mur.mu.rs

What is Appsterdam?

At some point during our volunteer meeting, after announcing the organization had grown too large for all-hands meetings to be our default mode, and after people had broken into groups to work on our Summer of Appsterdam initiatives, I had a really good conversation about that most basic of questions: “What is Appsterdam?”

It, like the question, “Why Amsterdam?” is a hard one to answer, because there are a lot of answers, and the best one depends on who you are. Our movement grows organically according to the talents and passions of its members. We have a lot of initiatives that go in a lot of different directions.

For example, our website serves as a “concert calendar” of events in and around Amsterdam, but we also plan events. We get App Makers together for Meeten en Drinken, but we also offer free work spaces and education. We help people go indie, but we also have a venture fund.

If you try to define the Appsterdam movement by its initiatives, you will quickly run out of words, and the only thread that seems to connect them is Appsterdam itself. Therein lies the greater truth. As a meta-organization, we are not doers, but facilitators.

One good metaphor for Appsterdam is the folk tale of Stone Soup. In a time of famine, when nobody had anything to share, one family put out a huge cauldron of boiling water with nothing but a stone inside, then explained to passersby that it was stone soup, and that there was plenty to share.

Each person who sat down for a meal of stone soup threw something in the pot—a carrot, a potato, a bit of meat—and when the soup was done, they took out the stone, and everyone had a nice meal. We are that way. We take what people are willing and able to contribute. We combine, coordinate, and engineer, and we end up with something nice for all of us.

The purpose of the Appsterdam movement is to bring App Makers together. Our goal is to serve App Makers around the world, and we’ve started that by building a capital in Amsterdam. This is not meant to set off a series of pissing contests over who has the better city. That is the opposite of Appsterdam.

Pissing contests are our biggest enemy. As a developer, I say with the greatest love in my heart, that developers are dicks. Oh, we’re nice to each other, sure, but we’re dicks to most people. Think about it. We insult people who use different languages, different platforms, or even different coding styles. iPhone versus Android. VI versus EMACS. Spaces versus tabs.

Then there are those jerks who can’t even code. We call them biz dev douchebags, marketing douchebags, new media douchebags, the list goes on. We bemoan the dearth of women in our industry, while refusing to hang out with the industries where women actually are.

Our inability to stop picking on each other is holding us back, when threats like patent trolls are looming ready to pick us off one by one. We need to rediscover what we should have learned as lemurs—that if we’re all going to survive, we’re going to need to stick together.

Appsterdam is the first organization that brings together programmers, regardless of implementation detail, marketeers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, scholars, the government, newbies, and anyone else willing to pitch in and be part of a new way of doing technology.

It’s no accident we chose a city with a diverse population whose name stands for tolerance. If you think you get Appsterdam, and you want to have a pissing match about it, you don’t get Appsterdam. We don’t like conflict, and the one thing we don’t tolerate is intolerance.

And we don’t care. We’re bulding a haven for App Makers in the Netherlands because we want to live in that haven. People who have been looking for that, and who are capable of getting along with other people, are welcome to join us here. If you want to fight about it, don’t bother.

The people who get Appsterdam, who will find a first or second home in Appsterdam, are the people who understand that Appsterdam is not a company or a person or a service. Appsterdam is an idea, which has blossomed into a movement, that we are better together—whether you join us here, and build your own little Appsterdam at home.

We don’t care about the naysayers, the haters, and the crabs who would hold us down, because those are the people who make things suck. They’re the ones we’re leaving behind. Appsterdam is what we make of it, and so far what we’re making of it is pretty good, growing really quickly, and attracting a lot of people to this grand experiment.

“What is Appsterdam?” “We are Appsterdam!”

Why Location Matters

It seems I owe some people some apologies. With everyone so excited about the Appsterdam movement, I’ve had to talk to a lot of people really quickly, which has meant boiling a lot of nuance into some very compact sound bites. It is never my desire to offend people, so I’d like to offer up those apologies now.

First and foremost, to my friends at Sofa, I apologize for the sentence, “Sofa wanted to help out, but then they got offered a lot of money to move to the Valley.” I didn’t mean to imply that the money played any part in your decision. Only that it was a nice bonus for the opportunity of a lifetime.

I also didn’t mean to imply that I think the Sofa team is wrong for joining Facebook. If I had grown up here in the Netherlands and was offered the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley to work with a team I genuinely admired, I would jump at the chance. A little bit of walking around money doesn’t hurt, either.

That said, and as much as I hope you guys have a blast, I hope you come back. The more Valley knowledge we can bring back to Appsterdam, the better. And to anyone growing up in the US, in or outside Silicon Valley, you should take a lesson from Sofa and come to Europe for a little bit. Appsterdam would sure love to have you.

Now I must apologize to my brothers and sisters in the great city of Berlin for the sentence, “Berlin is not a good place to raise children.” I didn’t mean to impune the reputation of your fair city, any more than I mean to denigrate any other city. Truth be known, Berlin is my second choice for a developer hub, right after Amsterdam.

The reason Amsterdam won over Berlin is not really about raising children per se. Berlin is a very hip city, grungier than Seattle and San Francisco combined. As such, it’s full of artists and bohemians of every stripe, making it a center for art and culture. If the Netherlands is serious about cutting public funding for arts programs, I think that whole industry should move to Berlin in protest.

We have a bit of Berlin right here in Amsterdam at the NDSM-Werf, where we have our first Appsterdam Official Hangout, Appsterdam Noord. Berlin is heaven for a certain type of person. Amsterdam has something for everyone. It is that compromise, that “middleness,” that makes it the perfect home for our movement.

In a very real sense, location doesn’t matter. We could have chosen anywhere to concentrate our efforts, which is why my search for the perfect place took me to such strange ends as Cambodia and Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world.

What matters is that we be in one place. We can work together over the Internet, but we can’t go out for beers together over the Internet. It is that beer factor, or to put it more scientifically, that density, that has Silicon Valley whipping the world’s ass.

You all can spend the rest of your lives debating about the place. We in the Appsterdam movement have picked a place and are already getting together. The great news is, the place is surrounded by a lot of other really great places that are close and easy to get to. Amsterdam is in the middle in a geographical sense as well, and we have a huge airport with flights to anywhere.

Amsterdam isn’t perfect, but it is pretty darned nice, and it’s filled with passionate developers who are intent on making it the best place in the world for App Makers. If you need any more convincing than that, come visit us here in Appsterdam. I’ll be surprised if you don’t want to come back.