innoviz project - summary report

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InnoViz

Project Summary Report

April 2013

By Olga Paraskevopoulou

Creative Industries Research Centre Amsterdam (CIRCA)

Project website http://innoviz.net
http://innoviz.net/http://innoviz.net/


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InnoViz Project Summary Report

Project website http://innoviz.net

Research Background

The research sets out to explore the appearance of a new set of organizations and social networks around

them, that are being built on the principles of openness, collaboration, and the sharing of knowledge and

expertise. To examine the socio-economic conditions and peer practices that give birth to such collective,

bottom-up initiatives in the tech industry, the researcher was embedded in the Appsterdam foundation. The

project took place from March 2012 to February 2013, and a crucial part of the research was to harvest

online data and design a practical study that would quantitatively measure the impact of social and

professional networks in the tech scene.

There are various technology communities and networks in the Amsterdam area, and particularly, there is a

growing network of App Makers that flourish on the ground of an economy of exchange. Rooted, historically,

in community-led development, such as the Linux and the Apache systems, peer practices in the tech

industry are featuring a new socio-economic trend, one that is more decentralized and cooperative. A

networked model that is based on recognition, and trust not on hierarchy and control.

As software development becomes important for players in all industries, such networks have been brought

to the spotlight. To examine and asses the network model of cooperation between tech practitioners, the

InnoViz project took the Appsterdam organization as a case-study and source of data. By observing and

harvesting data from a real world example of a network organization, the goal was to validate the network

effects on open innovation and measure the size of the tech scene in Amsterdam.

Why is the research relevant today?

Due to the economic recession and austerity, innovation becomes an urgent call. A call to open and reinvent

traditional structures and models of economic growth, to address the markets pressing demands. Open

innovation and the concept of capturing and implementing ideas in a hub of collaboration is becoming the

new value proposition for larger and smaller organizations.

The pace of innovation is faster in open systems and places that are able to build an ecosystem ripe for

network activity. For that reason, there is a lot of interest both from the public and the private sector to further

understand networked communities and innovation economies, and tap into their knowledge and resources.

The current discourse of such developments have not generated yet a broadly accepted analytic model to
http://innoviz.net/http://innoviz.net/http://innoviz.net/


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asses open strategies and the network phenomenon. Despite the strong interest in the digital cluster and

technology communities, policy has little or no data available to measure the value that the industry and the

network synergies generate.

The lack of data was the main driver for the InnoViz research and project, and the Appsterdam network was

a valuable data source to gain an overview of the network dynamics: the density, diversity and distribution of

people, and companies. Existing reports and market statistics fail to capture this level of distributed, micro-economic activity. The individual shops, the startup ventures, and new coalitions and cooperations that are

taking place underneath the numbers that the reports are capturing1. The InnoViz study, was based on

quantitative data derived from the Appsterdam network of App Makers, and demonstrates the benefit of

exploring community data. Data that allowed us to zoom into the micro level of economic activities in the

Amsterdam region and beyond.

The Appsterdam network

Appsterdam has been conceived, initiated and sustained by App Makers; independent professionals working

with technology and learning from one another, while creating new products, services and companies. It is ahorizontal organization which depends on the contribution, skills and creativity of its members. It exists for as

long as its members acknowledge its socio-economic relevance and value. The organization retains a

catalyst role transferring ownership and responsibility to the circle. It facilitates the initiatives of other players

in the tech ecosystem and supports new ventures. This approach is incentivizing openness and

collaboration, knowledge sharing, and connects the different components of the ecosystem.

The core members are engineers, developers and entrepreneurs; a handful of people that have built

Appsterdam on the premise of by App Makers for App Makers. The organization attracts, however,

independent professionals from many different disciplines, companies and organizations, irrespective the

platform or technology of use, who want to join with their skills, support each other and feed the network. The

outcome has been an open and influential network of App Makers.

Such practices have become important for the economic development of one region as they pave new ways

of doing business and innovating under recession. Networked problem-solving, creates a motor that moves

ideas and dialogue from centralized strategies and plans to resources on the edges of the network and turns

them to actions.

The InnoViz project

The above reasons made Appsterdam, as a non-profit organization, a social network and technologycommunity, a distinguishing study case. For a period of 4 months I collected data and collaborated with

individual contractors and the design agency Clever Franke, to index and analyze the findings. Although the

members of the community and the different components of the network are aware of the social and support

infrastructure that the organization has built, one of my challenges was to communicate that knowledge to

those outside the community. To expose to a wider audience how the network processes increase the value

created in the industry and create a tool that would visualize some of the network aspects and let the

audience interact with the derived data.

1 See the CBS website, last accessed in February (2013)http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/informatie/beleid/publicaties/papers/archief/2012/monitor-topsectoren.htm& the Amsterdam InnovationMotor (AIM) report on the cluster of digital media companies (2012)
http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/informatie/beleid/publicaties/papers/archief/2012/monitor-topsectoren.htmhttp://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/informatie/beleid/publicaties/papers/archief/2012/monitor-topsectoren.htmhttp://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/informatie/beleid/publicaties/papers/archief/2012/monitor-topsectoren.htm


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Main source of data: Meetup website

See: http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/

Meetup.com proved to be a valuable data source

for the research. Meetup is a website that helps

groups of people to plan events and meetings.When members sign up to a group they give a

description about themselves. How they relate

and why they are interested in that specific group.

In the Meetup website we find many technology

related groups in Amsterdam with many members

looking for interesting and informative events,

looking for people to connect. But these individuals are dispersed, they are small units that do not form a

unified base. They are developers, designers or marketers, that work on their own, in companies, or

startups. They may share the same passion for creating products and services but not always the same

philosophy or vision about the world.

By looking at the stacked bar below, we see different Meetup groups and the difference in size and in

amount of events2.

Appsterdam grows in a fast pace because it is an open network and has a strong philosophy of

inclusiveness. It counts more than 2.000 members on Meetup and has hosted 368 events in a year and a

half of its existence. That comes down to an average of one event every other day. This is an important

characteristic because the pace of innovation is faster when you are part of a vibrant ecosystem, when

everyday life is like attending to a conference: you meet new people, get multiple points of view, attend

lectures, observe and increase your knowledge. The physical interactions, the regular events throughout thecity and the ease of mobility give members the benefit of being part of frequent formal and informal

encounters. There are several events and activities taking place in regular basis. The majority are free of

charge, and are open to everybody:

- Meeten en Drinker at cafe Bax: A weekly informal event where the community is brought together.

- Lunchtime Lectures: A weekly platform for presentations as a basic principle is that being able to talk about

technology is of the same importance as mastering the technology.

- Speaker training: A monthly opportunity for anybody to get training to public speaking

- Pitch club: A monthly training course for entrepreneurs to learn how to pitch their idea

- Guru Sessions: Up to two times a month, Appsterdam organizes a day long hands-on workshop on niche

topics by and for the community.

Appsterdam

Hackers&Founders

JavaScripters

Rubyists

Quantified SelfSensemakers

Dutch Android

0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000 2250 2500

16

206

10

3

26

368

390

379667

269

231

1123

2072

Total Members & Events

2Members and events numbers are calculated by end February 2013
http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/


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- Family Weekends: Once a month, they bring the families of the App Makers together in fun activities

- Co-workingfacility at Bouncespace: Members of the community visit the space in daily basis to work and

meet with their peers.

The Appsterdam regular activities, events and communication channels have invested much effort to bring

people, companies and organizations together and increase their connectivity. For that reason, the initiative

is more than a tech Meetup or a non-profit organization, but resembles and acts as a network of networks,

as it invites and connects all those different pieces together. When those are connected they can achieve

more than they could on their own.

Data exploration and preliminary results

Conceptually the project falls under the category of knowledge visualization3. The visualizations did not start

with a specific dataset but with a cultural context and an important part of the process was to find, analyze

and organize the data, to build, converse and take into account the knowledge context we were working on.

In the case of the InnoViz project, I started with a socio-economic phenomenon, the question was part of the

research and as the question transformed so was the implementation of the visualizations. In preparation for

the PICNIC12 festival, the team focused on showing some first visualizations of the Appsterdam Meetup

data. Vincent Warmerdam, the data miner in our team, analyzed the profiles of the group members. He used

Cytoscape, an open source software tool, to visualize how the Appsterdam Meetup group members describe

themselves and showed different groups of App Makers.

Network analysis of Meetup members profile descriptions. Created by Vincent Warmerdam, August 2012.

3 Interview with Santiago Ortiz in Data Stories podcast, posted on 11/03/2013 http://datastori.es/episode-19-with-santiago-ortiz/
http://datastori.es/episode-19-with-santiago-ortiz/http://datastori.es/episode-19-with-santiago-ortiz/http://datastori.es/episode-19-with-santiago-ortiz/


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The graph is a topical analysis that zooms into the micro level of the member profile descriptions. We can

see the diversity in the base (skills and competencies) and sub-groups of people. Each node represents a

word that is used, the lines between nodes show how often words co-occur in their bios. Each node is color

coded. Green stands for a platform, orange stands for a word that is linked to business, blue indicates a term

expected from a developer and red is a term from the design perspective of an App. The thickness of a line

shows how often two words occur together in a profile description.

This analysis showed to us the diversity of the group and the clustering of different disciplines involved in the

creation of software. The diversity in the base shows the formation of a new breed of independent and self-

employed professionals. With their participation and engagement in collaborative activities

and networking events, they also wish to expand their social and professional networks. This increases

serendipity and enhances the likelihood of an encounter that will add value to a users entrepreneurial

activity4.

As for the total and active members of the community, although it may be hard to estimate the exact number

of members and level of engagement, what we can safely assume is that Appsterdam has more than 2000

people attending the activities and events and a base of 500 people that attend on a regular basis. It has areach of more than 3500 people worldwide that follow its news, communication and activities. Inclusiveness

is high, both in different disciplines and nationalities. The network includes members from Australia, Canada,

Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Kazakstan, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia,

Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, the USA and elsewhere. Although the community started with a core of

technologists, engineers and developers it has embraced many different professions such as lawyers,

marketeers, academics, business strategists, publishers, designers and more. The embassies have also

expanded quite fast, to Delft, Warsaw, Milan, Vancouver, Athens, Thessaloniki, Paris, San Francisco, Denver

with more popping up in Munich, London, Sydney, and other places. Each of these has been the result of

local people wishing to be part of Appsterdam in their own local region.

4 S. Olma (2012), The Serendipity Machine: A disruptive model for Society 3.0, Society 3.0 Foundation, www.society30.com, p. 26
http://www.society30.com/http://www.society30.com/


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Apart from the diversity and multi-nationality in the network, the InnoViz project drilled down through data to

find the amount of companies and organizations affiliated with Appsterdam. I extracted their names from the

member descriptions and asked the Chamber of Commerce (KvK) to provide me with meta-data, such as,

the number of employees and registration date.

From the Appsterdam Meetup data collection, in the time period from May 2011 to November 2012, we

identified 340 companies affiliated with the community and the Appsterdam network. The affiliation isgenerated by the Meetup members themselves when they explicitly establish that connection. Out of the 340

companies, 165 are located in Amsterdam. Another 35 companies are in the broader region of Amsterdam

(incl. Haarlem, Amstelveen, Almere etc.). The size of the companies vary: 74 of the companies are

registered at the KvK without declaring any employees however as our analysis showed, a great percentage

of them are BVs (limited liability). That might convey that the founder or co-founding member of a tech

startup is a member of the community and the company has not yet grown enough to hire an employee. 171

companies have one to five employees on the payroll, 24 companies have six to ten employees and 36

companies have 12 to 100 employees. Only 7 within the Appsterdam network are companies that have more

that 250 employees. Another interesting finding is that 214 companies out of the total number where

registered at the KvK as of 2010. That shows the rapid growth in ICT and software development companies

that has happened within only 2 years.

Interactive data visualizations

In collaboration with the design agency Clever Franke we started building two concepts that would enable us

to visualize information about the profiles and competencies of App Makers and their socio-economic

network. The first concept focused on member profiles; show different backgrounds and interests of people(frequency of appearance) and their interconnections (related topics). The second concept focused on the

context of the community (geography), determined by the different locations where the community meets

and by the network of companies around the community. The goal was to show growth over time, density

(co-attendance) and reach. For that scenario the idea was to visualize the different locations and intensity of

co-located activities by using a list of timestamps and event RSVPs. Also the visualization would show the

locations of companies that are connected with the community through a member.

Both concepts respect the full anonymity of the Appsterdam members, and are not disclosing any sensitive

or personal information, nor drawing relationships between the members themselves. On the contrary, the

visualizations focused on drawing connections between topics of interest, and geographical points. The final

Web application is a tool for opening up the dataset generated by the InnoViz project, sharing insights and

promoting dialogue. The visualizations, found at the projects website http://innoviz.net, are not built to

present an edited story of our findings but wish to let the user interact playfully with the data.

0 employees / B.V.

1-5 employees

6-10 employees

12-100 employees

250+ employees 7

36

24

171

74

Number of companies

After 201063%

Before 201037%

Registered at KvK
http://innoviz.net/http://innoviz.net/http://innoviz.net/


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Topic Visualization

The topic visualization loads an interactive word cloud. The visitor can see and feel the correlation between

words that members of Appsterdam use, either to describe themselves on Meetup or to communicate about

a topic in the Twitter data set. Color-coded keywords are joined by the words they appear with, with biggerbubbles indicating higher frequency and greater relation. The user can click on words to explore them, use

the search box or select multiple words to compare them. The user can see which words are in common use

by the industry, or compare how connected different words are.

The visualization is providing different levels of interactivity as the goal is not to provide a static image but to

allow the users to play with different topics, see how they behave, find a path that will either lead them to a

higher level overview of the word cloud or to drill down through the dataset. The user can filter, search or

combine words and see the interactions of specific topics. By clicking one of the selected words the user can

highlight it. Using the slider the volume of the words retrieved from the dataset is increasing or decreasing.

Finally, the user can switch between the two data sources or select them both.

In the current example, the user selected two words, the word Apps (blue) and the word Amsterdam (green)

to explore their relationship in both the Twitter and Meetup dataset. The word cloud reveals the weight of the

words based on the frequency of appearance in the dataset. The color coding shows the shared relation,

and the more related the two words are the more double coding is shown on the screen. In the particular

example, the words Apps and Amsterdam weight a lot, as they load a dense word cloud by retrieving many

words from the two datasets. Words that connect them are Appsterdam, Team and Developer. From

that point onward, the user can start exploring the relationships, and add more key words in the equation.

The application works in webkit (Safari and Chrome) and is still in progress.


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Location Visualization

The location visualization loads a map and a timeline which allows the visitor to move through time and

discover the growth of the Appsterdam community and the affiliation with companies. It opens with a popup

window where a graph shows statistics about the visualization. Once the visitor closes the popup, the map

can be panned and zoomed and the timeline controls will become available allowing the visitor to move

through time with controls resembling a cassette-player. The timeline displays the dates on which an event

was scheduled or a company joined the Appsterdam community. The socio-economic map of the

Appsterdam network, presented a very different view of the community. Zooming out from the individual

level, the visualization gives a bird-eye view over the networks density and expansion. A future attempt

however, would be to also present those elements in a network display.

The screenshot depicts February 2013. So we can already see many companies plotted on the map with

Yellow, and with Green the 2 events that took place that day. But if we go back to the first day of Appsterdam

we would see an empty map.

The InnoViz visualizations serve as a communication and awareness tool for the App Makers themselves, to

see their role and impact in the industry, what they can achieve when they find themselves and get

connected, it is a research instrument and a reference tool for policy makers. Although the current

visualizations are far from complete representations of the digital cluster and technology community

networks, they are, however, providing an insightful interaction with textual and geospatial data. They do not

reveal the mesh, the exact linkages and nodes of the network components but they bring to the fore and

make community data available that could have never been presented to an audience otherwise. Several

InnoViz scripts and data files are open sourced and can be found on Github5. I would like to encourage the

reader to give me their feedback or get involved for further research and implementations.

5https://github.com/InnoViz/innoviz-scripts
https://github.com/InnoViz/innoviz-scriptshttps://github.com/InnoViz/innoviz-scripts


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Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me to develop the InnoViz project, both through action and long discussions about

what is needed and how to proceed. I would like to thank the Appsterdam organization, the Mayor Mike Lee,

Paul Darcey, and especially to thank Klaas Speller for his valuable support at all stages of the project. I wish

to thank Jan Simons and Sebastian Olma who gave me the opportunity to carry this research and their

feedback along the way. I am grateful to people at several institutions who have supported the project;Bernhard Rieder and Yuri Engelhard from the UvA, for thinking along about the visualization process in the

beginning of the project. Mike Shulmeister and Willem Koeman from the Amsterdam Economic Board for

securing funding and supporting logistics and Katalin Gallyas from Amsterdam Economic Affairs for partly

financing the initiative. Special thanks to Vincent Warmerdam for his enthusiastic contribution and for

presenting the visualization concepts during the PICNIC12 festival. Richard Hoving for providing data from

the Chamber of Commerce, and finally Bouncespace for letting us host all the InnoViz meetings.

Information about the author

Olga Paraskevopoulou is a researcher working with public and private organizations on digital technology

projects. She is currently based in Amsterdam, designing and producing pilot projects, events and

workshops powered by Appsterdam, the Waag society, the University of Amsterdam (UvA-CIRCA) and the

Amsterdam Economic Board. She is particularly interested in mobile product development and she iscurrently coordinating the Apps4Amsterdam: Open for Business program. She holds a MSc on Political

Communication and New Technologies from the University of Athens and a MA on New Media and Digital

Culture from the University of Amsterdam.

b.http://blog.olmageddon.net/

t. @olmageddon

e. [email protected]

l. http://www.linkedin.com/in/olgaparaskevopoulou

April 2013, Amsterdam
http://www.linkedin.com/in/olgaparaskevopouloumailto:[email protected]://blog.olmageddon.net/http://www.linkedin.com/in/olgaparaskevopoulouhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/olgaparaskevopouloumailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://blog.olmageddon.net/http://blog.olmageddon.net/

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