I’m one of the founders of Mediamatic in Amsterdam. We started as an artist-run place being experimental and helping each other to have space for that, to present it, to help with technology, to play with the artistic possibilities of new technologies. And that’s what we’re still doing. We have non-paying members but lots of members already as an artistic organization. We are social network based, since I think in 2003 we started to have members. So the core communication of our organization, but also the core development tool of the organization, is a social network.

We go so far that we have online dating integrated in our institution. I think we still do. We’re the only one in the world that does that as a cultural institution. It started as sort of a polemic experiment, but we kept it because it was immediately successful, and we can also defend it quite well to the Ministry of Culture that frowned a little bit at first at this initiative, by explaining that this is the most clear expression of our ambition to be a social hub as a cultural organisation. And that having people meet around their passions is about the most important thing that we can organize.

Back in the old days of the 20th century we were doing weird experiments with social media. This is a sketch we made for a history sharing website, a public social media based history sharing website. It was about the people of the village of Zeist in the Netherlands and it envisions the people in the village sharing stories about the history of their city, about their personal histories and their memories. So this is a personal page of the girl, Kerrigan, and it’s stories about here. This is Bert, the stories he tells. This is sort of an initial sketch of a social graph. This is metadata based. Themes, collections of stories, so this was about food in the 1930s, and this one is about food in the 1970s. We see that the food gets more colorful but also that the stories change.

This is just sketches. We made it for a bank. Actually the bank had their hundredth anniversary and they had one really bright innovative director and he said, “Make sketches for me, I’ll sell this internally.” He failed. The rest of the bank started really worrying about the idea that the people in that village would start writing their own history. It was not the way banks function, it was not the way they thought – they really had a more classical idea about where history comes from, people who are at the top of the pyramid. This is not surprising for a bank director, of course. So the project was shelved.

I went on for five years to show these slides at all these conferences, like these kinds of conferences, but without heritage people, of course, because in those days heritage people didn’t do new media, but in the end, in 2003 we launched with the Amsterdam. Oh, my last slide, this may be default. It’s still downloading. Shit. It’s the most important one. Now, this is just a neighborhood website that the Amsterdam museum made, an exhibition about the Eastern part of the city and we approached them because we heard this and there was a new head of educational, 23 years old I believe, so we thought we have a chance, there’s a young person, they may understand us. We joined, trying to raise funds and make a project. The goal was to have fifty shared stories at the end of the exhibition, and we made that easily. By now it’s almost 2,000 shared stories and over 7,000 substantial additions in the comments. So not like comments, but really, “I remember something too, I’ll add to your story.” It’s part of the collection of the museum now because they recognize it as a historical document. This was also an interesting moment, the head of collections came to our office and said, “yeah, we’ve decided that the story project that you started is not just educational, it’s a historical document. We have to conserve it.” So I said, “Yeah, fine, great.” They said, “You have to help us because we can’t conserve it, it keeps moving.” The website was still online and people kept adding stories and comments so they thought it was – it was important historically but useless for them as a museum. So we made snapshots of the January 1 version of it, and they could allow the project to go on moving.

What’s interesting is that all these stories are often quite simple and anecdotal. By themselves maybe trivial, but by now we are at 2,000 stories and if you start searching for key words, it has a very simple CMS, people are supported in adding a little bit of metadata, very common concepts, then you get all kinds of collective ideas, other views of what’s happening in this neighborhood. So here we’re searching for angst and there’s a hundred and sixty hits on this site so if you browse through this you get a feeling for what uneasiness could be in such a neighborhood. And you can search for a lot of other things of course. It’s by now connected to Jasper’s network of national history sites, so you can, from here, do combined searches in other websites and you find they are in another website and there’s all kinds of connections starting to happen. So that’s quite an interesting thing.

I can’t show you the last slide, it is still downloading, it’s a really interesting thread that has 570 comments at the moment, it’s an old guy that found some photos back about how they were playing in the street when he was a kid, and all the kids from the street started finding this page, and adding memories to this one story that he made. So actually there’s a couple of pages around it, and all in all there’s over a thousand contributions from this particular group of kids that played in the street in the 1950s. You could do a PhD on that thread alone. It’s amazing what is happening on these sites, although they’re very simple.

Another project that we started to do when this was running was the Jewish monument. The Jewish monument was an interesting idea, I got this phone call from an old professor that said, “I have some money and I’m going to make a database of all the dead Jews of the Netherlands.” That’s actually how he said it, “Dode Joden.” I said, “Look, didn’t we have a problem with databases and Jews? Wasn’t that the reason that the Germans could kill them so efficiently? Especially in the Netherlands?” At first he was like, “That guy is crazy,” but he said, “No, they’re only dead Jews and they can’t be killed anymore and actually there’s a lot of people that need to know about them, so I want to build a database.” So we agreed and we started building the database, quite an interesting project. When you are asked to make a monument, and design the homepage of a monument, you sort of realize that usability is not an issue. Monuments are not for using, they are for contemplating. They have to stop you in your tracks, so this is the home page of the monument. It’s a pretty useless homepage, but it’s an info graphic. Actually, the colored dots you see, those are the dead Jews. There are over 100,000 and they are grouped, they are color-coded for gender and age, grouped in families and these are all of them that we had in the archive. Actually it’s a live generated view. It’s all the people that we have in the archive at the moment, because the snapshot is from yesterday.

You can search the database. For instance, enter a city, and then you see that most of these Jews lived in Amsterdam by the 1940s. And if you click on dots in that map, maybe I can zoom in a bit. You see the groupings? Those are families and this is an elderly home. Red are women, so it’s an elderly home for women, all killed. If you click on that map you go directly into the database, you find a family. Every dot connects to a family in a database. It was three years of work and they spent about 2 million Euros on combining 600 historical sources to build this database. We didn’t do that, we only did concept and design and building the actual web server. But it was an enormous project and we were building this at the same time as when we were seeing the success of this little history site in Amsterdam Oost. So I tried to convince these old history professors and representatives of the Jewish community in the Netherlands that we have to go with user-generated content. That we have to make a community site out of this and they explained to me why that would be really crazy. For one, because history is something for experts. This is of course a very obvious answer to expect from a retired history professor. And the other guys in the steering committee were representing Jewish groups in society, were primarily concerned about anti-Semitism. They were very concerned about all kinds of vandalism, anti-Semitic vandalism in their database, so no way were they going to open it. Not even comments would be allowed.

The only thing we could build was this. What I’m doing here is from the family that I found, I see their address, Leibestratte, and I can click on that. And then I see the neighbors. So they’re on the second floor, this is third floor. See? Another seven people. And there you go. (name) and his children. So this quite touching to see this and browse through this, but at the same time something really interesting happened. This made the 8:00 news when it went live in 2005. Within four weeks we had more than 10,000 additions in the mail. Photos, corrections, additions and from that moment on the editorial team that was formed to maintain this website had a backlog of six months, which was a decision. We don’t know really how much time this is going to take, so let’s say it’s six months. And then whenever we’re able to reduce this backlog, so there was an enormous problem growing in the maintenance of the site. And that led to a new version that we are still actually working on, but it was launched last year September, which is the community version of this website. The maintenance of the whole project and the ownership went to the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum. It’s a younger generation that manages that so suddenly we were able to discuss all these user generated community-based ways of working. Also, of course, because they learned that doing it the old way with an editorial team was very expensive, and very slow, and basically also discouraging the people that were sending their information.

If you send some photos and some corrections, and you have to wait for more than half a year before you see something change on the website, you’re not going to do it again. So here we are, the old monument is still here, where everyone is the same number of pixels, and there is not order. And here we can say, “Okay, but if there’s pictures of these people it will be more engaging so let’s put some faces on the homepage.” Let’s have a photo bar for people who we don’t know who they are, the people in these pictures. Let’s have the comments celebrate the newest pictures and do all the things that we are now quite used to. And this is an enormous success. The latest comments – you see that since the launch out, almost 10,000 comments and most of them are really like substantial corrections and additions to the database. So we’re going at five to ten times the speed of the editorial team at the moment.

Here you can – let’s see how this works. I couldn’t rehearse. So here you see these comments, they’re all people that know stuff about the people in the database and add little info and corrections. My favorite page is this one, it’s the newest pictures. This counter here shows all the pictures in the system, and more than half of those pictures have been added since September of last year. So here we are also seeing that we are having five times the speed of the editorial team with the community. And at a much lower budget. And it’s fantastic to see what all these pictures are. Most of them are people, but often it’s also places, it’s documents, and the stream is only growing.

This one, of course, is – something we are building also, it’s the Jewish monument . Since we have all the address data of these people, we can tell you wherever you’re sending in the Netherlands, which was the closest house. And you can walk up there and take a picture of it, or at least see it. So this will be the mobile app for you, anywhere where you are. Like you’re looking for a shop or whatever, you can find the actual houses of these people and see who they were. And maybe add to the database again.

A little video. But what’s interesting is what we’re growing now is this database that started as an expert database, gets a community layer added to it, we’re starting to make a mobile application that runs on the main database. Now, there’s another place in Amsterdam which is an old theater that was used as a station for driving these Jewish Amsterdamers together before they went on the train to the East. That theater, of course, never was used again as a theater. It’s a monument. And it has the classical typology of the monument wall of names, you’ve seen them all over the world. So there’s this wall of 6,000 family names. And people are visiting that wall and looking up the names of their relatives.

The museum asked us, “Can you connect the database to the wall? Can you make something nice, maybe a nice monitor in the same room, or a beamer or something with a simple keyboard so people can look up their families?” And then we looked at that wall and said, “Why can’t we change the wall, turn the wall into a touch screen?”And they said yeah, but its’ a monument, you can’t touch it. We discovered that it was made out of glass. The green is actually engraved topography in the glass and then they put light in it, and behind the glass is just black. So in the black we put RFID tags and then we made a special device, a modified iPod touch, so actually the iPod that you see here helps you get into the database. You’re standing at this wall, looking up the name of the family, and then you can hold the iPod and because of the (RFID tags) in the wall, it knows which manes you’re pointing at with it, so it takes over immediately the same list of names and then you can go on pointing and with your finger drill down in the database and find individuals.

Oh, I have a very short video about this. There’s sound.
The iPod is a multimedia guide (Dutch)

That’s an inappropriate final shot. We use it for other things too, that same device, in other shows. That’s not a Jewish bicycle. What’s really amazing is to see that most of these visitors are old. They’re often in their seventies and eighties and they are using the iPod touches without any trouble. They are used to pointing and they go on pointing all these devices and they are fascinated and where normally they would never go to the kiosk to access the database website, here they are suddenly finding much more, because it remains tactile and it remains physical.

So that’s quite an interesting development. And then another thing we did with this, more recently this year, was a project around Remembrance Day and Liberation Day. In the Netherlands we are at (name of company) and the moment making an exhibition about telling stories, sharing stories, stories about resistance and we work together with the Amsterdam Remembrance Day Committee to do something with these Jewish addresses, these homes. What we did was make a special supplement of the local newspaper and printed all of the addresses. The paper says is this your house? Your home. And then it’s a like a telephone book, you can just look up all the addresses. There are over 20,000 addresses in the City of Amsterdam that are in the database.

It’s very simple, you just look up yourself. In the rest of the newspaper there were all kinds of questions that you could entertain about this discovery, like, “Oh, these people lived on my street or even maybe in my house.” And we suggested that people take this page, the right page, out of the newspaper and hang it in their window on Remembrance Day. Many, many people did that. And of course there was a URL, look up who lived there on the website. And maybe you can tell us a story about your house or leave a picture. Then the newspaper goes on talking about other things that we do in the exhibition. It’s not just about the Second World War, it’s also trying to connect Remembrance Day to more contemporary issues of freedom and resistance. So it’s connected to Arabic Spring, it connects to the Squatters Riot in Amsterdam and I’ll show you a little bit of a video what we do in the exhibitions.

This was the special learning page we made for the newspaper, it says Jewish Houses and you can just very simply type in your street. It gives you a list of people. If you type in your address you get a list of the people that lived in your home, if anyone lived n your home. If you type in your street, it’s almost a guaranteed hit. So this was quite a busy website, people would find these pages. Those are all pictures of people that live in these houses, so we did this activation through the process and getting people to check out the website, but also go out on the street, take their phone, take a picture of the house and upload it to the website. That’s still going on. This is how we enrich the website, but this is not the main goal, of course. If I just need pictures of these houses then I can use Google street view.

The goal of this exercise is not the crowdsourcing, but engaging the crowd. Which is, as far as I’m concerned, a more interesting result of any crowd sourcing exercise. So here, that’s just the people the live in that house.

In the exhibition that we are still running, we just print all these pictures. So people know that they become part of the exhibition. Every day one of our interns is looking at the website, finding new pictures, and then printing them and sticking them on the wall. So it’s a growing sculpture. And some people also come to the exhibition to bring a picture. They don’t know how to upload. They saw it. They don’t want to learn, they come and bring the picture and tell a story. So that’s the last little thing that I’d like to show you.

The exhibition is a mix of contemporary art that plays with distance concepts, documentations of resistance. There’s a big collection of protest signs from Egypt, for instance, collected by a group of artists in Egypt. There’s a fantastic digital paintball graffiti cannon. A highly recommended art installation. There’s also a story lab. One part of the exhibition is closed off, we have a lot of loans from the public. We started with loans from the Resistance Museum and the Press Museum in Amsterdam and in our communications tell people that if they bring us a story or an object, they get free entrance. So continuously people are coming with little things, small stories, small objects, that they want to record with us. We teach them how to do it themselves, and that’s what the last five minute video is about. They wear white coats and white gloves. It’s more ritual than technical.

Video Transcript:

Employee: What does this tag? you can connect your profile with the tag, and then you can link it to your object. So first we’re going to make a registration for you, so place the heart against the heart here to start.

So they do on-site facebook connect or a registration to our own database to be able to participate in the implementation process.

Employee: So now you can see that they have opened. So now you want to add your object. The name of the object, yes, you want to give it as short title.
Visitor: Can you tell me the date please?
Employee: Now I’m going to link the object that you registered on line with the RFID tag on this label.

There are fixed dates in the week where groups come through and learn how to do this themselves, but basically you can do it on a walk in basis.

Employee: So, put your object. Yeah.
Other language.
Voice: “To the children of the world.”

There’s wall-mounted cameras for corporate parties. We can make (drowned out by music from video) it really works in these shows. That was a physical, an off-line I like it, so it goes to her I like it on her Facebook wall.

Visitor: I’m born on the 28th of December in 1939 and I call myself a war child and that’s why I think I’m here in this exhibition.
Employee: So, okay, so what has been worth in your life to resist from?
Visitor: It’s a part of life, I think. Resistance. Because not telling the truth makes a lot of problems in people’s lives.
Employee: Any special experiences with that?
Visitor: Yes, there is a conservator of art in the State of New Zealand Amsterdam in 1986 a wonderful paining from

Really quite an interesting story was head of the restoration department of the Staalig and the was gagged when he was trying to become a whistle blower on a fuck up with a big, big, high profile restoration project. And he’s now coming to record that. But it’s not so relevant.
So basically what we are trying to do there, and it’s something that we always try to do — is have a combination of doing quite serious and functional heritage projects, at the same time play in our own projects and have experimental set ups to learn how we can advance this exchange with the audience that we make with our websites.

Actually, I think – is that enough.

So thank you very much for listening.

—

Willem is the founder of Mediamatic, a cultural institution, new media agency and technology developer based in the Netherlands, where he is responsible for general management, curatorial strategy and art direction.

MediaMatic has diverse activities covering everything from publishing to opening an Arabic department store, all in the name of culture. As a new media agency, Mediamatic has a reputation for developing complex social networks and connecting these to the real world.

Willem spoke at the MuseumNext conference in Edinburgh about developing Digitaal Monument Joodse Gemeenschap in Nederland, a virtual community which lets the public share new information, pictures and stories on people relating to the Jewish community in the Netherlands during World War 2.