OpenData, BigData, Infographics, Visualizations and Data journalism are all buzz words and movements which started to get quite some traction lately.

While there are lively ecosystems of blogs around niche topics like visualizations, processing or data journalism there’s not enough interdisciplinary communication going on in my opinion.

Well, how about creating it by interviewing those experts, give them some airtime and maybe even connect previously unknown scientists, journalists, hackers, politicians and ideators to each other.

Since i’m still playing with the idea there’s nothing fixed just yet. Language might be english or german depending on who’s in front of the camera. Also if you’re interested in being a host or you’re having a name suggestion let me know.

Would you listen to or watch it?

John Perry:

One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent.

Being a heavy procrastinator myself I agree with John Perry but I’d like to extend one point. While some work can be encouraging even slightly more can have devastating effects. From my personal experience a task overflow can turn everything into white noise at which stage you’re not caring about any of it anymore.

Positive side effect, you’re able to work off those items quite relaxed. On the other side you might also over-commit to incoming work because estimating white noise is kind of difficult.

On another note, have a look at the awesome copy in the article footer. Brutally honest.

Yesterday, on january 19th, Swiss OpenData enthusiasts and activists have founded the OpenData.ch Association in Bern. It’s goal is to bring together citizens, journalists, designers and developers to realize ideas based on publicly available OpenData and OpenGovernmentData.

More about the goals and mindset of OpenData.ch can be found in the German-Only - Open Government Data for Switzerland Manifesto.

If you’re up to create something with OD, whether your a developer or not, reserve march 30th and 31st when the next Make.opendata.ch-Hackathon will be held. Need, some inspiration of what the first one was like? Checkout the great summary by datavisualization.ch or read my hackathon review.

Thrilled to start this new chapter with an amazingly diversified group of people.

James Hague:

Be widely read. There are endless books about architecture, books by naturalists, both classic and popular modern novels, and most of them have absolutely nothing to do with computers or programming or science fiction.

Seems funny now, but had the most difficult time to let go of all those other things when started studying. No more philosophy or politics just algorithm runtimes and graph theory.

via the codeproject newsletter

Richard Minerich:

We work in an environment where hearsay and taste drive change instead of studies and models.

While VCs and influencers encourage us to jump on the emotional UX and viral social-network train to make our ideas succeed, we tend to not consult our logs first. After all, tapping in the dark is not science, but that’s sort of another topic.

Richard Minerich writes about the shift in programming languages away from proven ones to scripting languages. I tend to agree that dynamic languages should mainly be used as glue. Building a house out of porous cardboard could work if you’re an experienced professional, but it’ll probably fail for most of us. That said most of my code to date is dynamically typed because it’s just way to comfortable.

However there’s no test that’ll cover every single error case on the other side there always will be static and correct formulas.