Groningen –Drie journalistieke projecten krijgen een bijdrage van de provincie Groningen uit het Mediafonds. Het gaat om een documentaire van Ewald Wels over Chileense vluchtelingen in Delfzijl, een radiodocumentaire van Willem de Haan en Lejo Siepe over de strijd tegen de georganiseerde misdaad in Groningen en een boek over de rol van Groningen als energieproducent door Louis Stiller. Bij elkaar…

Media, play, community, and Sightless Slapsie

Media, play, community, and Sightless Slapsie By | October 24, 2016 | 0 I was given the opportunity to give the keynote at an event called “This is Media.” “This is Media”? I said to my self as I prepared my conceptual presentation and imagined illustrative game. “Media?!” (as in “what do they mean, ‘media’? and “media,” what a great opportunity to make the connection between media and the play…

It still feels like I am leaving my comfort zone with writing weekenotes, nevertheless, similar to the activities that come with my new new role as a chairman of the Open Coop, I really enjoy this change. 

We are facing a few challenges with developing the Open Coop and cultivating the organisation. Being a open bottom up organisation it might come across almost effortless how we generate great initiatives. Generally  we can claim that there are more group benefits than there are damaging events. We are planning a group workshop in the middle of February and I will develop the program for the day. My aim is to have everybody in the group involved in finding pragmatic ways of working and create momentum for the execution of our cooperative plans and initiatives. More on this in a later note.

On Friday we travelled 3 hours from Amsterdam by car since the next Sandberg@Mediafonds Masterclass meeting was located at a farm in Groningen. The program organisers spoiled us with excellent food, a long hike along the coastline and inspiring lectures and discussions.

We heard about the making-of and the phases of several Subjective Atlas projects by Annelies de Vet. Her publications are anthropological design studies about perceived soft cultural boundaries and manifestations. 

Bregtje van der Haak made the point that journalism is a complex cultural practice and gave a lecture about state of the art documentary making. Martijn de Waal approached the subject of non-linear journalism from the perspective of an integrated platform. 

Today the short film Yim & Yoyo aired on national television channel Nederland 3. The film, one in a series of 6 shorts called Nu of Nooit! for Zapp, KRO and Mediafonds, premiered in Amsterdam last Sunday in theater EYE.

It was an honor to have participated in the making of this short(as the on set VFX supervisor, see this earlier post for pictures), and hope to someday work with the crew on other projects in the future.

Update:

"It's interesting. Before satellite AIS came along, you'd talk to people and they'd just assume that ships were tracked wherever they went in the world. But the reality was that there were 60,000 ships out there carrying nine trillion dollars' worth of cargo, and when the captain went over the horizon, unless he sent a signal, no-one knew where he went. That's all changed now," says ExactEarth's John Allan.

Yesterday the final presentations of Curating Reality - New tools for investigative journalism, this year's Sandberg at Mediafonds masterclass for designers and media professionals, took place at the promethean Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam. This is where we presented our proposal for developing Shippr, a maritime datastore. Here is a brief write up of our presentation.

--

According to the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations specialized agency with responsibility for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine pollution by ships, "international shipping is the principal carrier of world trade, transporting around 90% of global commerce."

Despite their ubiquitous influence, the manifold aspects of marine traffic modestly appear in the news. We read about ships when they are pirated, capsize or spill. But what happens on sea in between these events? What can we learn from the oceans of data that are produced by tens of thousands of ships and marine infrastructure roaming the seas?

With Shippr, we would like to build an public datastore for maritime data, pooling multiple sources and databases into one open directory. This data can range from location of ships via their AIS transponders, cargo, ship owners, and destinations, to weather events, environmental statistics, port CO2 reduction, and even acts of piracy and terrorism.

Anything that happens on sea does not have to stay on sea: it can help economic researchers understand emerging patterns of behaviour, it can benefit environmental research, but it can also make the forgotten space more visible for a larger audience of curious spotters, collectors and even gamers.

Ships turn off their AIS signal in the Gulf of Oman

Wouldn't it be awesome to have a Fantasy Football for ships? A Facebook embedded synthesis of Championship Manager and Ports of Call, using realworld data like weekly trading results from the Shippr datastore, challenging your online friends? Ship Manager would be a great game to source information from marine enthusiasts, students and the general audience. And to distribute public awareness of maritime affairs.

One Shippr application could be a Foursquare for ships 

Another application could be a Foursquare for ships. Instead of people checking in, it would be ships, telling harbour masters, bunker suppliers and ship spotters when they enter a port. Or when they survived 10 hurricanes ("Storming through! You just unlocked the Hurrican Badge!"). Or become the Mayor of the Port of Shanghai. This could be an app with endless specs: we would love to 'love' a ship we see pass by, and follow it on its route towards the Strate of Hormuz. Or search for the world's most environmentally effective fleet.

We intend to develop the Shippr datastore in the near future. We hope Shippr will have significance for domains outside of journalism, like academic research, information design and, of course, professional shipping companies.