emblems out.

Tags: emblem, logo, opendata, opengov, opengovdata, transparency

Can Semantic Web People Be the Dr. Snow of Open Gov Data?

The day before yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) to about a 100 people of the Dutch Semantic Web commnunity.

In my talk I gave an overview of the current situation in Open Government Data in the Netherlands, as well as in the EU in general. I ended with a few observations on how open government data is of relevance to the Semantic Web community.

The availability of open government data, especially if pooled in a data catalogue, to me seems like the logical place where semantic web can come into its own. This because open government data catalogues provide both the volume and the variety of data where 'linked data' not only becomes nice to have, but a need to have. Linked data (i.e. semantic web) will prove, I think, to be a key ingredient in helping large parts of the population understand the potential and value of open data, as well as helping them make sense of all the data that is out there by weaving the connections between datasets.

Another observation I made was worded more as a challenge. When you have large sets of data or information, that are digitally opened up, you have more than just a very large pile of records. The great additional thing you get is the possibility of adding another layer, a higher level, of information altogether. When you have all EU documents translated in all 20-30 languages, you don't just have a large set of similar documents, you have an invaluable corpus on which to base automatic translation algorithms. Which is what the EU did for Google translate. When you have a large body of stories or narrative fragments, you don't just have a bunch of qualitative data, you have the ingredients for building a cultural map of the storytellers involved. In anthropology this is common, but it now is becoming possible digitally as well, by using tools like SenseMaker Suite. More, especially digitally more, is different. Very different. Especially when you can start linking all that 'more' data together. You open up new dimensions of insight. The SemWeb people know what it takes technologically to do that. So I challenged them to be the Dr. Snow of the 21st century, to be the ones opening our eyes to new insights and connections using open government data.

Dr. Snow, as described recently by my friend Robert Paterson, opened up our eyes to something new in 1854 in London. People were dying of cholera, and nobody knew how you got infected or how it was transmitted. Until Snow started mapping the deaths on a city map of London, not knowing what that would yield. What it yielded however was a major breakthrough: most deaths were concentrated around one particular water well. Turned out the water was contaminated by sewage. Once that link was made the massive effort of building the London sewers got underway.

It was an afternoon well spent in Amsterdam, and I am looking forward to continued discussion with some of the participants.

Tags: linkeddata, opendata, opengov, opengovdata, openpsi, semanticweb

FabLab Year Book Released! The Why and How.

We in the Dutch FabLab community just released a year book for the FabLab community. The first ever year book actually. Consistent with FabLab principles the release was printing the book physically in the CabFabLab in the Hague, and sharing the digital files online so you can make your own copy. Download the FabYearBook 2010 and instructions on how to put it together.

This post is about how the year book came about, and some of the rationale behind it.

What's a FabLab?
A FabLab is a workshop that contains industrial quality equipment that is controlled by widely available software like Google Sketchup, Inkscape or Coreldraw. It puts the power to produce basically anything into your hands as an individual. It does for production what social media does for publishing and sharing. You hit print on your computer, and end up with a physical product. There are four of these FabLabs in the Netherlands, and a couple of dozen worldwide. In the past 2 years I've seen things being 'printed' as diverse as furniture, food, fashion, car and motor parts, jewelry, lamps, and toys. As prototype or as personal unique product. It's amazing and hugely empowering. Remember how amazing it was when you first started blogging: the relationships suddenly forming, the value of conversations? This is the same all over, but now you're turning bits into atoms and change your physical environment.

FabYearBook 2010
The idea for the FabYearBook came from two things. First, when visiting the then still very empty space that now is becoming the FabLab Groningen, I saw how Bart Kempinga had put together a reader with print-outs from different FabLab websites from around the world. He had placed that reader on a table in the middle of that big white empty room. Visitors and potential partners leafed through it, and it helped them paint with their imagination a vision of what the FabLab Groningen could be on the bare walls around them.

Bart Kempinga with his 'scrapbook' in a still empty FabLab Groningen

Second, I worked with a group of students at the local university in my home town in the spring of 2009. I gave a few guest lectures on knowledge management and community building. As part of their assignment I asked them to generate ideas on how to stimulate community building in the FabLab network, as well as knowledge sharing. In a bigger list of ideas, the students also came up with the FabYearBook. Marloes Wilmink, Anne Heesink, Eva Rennen and Karlein Sanders were the students that planted the year book idea firmly with me.

Presentation slide by my students

We put forward the idea for a year book at the global Fab5 Conference in India last August, and sent out calls for contributions in November. Actual contributions started coming in around January 15th, with the latest arriving this week Monday. Now, Wednesday we've printed the first FabYearBook 2010. More than 50 pages, from mostly 'close by' sources, but already with interesting variety and diversity.

Making the year book was not just about making a book, it is an intervention in the global network and community as well. There's two components to that: visibility and rhythm.

Networks, nodes, visibility
In a network all nodes are distributed. That makes it often hard to see the breadth, depth and potential of a network from your perspective as a single node in it. For you and me to perceive the network from our individual position in it, we need to be visible to others and the others need to be visible to us. You probably know a sizable number of the contacts of your own direct contacts, but after that visibility of people/nodes brakes down quickly. To look further, over that '2 degrees out'-horizon from your own position, we need tools. Network visualizations are helpful. Sharing stories from the network in the network is helpful too. All this is true for the global FabLab Network as well. Some nodes are highly visible and see a lot, others are mostly dark nodes in the overall network fabric. The FabYearBook 2010 is a first attempt to share stories in a more persistent way, a beacon as it were in the FabLab landscape. So that visibility can improve, and new connections can be made.

Community, rhythm, predictability
Functioning communities show a number of characteristics that can be also purposefully used to create circumstances for community to grow and blossom. Community creates these characteristics, but the characteristics also help create community.

Rhythm is such a characteristic of community. Our society has rhythms on larger and smaller scales. They help us to feel as part of a whole, and give us predictability where there actually is none. Christmas is such a macro-rhythm in the western world. Even if you haven't seen your family for a full year, you'll be welcomed at Christmas. Weekends are a rhythm like that too. Morning coffees as well. For the Dutch FabLab community we've set a rhythm through FabTables, regular meet-ups at 6 weeks intervals with a fixed date and time. Anyone is welcome, and they always take place no matter what. I've done the same with Elmine to get our local GeekLounges going, at a 2 month interval. Even if you have to miss out on one or two, you know you'll be welcome at the next get-together, and when it takes place. An existing macro-rhythm for the FabLab community is the yearly Fab Conference. It's FabLab's Christmas so to speak. You have to travel for it, and meet up with the extended family as it were. The year book hopefully will serve as a new macro-rhythm, about half way (January) between two Fab conferences (August), and it comes to you.

The finished year book

Looking forward to when next year January sees the next FabYearBook coming out!

Tags: communitybuilding, fablab, fabyearbook, fabyearbook2010

Do You Know Academic Sources Regarding Group Size?

In blog based discussions there has been talk of 'effective' group sizes and network sizes in the past (see some of it here from 2003 and 2004). Most of that however was always based on anecdotal 'laws' or Dunbar's number (the application of which I usually see as the mis-interpretation of Dunbar's theory).

Working in different groups.

Of course I know from personal experience the size of groups I am comfortable with in different settings. I like working on concrete tasks with 1 or 2 others, I like teams of 5, I like doing interactive sessions with 8 to 16 people, with an optimum of 12, I enjoyed working for a company where the communication habits didn't scale beyond 16, I like to do open conversational sessions with 20 to 25 people, and I like to present to larger audiences.

But what are the 'transition points' in group size? How much people do you need to have enough variety in a group to increase the learning in that group during learning activities? When does communication overhead become too big to stay with 1 on 1 connections and additional group roles or tools to facilitate communication are needed?
I can imagine all kinds of variables coming into play: variety of skills in the group, group inertia (though the work of Olson seems proven to be false), organizational overhead needed, cognitive overhead, communication needs, in-/outgroup aspects, peer pressure, etc.
All these factors are probably depending on what needs to be done: group learning, a concrete task, problem solving, collective action etc.

Is there any academic source you are aware of, or empirical studies you've seen that cover this, or at least aspects of it? Any pointers are welcome. I will of course blog what I find / receive.

Working in different groups.

Tags: anthropology, Dunbar, groups, groupsize, sociology

Rotterdam University Learning Network: Yammer activity

Before the start of the learning community project I did at the Rotterdam University for Applied Sciences, Elmine and me did a workshop on web2.0 and networked learning (connectivism) for a number of people. Most of these were group managers in their faculties, and as it turned out the managers of some of the participants of the project. This workshop was, in hind-sight, important because of that: it made sure that the managers of at least some of our participants knew from personal hands on experience more or less what the project was about. And indeed it helped make sure that the results of the participants was more easily integrated in their immediate circle of colleagues. One of the participants in that workshop (Sander Schenk) kept on experimenting with different web2.0 tools on his own. Over the course of several months I saw him pop up in different on-line services and networks. A bit over a year ago it was him that created the first Yammer account within the organisation.

For those of you unfamiliar with Yammer. Yammer basically offers the same functionality as Twitter, but only those people and messages are visible that share the same e-mail domain with you. So everybody at company.com can see eachother, but nobody else. Added to that is group functionality and drawing organisational relationships between people. In short it is an internal Twitter, but lives outside you firewall.

Last week we received the graphs you see on the left from the Yammer team. It depicts nicely how the adoption of Yammer within Rotterdam University evolved. Starting in November 2008, the number of registered accounts rose to just under 200 in a year. The plateau in July/August in all three graphs is the summer holiday (but there was still some activity), and activity rises as soon as the new school year started, especially the number of accounts.

Of those 200 people that created accounts, some 130 posted one or more messages. The total number of messages is around 5500, or on average 42 postings per active user. In comparison the learning community, with 12 people active, wrote some 7000 messages over the course of a year in their platform. This gives you some perspective on the different layers of involvement you always see in groups, from active core to non-posting lurkers. (though the learning community and the yammer group aren't connected per se, the members of the former were generally also part of the latter)

Yammer.com sent us these graphs as a means to sell paid for services. However I think this type of information (and more detailed than this) is increasingly important if you want to understand the group dynamics of the communities you're involved in. In networked environments where social connections are the means of navigation and information filtering you need pattern information to spot opportunities and threats to the health of the community.

(to the left, graphs for total number of posters, number of users, and number of messages)

Tags: connectivism, hogeschoolrotterdam, hzap08, networkedlearning, rotterdam, yammer

Ecofont - Letters With Holes Save Ink

Leaving through a weekly and reading an article on greenwashing and 'deep' green marketing, I noticed something in the right hand bottom corner. It read:

"Ecofont The articles on pages 14-19 are printed with Ecofont Spranq Eco Sans, a letter with holes in it, thereby using up to 20% less ink during printing. You don't see the holes in normal pt-size, but they are there. At bigger font sizes do notice, as the holes get bigger."

A clever idea I think. Unless of course you now start mindlessly printing e-mail again.
The font is developed by a Dutch company, is freely downloadable but also available in a paid version which lets you turn any font (incuding your own corporate font) into an ecofont by 'punching holes' in your letters. Adding installing this font to use in my invoices and proposals (the only stuff I ever print) to my to-do list.

Holes do show at larger font sizes, but otherwise your eyes don't notice at all.

Tags: ecofont, innovation, printing