Kabinet Online Slotbijeenkomst trip report

On Tuesday evening, October 8th, 2001, I went to the Kabinet Online
Slotbijeenkomst in the Felix Meritis.  The URL for the event is

  http://www.kabinetonline.nl/home.asp?id=116

Among the speakers was Dick Rijken, who is the keynote speaker at MMM
2001.

The Kabinet Online is a mirror cabinet of ministers making plans for
the ICT infrastructure for the Netherlands.  They have, of course, no
official governmental role -- these are people from the Amsterdam New
Media community and related community who pulled this together for
kicks and giggles.  Even with the hobbyist nature of the cabinet, much
work went into it, resulting in this final, closing meeting of the
cabinet with a thick "First nota" of plans the cabinet and its various
ministers came up with, presentations from the top four plans, and
dialogue with the audience.  This was all orchestrated with a very
professional host.  He wandered between the minister podium and the
audience with a wireless microphone, moving the topics and dialogue
along his flexibly planned route.  In this manner he engaged experts
and notables planted in the audience, as well as the ministers and the
audience in general.  It was impressively organized.

Dick Rijken presented his plan "N.I.K.S", the Nederlands Institute for
Kulturale Software.  This is a trading ground for open software and
open cultural media.  It is based on his work with the MMBase project
in the Dutch broadcaster MMBase.  He also propposed snelspoor.nl
("fasttrack.nl" ?), a government-run Website for taking proposals for
Open Source software projects on the order of f5000 guilders and
giving approval within three days.  This enables money to be pumped
into Open Source in an Open Source-type nature, enabling individuals
to do small-scale Open Source projects and make a living off it.  Dick
plans to present similar material at the MMM 2001 keynote on next
Tuesday morning, November 5th 2001.  The keynote will focus more on
the open sharing of media, rather than software, as was done with
MMBase.

Lloyd Rutledge