Unconference in Amersfoort, The Netherlands

Meet Je Stad, the citizen science project to measure and analyze the weather within your city, held a get-together with other such projects last weekend. Geek out! I joined in, since my life motto is "Have fun! Learn! Make a difference!"

Geeking out in the Amersfoort Fablab. Happy people! But cold.

Penny and I left the other guys to their fun with the Lacuna satellite on Friday to explore Amersfoort.

We rented bicycles and rode to Kamp Amersfoort, which was a concentration camp in WWII.

At the camp memorial

Parking at the train station. City bike rental near there.

We returned the bikes and started the city tour, following the GPS track from the Amersfoort website.

What is going on here? 

We needed a hot chocolate warm-up!

Arrival night, walking through the old city gate, looking for food.

The unconference was built around moving from an industrial model to a collective model of science and society:

from driving to walking; from hierarchy to networking; from money to happiness measures; from debt to CO2 measurement

While Penny and I were being tourists, Roger, Martin, and Ketil from Norway joined our hosts from Amersfoort, and Thomas from Lacuna, to build a satellite link for our weather data. The satellite is the first open source satellite. It's from Lacuna and co-funded by ESA, the European Space Agency. They did it! The very first pass of the satellite received data and transmitted back to earth. There were some bugs, but they fixed them and, magically, it worked by the next pass! "Magically", I say, because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Thanks, Arthur C. Clarke) It was actually hard work for many hours by our geeky friends. The best antenna they built looks quite artistic to me, but I didn't take a picture. Sorry.

This slide shows another amazing project - getting enough electricity from microbes to power transmissions to the satellite. Currently, MjS uses LoRaWan, local radio wide-area-network. The opportunities are now wider! Maybe in developing countries, where batteries are harder to find, or out in the forests, or other hard-to-reach places?

On Sunday, I tried to build an Android app for my phone. If I get the "magic" right, I will have an icon on my phone that shows me the temperature and humidity on my deck. It's a work in progress.

The MjS group is so much fun to hang out with. Thank you, Diana, Harmen, and Matthijs, hosts with the mostest. Thanks to all the participants who stepped up to make a very interactive and active unconference!