A maker of things and open-source advocate, Catarina Mota is co-founder of openMaterials.org, a collaborative project dedicated to do-it-yourself experimentation with smart materials. This is a new class of materials that change in response to stimuli: conductive ink, shape-memory plastics, etc. Her goal is to encourage the making of things; to that end, she teaches hands-on workshops on high-tech materials and simple circuitry for both young people and adults–with a side benefit of encouraging interest in science, technology and knowledge-sharing. She’s working on her PhD researching the social impact of open and collaborative practices for the development of technologies. In other words: Do we make better stuff when we work together? She is also a co-founder of Lisbon’s hackerspace altLab.

“Probably the most disruptive element of this technology is not the tools themselves, but the maker culture—the community of people who sell, use, and adapt the tools of digital fabrication.”

from “R&D: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Fabrication”

No dia 9 de Dezembro de 2012, realiza-se no Laboratório de Criação Digital em Guimarães um evento aberto ao publico com o objectivo de dinamizar o movimento de Open Data em Portugal.

O evento inicia às 10 da manhã, nas instalações do LCD no Centro para os Assuntos da Arte e Arquitectura (CAAA), junto ao mercado municipal. Da parte da manhã serão realizadas algumas apresentações sobre o estado da Open Data em Portugal e movimentos civicos relacionados. Convidam-se os presentes que estejam envolvidos em projectos desta natureza a preparar apresentações de 5-10 minutos para apresentação dos seus projectos.

Segue-se um almoço convivio para discutir informalmente questões relacionadas ao desenvolvimento do Open Data em Portugal.

Da parte da tarde retornam as actividades ao LCD Guimarães para sessão de desenvolvimento em conjunto (o chamado hackaton) nos diversos projectos presentes até às 18:00 da tarde. Convidam-se os presentes a conhecer melhor os diversos projectos em desenvolvimento e descobrir formas de colaboração e entre-ajuda.

Por favor divulguem a quem esteja interessado em participar no evento.

The talks had moderate attendance as usual, most of them are already available at sapo videos. So if you missed some, or couldn’t make it to the event, go check them out! Lots of interesting stuff being presented.

The hardware den was a big success this year, some of our members spent most of their time there, giving workshops, offering support or working on their hardware related projects. Folks seem to be getting alot more into physical computing at Codebits, this year with special focus on the RaspberryPi and Ultimaker.

We also worked on some projects for the 48 hour competition, not as successfully as last year.

Speaking on a personal level, a hard lesson learned from our No Ninjas Story Slicer project presentation was not to ever prioritize impact over communication again. Our trailer presentation video was rushed and after 40 hours from working on the projects it became hard to be objective that it wasn’t actually explaining the project properly. Which was sad considering all the work we put into developing the editor and the game. In the end just showing the website and talking through the concept of the developed editor and developed game would have worked better.

We will mostly be located on the tables around the so called hardware den, where the workshops about hardware stuff take place, so look for us there. Besides giving support to the workshops by Mitch Altman and Erik de Bruijn we will have some presence of our own:

• Belmiro will give a workshop on Android NFC connections
• Filipe will give a talk on javascript creative coding
• Tiago will give a workshop on Kinect OSCeleton
• Guilherme and the Artica posse will talk about his robots and later also give a workshop about it
• Filipe will also give a lightening talk about open data in Portugal
• the altLab gang will give a workshop on hands on Arduino
• The other Filipe will give some workshops and talk about the internet of things
• Pedro will talk about computation

And ofcourse we’ll be working on some projects to hopefully take the 48 hour competition by storm again. See you there! If you’re not coming to Codebits don’t feel bad, you can still follow the talks through the stream videos later.

Some of the AZ Labs folks just spent 10 days in artistic residency in Guimarães focusing on the theme of Creative Politics, how to bring the people back in touch with politics and engage them in political issues. Many ideas were discussed, you can access more info at our wiki.

Here is a short description of the projects we focused on:

Hacking Urban Knowledge

Ana Palma, Filipe Pais, Peter Westenberg and Tiago Serra focused on developing a guide on hacking urban knowledge, as a grassroots approach for citizens to question and intervene in urban policy at a local level. You can find the guide at the wiki.

They developed concepts like the open news reporter, a way to capture news at a local level from local sources, using low cost technology to capture, open source software to transcribe it as speech to text and upload it to a server online for public access at a macro level.

An example of re-using urban resources is to use old public spaces as originally intended, in the test case they adventured themselfs in a public laundry, learning the trade from the people who still use it. In a time of automatized labour and individualistic consumerism one can learn about society and technology by regarding manual and traditional culture transactions. The target public of this intervention is anybody without access to a washing machine or anybody looking for a chat and some human contact.

An example of re-appropriating public and abandoned resources is their real estate for abandoned houses project. They made up a real estate agency, whose graphic image reminds an already existing one, to publicize abandoned houses around the city. The action intended to call attention to the large number of abandoned houses that exist in Guimarães, and in Portugal in general, and in an amusing way spread the idea that they could have new, temporary, functions and serve low income communities within a legal and organized framework. Sheltering homeless people with the consent of the owners at the expense of simple renovation works in the houses and creating public vegetable patches are two possible functions. The real estate agency would then be a platform devised to map abandoned houses and serve as an interface between owners, future tenants and the council.

Another concept developed was the hacking of city maps to include additional information that could be useful for homeless and people in financial troubles. Listing night shelters, charity institutions, government institutions, food distribution locations, meeting areas, available land for growing vegetable patches, etc.

Reclaiming Data

Ana Lobo and Filipe Cruz focused on unravelling the state of Open Data in Portugal.

The main purpose was to document the current state of the art, you can find that in the newly created blog at opendata-pt.blogspot.com.

The secondary goal was to try to answer the question on how can we get citizens more engaged in Open Data. When explained the purpose of Open Data to citizens they agree it is something useful, but they lack the motivation to get involved directly for not seeing any direct benefit from doing so. In other countries this problem is being address by governments, universities and media entities with campaigns, competitions and organized meetings. In Portugal the government has been developing platforms to empower the use of Open Data such as dados.gov.pt, but the main driving force to get people and developers involved with portuguese open data seems to be coming from the citizens with projects such as Transparência Hackday.

New Media

Ana Lobo, Filipe Cruz and Pedro Ângelo worked on the concept of doing new media that brings awareness and hopefully more engagement to social and political causes worth supporting. Sadly without time to do any proof of concept.

Pedro Ângelo was working on the concept of making an hiphop album where each track would state the point of view of different political party, to raise awareness and curiosity amongst young people on what political party diversity there is and how they relate with each other in a more engaging manner.

Filipe Cruz focused on testing the use of the Songify and Auto Rap tools developed my smule/khush. There was some prior work done about corruption in Portugal, and some new tests were made about how it can be applied to tell people about the usefulness of Open Data. The next step is making a viral video with such type of soundtracks.

Political Manager

Filipe Cruz, Pedro Ângelo, Ricardo Lobo and Filipe Pais collaborated on the concept of a Political Manager webgame, where the user would take on the role of a politician on the rise and have to deal with issues regarding popularity, finding a job, an higher education, dealing with corruption, getting involved in elections at different levels and the problems with keeping their promises. The work done was more of a conceptual nature, brainstorming on gameplay and storyline possibilities.

Comparative News

Ricardo Lobo and Mécia Sá focused on the comparative news project, where the goal is to help citizens understand the trends and tendencies in the political discourse that the media present to them everyday. The strategy is to compare different sources of information, like newspapers, radio and television using data visualization. The intuition behind this project is that comparing sources enable people to see the big picture, to identify what’s important and what’s not. You can find a schematic illustrating the concept of the project here.

Forest Fire Data

Mónica Mendes and Pedro Ângelo also focused on finding out what data is available about Forest Fires in Portugal, especially how much money is spent. This info was wanted for use on their installation project Play With Fire

During the first weekend we had running at LCD a parallel event named Antropocode, part of the Atlantic Arc Summer of Labs 2012. During the weekend over a dozen artists and hackers from Portugal and Spain were gathered developing concepts and projects in a hackaton about the borderline of body and technology. Some of the projects were also related to the creative politics theme.

The hackaton is now over but the Creative Politics artistic residency continues with a dozen other folks, mostly folks from Portugal but also including some foreigners. The first days have been focused on brainstorming project ideas. You can find more information on our wiki.

Some examples of projects currently being developed:

• Reclaiming Data
  Research and documentation of open data initiatives in Portugal, the end goal is to develop a viral video calling for more active participation and involvement from the citizens or a webtool to request missing data.
• Hacking Urban Resources
  Research and documentation of ways to hack urban resources to improve the way of life at a local level in Guimarães, bringing back the control of the city to the citizens. A sample book on how to re-appropriate, re-use local resources and also on how to re-learn useful old skills.
• Political Manager
  A web based game where you play the role of a rising politician and have to improve your skills to build your career without succumbing to the pressures of the dark side.
• Comparative News
  The goal of this project is to help citizens understand the trends and tendencies in the political discourse that the media present to them everyday. The strategy is to compare different sources of information, like newspapers, radio and television using data visualization. The intuition behind this project is that comparing sources enable people to see the big picture, to identify what’s important and what’s not.

Many issues were brought to the table that night thinking about why our society is in this crisis and how to fix it. Some claimed the problem lies on the elected officials, others stated the people were not interested in politics enough to cast well grounded votes, that the whole process was a propaganda façade. There is no accountability for void campaign promises. So every election boils down to another propaganda campaign and focus group promises. The truth is the majority of voters don’t have time, nor interest, to get to know what their representatives are doing while in office, nor do they know their real intentions. ARTV exists, but people don’t watch it.

One radical idea one of us had was to pass a law to make every member of parlament sing before speaking at the assembly. Singing brings joy. Soon the concept morphed into another, hack the ARTV stream and realtime songify everything that was being said, that is, making automated music out of what is being said. And yes, it’s possible. Might get a bit boring after the first few minutes though.

A few weeks later i found this app for iphone that did just that, turn realtime speech into song. It’s called Songify by Khush Inc. They also have a Rappify app which does the same but turning it into rap instead of pop. As soon as i tested the app an urge came over me to bring this idea into a concept album asap. And now that i finally found myself with a couple days of free time, here it is.

The concept slightly mutated to songify a televised talk about corruption in Portugal. To make things clear: the point is not to mock the talk about anti-corruption, but to bring more awareness to it.

The anti-corruption theme is no stranger to me. In 2011 i had already started a side project called Politiquisses to address this exact issue. Since then i have also started and curated a label dedicated to political and social activism known as Anonymous Archives.

Most people nowadays have access to independent media through the internet, yet so few actually use it. There is such an overload of information that we seem to almost shut ourselves out to the rest of the world and focus only on our facebook group of friends. So independent media has the channel but not the attention.

While organizing the 99 Anonymous mixtape series i analyzed the problem to a further extent and noticed projects trying alternative ways to bring important information to awareness. Projects such as The Juice Media’s Rap News which presents important global news as a comic rap sketch, much easier to digest. Other projects like the viral video “Nobody cannot cross it” make use of parody to bring awareness to important tragedies. There is always the problem that it might be miss-interpreted as a mockery or an insult, but just getting people to address the issue is already a win.

The album is called “LCD Mostra-se” and is a collection of field recordings from the self-titled event that occured in Guimarães on the 21 and 22 of July, organized by our LCD brothers.

It’s available free for download as the first release of Audiência Zero Sound Archives, the newly formed netlabel dedicated to release audioworks related to our Audiência Zero labs network (LCD, xDA and altLab).

xDA & FabLabCoimbra on Vimeo.

xdatelier.org
novotecna.pt/fablab