I just finished the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter. The series is a look at the (solution to, reason for, questions surrounding the) Fermi Paradox through three potential lenses. Best and most raw sci-fi I've ever read. The books left me hopeful, suspended, disgusted and in awe of the depth of this man's observation of humanity.
If you're looking for something lighter, perhaps check out Time Ships by the same author. This was the only authorized sequel to the legendary classic The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
I'm currently working my way through Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy. His writing is incredibly insightful and psychedelic. I'd also suggest the Time Ships (only authorized Time Machine sequel) and anything from the Xeelee universe. Maybe start with Vacuum Diagrams?
David Brin's Uplift series is brilliantly written, and personifies non-human characters wonderfully.
Heinlein has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, and his writing always makes me giddy.
The depth of his exploration of the human condition through the continuation of H.G. Wells' classic just floored me. My jaw was dropped practically from page one.
Hmm, codefordenmark does not seem to be used by anyone, so maybe the concept hasn't reached us (yet!). :-)
There are a bunch of local hackathon events, like "Hack Aarhus" etc., but in my opinion it would be cool to help out whenever you had the time and not only at events (and not involving prizes and competition, which many of these events do prefer).
Thanks for the link. :-) It's nice to see that these initiatives also exist in Europe. In addition to the above, this really makes me think "Why the hell is there not something like this in Denmark?".
Look for information you would want to see in your available media -- find a dataset and build it into a useful app to be filtered and queried in different ways. Map data points to physical locations. Correlate those things. At some point it all starts to look like a population density heat map, but sometimes you find good stuff in there. And people want to see it. They need more tangible access to all the real world data we have been collecting. Otherwise, what's the point?
I worked for a year at a newspaper and built apps and stuff like that -- it was the most fulfilling work I've ever done and I wish the situation had been able to work out. If I ever get a chance to do real news apps again, I would jump on it. Enjoy your opportunity, Anders, and be prepared to show your work.
Sometimes, the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is applicable. If you build something that shows you CAN build something, show it to the right people and you will attract attention.
Thanks a bunch for sharing your insights, it's really helpful to me. Your newspaper experience is very motivating too :-)
In Aarhus, we do have an open data collection called ODAA (http://www.odaa.dk/) that might be an avenue to pursue. A few developer friends and I have played around with it once, but we quickly discovered that despite it being relatively easy to just "make something", it's much harder to "make something useful to others" and we'd love to have had a government representative in the same room to guide our skills in the right direction.
I completely agree with you on what's the point of all this data if we don't turn it into something people can understand and use in a meaningful way. What I'm missing is that person / people saying "Hey, can someone turn THIS heatmap data into X thing, that would really help!".
A newspaper sounds like a great place to learn deeply about different local issues / problems that could be solved. I have a few journalist friends I could try and contact, see if they have encountered something.
Also, thanks a bunch for those inspirational links. They are bookmarked for sure! If / when I do create something, might I throw it your way for feedback?
If you know any journalists, I'm sure they'll have ideas -- They are (in my limited experience) intelligent and incredibly busy people, leaving them with little time to really dive in to every topic they see that interests them. Also, news organizations have been slow to catch up to the internet age. At least in the US, there are only a handful of papers REALLY diving into the app side of things. Thankfully that number is growing.
I'd love to see what you and your friends are doing with open data. I'm finding it difficult to stay motivated in my own area, with few developers and little free time.
Glad to see that people world over are investing time in open data. :)
I have a few in different areas, mostly writing for technology-based magazines but have previously worked at local and larger newspapers.
As for news orgs. to be a bit slow, I hear you completely! I conducted a closed workshop with a corporation that develops enterprise-level software for newspapers and you could literally wow them with simple CSS3 transitions and animations, let alone flexbox layouts. :-)
Motivation is a big factor for me too, I tend to dream about applying my skills to the common good, but end up creating either entertainment-based webapps and / or tools other web developers (https://github.com/AndersSchmidtHansen?tab=repositories).
I'll keep you in the know! I think that investing our skills into evolving our society (local and global) is the next, natural step for us geeks. ;-)
