Yesterday a Roomware Devhouse was held at the Ex Machina office in Amsterdam. Here are some pictures:

To summarize briefly: Roomware is a piece of middleware to facilitate the running of software in a physical space. This most directly involves Bluetooth and RFID like applications which by their nature are limited to a specific area.

You set up a Roomware server and it handles the communication to and from the devices. My small project for the afternoon (we had some ideas for projects which would have been hard to finish) was making a badge clubs can put on their website to show who are in the club at a given moment. With the messaging functionality that was developed the same afternoon, it would even be possible to send your friends at a club messages.

Technically simple, the concept demonstrates how close physical computing has become. The Roomware server does a great job removes the heavy lifting in interfacing with libraries for Bluetooth and RFID.

A great next step would be to add an XMPP layer on top of the roomware server. This way you could theoretically connect your Adium to some clubs of your choice, and see people entering and leaving in your buddy list and even message them.

The only problem is what to use as a unique identifier as your Bluetooth name. I’m a proponent of using a URL but a lot of people do something like their Hyves username or their Twitter name. Fortunately this distinction is mostly blurred using Google’s new Social Graph service.

I like the vibe of devhouses and building something in a strict time limit, but working solo puts limits on your reach. Next time it would be great to work in a team and build something as a group.

Tijs and I have just returned from a quick weekend in Berlin, let me write a quick wrapup of the Plazecamp and try to answer the questions I posed before we went.

The day at the Plazes HQ started with a brief explanation of the API (video) and a day of hacking with access to the plazes devs so any problem could be fixed very quickly. Peter Rukavina, Plazes’s advocate, had flown over and he wrote a detailed wrapup of the event.
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We got a small notebook on Reboot to jot down our thoughts. I made extensive notes during the first half of the first day and during lunch I then managed to lose this book. I’m writing this from memory which should still be very accurate, but might not completely capture my thoughts of the moment.

Jeremy Keith did a presentation early on the first day about Soul online which was a great combination of right and left brain. His talk about soul and provenance was a nice story with a microformat sneaked in here and there. His idea, that who you are online is defined by your presence, ties into current projects which create and combine presence streams.

Transparency

This does raise issues about privacy, authority and reputation. A quote by Gibson says that we cannot escape the power of transparency: “It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.”

People are multifaceted and are becoming more and more transparent. So this way you would be able to see a complete picture of someone and you would have increasing difficulty hiding parts of yourself from people. A big objection to be raised by this, is that by tieing together the story we tell ourselves, we lose control about the story we tell others.

One idea we had to solve this is to create a service which will disinform webservices for you. So suppose you give it your Flickr login, it will create ten more Flickr users under your name with semi-random information and pictures associated to you. This way a casual Googler will have a very difficult time to form an accurate and reliable picture of you. Increasing crap might be our best way to privacy.

Provenance

The concept of provenance —I think a very difficult word for non-native English speakers— is a nice way to check the reliability of people online and to form yourself an image of someone you ‘meet’ online. This is nice but people change their minds, ideas progress and evolve over time. Someone who held one political or religious view in the past, may have changed that.

This is not a big problem, it is in fact very human, but currently people in general do not respect that. Most people are more inclined to trust someone who looks like he is sure of what he is saying and has said the same thing for all his life. People who are not confident or who flip-flop are less trusted.

I hope the future with its unimaginable tools of transparency makes people adjust.