open cities

The research project Contemporary Commoning focuses on the ways the commons can contribute to new forms of (digital) public space and initiate different forms of urban development.

 

The WeMakeThe.City festival was held for the second time in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. Where could you find Waag?

 

The Cities for Digital Rights conference in Amsterdam couldn’t have started with a more urgent keynote speaker than activist Bianca Wylie.

 

Hidde Kamst examines a more cooperative city with a participatory model and some trade-offs that are involved in participation. 

 

Sito Veracruz will inform us about the last updates of Fairbnb.coop and will introduce their crowdfunding campaign.

 

Marleen Stikker participates in the debate 'Smart Cities or Dumb Cities' on May 21st at OBA Oosterdok in Amsterdam.

 

In this blog series Hidde Kamst examines different ways of using technology in cities, and the corresponding roles these imply for citizens.

 

How can scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, citizens and creatives best work on solutions for urban issues together?

 

How can scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, citizens and creatives best work on solutions for urban issues together?

 

On Thursday the 21st of June, the exciting conference Next Generation Cities took place. During the conference the positive and negative effects of technology were debated.

 

Ivonne Jansen-Dings is one of the speakers at the event 'From ctrl-alt-del to alt-gov' in Ghent on June 11th.

 

On June 21st, Waag hosts a full-day conference at WeMakeThe.City with inspiring keynote speakers, break-out sessions and panel discussion.

 

Frank Kresin (Waag) will give a first reaction on the presentation 'The socially inclusive city' of Anthony Townsend (NYU) at AMS Institute on 12 March 2015. This special lecture is organized in collaboration with the John Adams Institute and moderated by Tracy Metz.

 

reSITE, in cooperation with IPR Prague and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Prague will be hosting a free day-long program consisting of a public workshop, public lecture and public evening discussion salon for designers, city creative strategy planners or researchers involved and interested in the collaborative economy to map current creative research, activities and projects related to relevant social and urban developments, and build a network for future collaboration - “Users as Designers” method is empowering people to make and understand products and processes, for more transparency.

 

Marleen Stikker and Pieter van Boheemen of Waag will be present at a meeting at Pakhuis de Zwijger on November 16th about self-sufficient FabCities.

 

The Lab of Labs at Design & The City consists of hands-on design charrettes that explore a variety of approaches for living labs and design research practices, with high-profile international practitioners concretely demonstrating their own methodologies. Each lab will conduct a two-day charrette, open to the active participation of Design & The City participants.

 

Marleen Stikker of Waag is one of the speakers at the public dialogue programme of the FabCity Summit, at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam on 20 April 2016. Earlier on the same day, Frank Kresin (research director) will attend the expert meeting at the FabCity Campus.

 

Ivonne Jansen-Dings will speak at the Greater Stavanger Impact Week on 25 February 2016, on the topic 'Open Amsterdam - citizen participation, civic engagement and open data'.

 

An evening on the rich history and promising future of the commons at Pakhuis de Zwijger on 1 September 2016. How can we govern urban commons in co-creation?

 

In 2015, FutureEverything celebrates its 20th anniversary. For the last two decades the festival has brought people together to imagine, shape and question the vision of a truly participatory society. A belief in the emancipatory and creative potential of new technologies runs throughout digital culture. It is found both in the open source community, and in the rhetoric Silicon Valley startups. Today the contradictions in this vision have come to the surface.

 

Frank Kresin, Research Director at Waag, will give a keynote on Sunday 13 April 2014 at the Information Access in Smart Cities (i-ASC 2014) workshop in Amsterdam. His presentation will be on the topic 'Smart Cities, Smart Citizens and the case for the CitySDK'.

 

Intertraffic Amsterdam is a four day, international trade fair for infrastructure, ITS traffic management, safety and parking. Marleen Stikker will talk at the event about the subject ‘Open Data: a boost for smart mobility devices?’

 

Marleen Stikker is participating in the Open Cities and Smart Citizens session at the Open Governance Partnership conference in London on Friday, November 1, 2013.

 

On 31 October, the presentation of the results of three workshops 'Designing responsible cities' will take place at the Tobacco Theater in Amsterdam'.

 

Through platforms such as vTaiwan and Pol.is, the democracy of Taiwan is starting to make moves towards becoming one of the first liquid democracies in the world. This development did not happen out of nowhere.

 

WeMakeThe.City is the festival that makes cities better. A five-day event in which we will tackle urgent challenges in urban daily life.

 

Coen Bergman (project developer) and Gijs Boerwinkel (community manager) of Waag will speak during the reSITE 2017 conference In/visible City in Prague.

 

Frank Kresin looks ahead to 2017, that brings new challenges and opportunities and a new job for him at the University of Twente, managing the newly founded DesignLab.

 

Fairbnb is a movement that seeks to encourage vacation rentals that comply with the principles of a fair, non-extractive and collaborative economy.

 

During the Dutch presidency of the EU, the Dutch consulate in Rio de Janeiro and the Rio Prefeitura brought together designers, civil servants, citizens and entrepreneurs for a week-long design workshop and a one-day seminar.

 

Over the course of five days, twenty eager participants from Rio became Smart Citizens. Pieter van Boheemen and Taco van Dijk from Waag teached them how to appropriate low-cost, open source technologies to make sense of their environment, helping them to care, share and act.

 

This first edition of the Smart Citizen Talks, we’ll explore participatory sensing. How do we collectively measure and make sense of our environment? How do we - along with citizens, scientists, and designers - stay in tune with the ever emerging smart city? How do wé make sense of a (smart) city that likes to make sense of ús instead?

 

In the context of the Design & City Conference, which will explore citizen-centered design approaches for the smart city, we invite you for an exciting workshop about using open source hardware and software to solve local problems. This a great chance to get acquainted with our newest initiative in the emerging field of smarts citizens. After our first two exiting editions of the Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab, we’re broadening our horizons to the international field.

 

Ivonne Jansen-Dings of Waag is one of the speakers at 'De keuze voor een Smart City' (the choice for a Smart City) on 29 February at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.

 

Marleen Stikker will participate in a programme at Pakhuis de Zwijger on 27 October to celebrate the 740th anniversary of Amsterdam and to look forward to the celebration of 750 years in ten years time.

 

This edition of Urban Movies at Pakhuis de Zwijger will feature the documentary Smart City. In search of the Smart Citizen by filmmaker Sara Blom and researcher Dorien Zandbergen. Afterwards, there is a discussion with speakers, among which is Frank Kresin (research director at Waag).

 

Recently, a new publication was published titled 'The Hackable City: A Research Manifesto and Design Toolkit'. Interesting for anyone who wants to know more about the open process of citymaking.

 

Frank Kresin (research director Waag) will participate in a round table discussion themed 'Smart Citizen' during the Accenture Innovation Awards in Utrecht.

 

Marleen Stikker of Waag will give a lecture called 'Technologies for the People? A bottom-up approach to urban informatisation' at Digital Clouds and Urban Spaces. Cities as Information Systems in Vienna (Austria) on 11 June 2014.

 

The theme of the Open Data Estafette on 6 November in The Hague is Smart Cities. Marleen Stikker speaks about the role of citizens and the importance of open and fair technology for the city: Fair Meter, the City Dashboard, Smart Citizen Kit and City Service Development Kit.

 

The third National Congress Open Data will take place on 28 February 2014 at the Town hall of Eindhoven.

 

Smart Cities vs. Smart Citizens - musings on the Smart City World Expo Congress, by Frank Kresin.

 

Cities are the dominant and most successful organisations of human endeavour. This intense form of cohabitation has developed over thousands of years, attracting an increasingly larger part of the human population. While they have vibrantly developed in terms of size, density and quality of life, technology has sped up, leading to problems and possibilities that we still have to fully apprehend.

 

The festival Ruimtevolk Expeditie 2013 will take place on Thursday, November 21, in the Eusebius Church in Arnhem. Marleen Stikker is one of the keynote speakers at the festival.

 

Amsterdam wants to present itself as a leader in the field of open data, but to use open data optimally they should really be open: searchable, real time and editable.

 

From the European Open Cities project a new challenge has started to build apps that help cities manage their challenges related to tourism, titled Open Data Tourism Hack at home. It brings together two important themes of the smart city - open data and sensor networks - and uses them to help European cities find new ways to manage the big challenges and benefits of tourism today.

 

The first meeting for the World Smart Capital program of this year will take place in Amsterdam, from 14 till 16 February. A number of cities are invited to attend this Partner City Meeting to discuss their participation and experiences in the various pilot projects.

 

Our C4EU fellows arrived last week on January 14. For the project Code4EU, they will work on three challenges that the city of Amsterdam has mapped for them.

 

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.

 

The City of Amsterdam has won the first prize at the World Smart City Awards 2012 in Barcelona, with the open data program of DIVV.

 

BlindSquare, an augmented reality app that uses audio technology and crowd-sourced open data to help visually-impaired people move around and get the most out of their cities, won the first prize of the Open Cities App Challenge.

 

Waag stood to the cradle of Apps for Amsterdam, Apps for Noord-Holland and Apps for the Netherlands, and soon the contest Apps voor Europe will start.

 

The project Smart City SDK brings European datasets and the development community together. This became clear at the OK Festival in Helsinki, where projectleader Job Spiering represented Waag. And where he met up with partner cities Manchester, Barcelona and Helsinki.

 

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.

 

The Open Cities App Challenge brings together two important themes of the smart city: open data and sensor networks. As part of the Open Cities project the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS and the University Pompeu Fabra have created a data platform for developers to create services based on the data, which the cities provide.

 

Open Cities was a project of six major European cities: Helsinki, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Barcelona.

 

At the beginning of 2011, Waag organized the first 'Apps contest' in The Netherlands, called 'Apps for Amsterdam'. We published a report on the contest titled 'Apps for Amsterdam, a city opening up' (pdf), giving the results, stats and lessons learned.