code

White men are over-represented in the world of programming. That is a pity, programming is for everyone - says Erwin Rooijakkers.

 

Last month, Dutch and Finnish fellows and policy makers met during the Mindtrek conference and a code fellow training in Finland. The aim of this exchange was to compare routines and share successes. There was also a strong need felt to connect to the wider European community of civic hackers and people from the governments to learn from each other's work.

 

As a participant of both Hack the Brain 2014 and this year’s edition, I like to share my team’s (technical) experiences with coding rapid prototypes using EEG data from the Muse headset.

 

Smart rules for developing ICT, the government sure can use them. Frank Kresin wrote these for smart cities, but they apply to governments too and can save a lot of trouble. Start with involving citizens, working agile, building small systems with small parties and sharing knowledge.And hire Code for NL fellows.

 

What better way of acquiring new ways of working than by simply doing it and learn form the experience? Without consciously knowing it, this is the principle behind the Code for Europe Fellowship program.

 

The City of Amsterdam welcomes Ohyoon Kwon, Piotr Steininger and Giovanni Maggini as fellows for the Code4EU project. The coming nine months they will be working on innovative and smart apps that change the way governments work for their citizens.

 

Thursday December 13th, the winners of the Apps On competition were announced. In the contest participants competed for the prize for the best app for higher education or research. SURFnet and Waag organized this competition for the first time this year to stimulate the development of mobile apps

 

The Open Innovation festival in Amsterdam kicked off on 26 November with the soft launch of openinnovationamsterdam.com. This new website will inform you on the innovation projects of the City of Amsterdam, among which are the so-called City Challenges. These challenges will soon appear on the website, but were presented today at the C4EU City Challenge Pitch.

 

On 22 August 2012, I gave a presentation about Open Cities (and Apps voor Amsterdam) at the Campus Party in Berlin. Campus Party exists since 1997 and has grown into a large festival where thousands of hackers, developers, startups and geeks. The travelling event this year took the former airport Berlin-Tempelhof as it's residence for the many tents of the Campuseros and ten stages. It offered keynotes by Paul Coello, Tim Berners-Lee, Don Tapscott en Yossi Vardi.

 

On Saturday 16 June 2012 the second edition Apps for Amsterdam was launched, in which contest developers not only have a chance to win great prizes with their newly developed applications, but also the opportunity to develop them further to get them on the market. The newspaper Het Parool covered Apps for Amsterdam in an article written by Saskia Naafs on the opening day of the contest.

 

On Monday 4 June 2012, within the framework of Apps for Amsterdam, an Waag Open Space was held at the Waag in Amsterdam. About 60 developers and entrepreneurs came together to discuss 'Apps and Business'.