120 goats

It is unbelievable. The French said NON to the constitution. Terrably shocked am I. This is really bad news. For The Netherlands it is even more bad news. Why would you go voting on Wednesday. If one country disagrees, in principle the whole process should stop. And with a 54 per cent NON vote from a country like France! A survey for Dutch public televison tonight shows that relatively more Dutch people will vote NEE (NO). At least 48 per cent of the population will go and vote. Of them 59 per cent will vote NO and 41 per cent will vote YES.

Today I am working on the administration of projects. In the past year I was involved in the EU project ACTeN, X-Melina and INYOP. Now, I finishing up the last project, writing up reports and producing cost statements. ACTeN has been a big project with 11 partners, of 2 years running time and with a budget of 1 million euro. The final report can be read on the ACTeN site. X-Melina has been a project for broadcasters looking at multimedia. Cross-media was the theme. The project consisted of an e-learning course, a workshop and a project proposal. The workshops were very intensive, but yielded a great burst of ideas.


Business Round Table and workshop in Prague

INYOP was a cross media workshop for moviemakers. (The site http://www.inyop.org/ has been removed). One of the pillars was digital story telling. Besides a workshop in Prague, the participants went to an old town and produced an interactive movie.

The INYOP workshop has gotten a sequel in the meantime. You would not seek it behind a URL as Goatmilk Festival. But in this festival non-linear storytelling is the subject. My friend Paul van Zoggel, a young Dutch man, produced a non-linear story about the Romanian village of Belarechka. I really like it. You can start with the village facts:
- The village is located at a height of 500 meters
- There are 64 houses
- with 92 people
- of whom 35 people died in the last four years.
- There are two young families
- 120 goats
- 5 cows.
Can you imagine these cool facts, while you are living in a metropole like London, New York or New Orleans or just in Utrecht with 250.000 inhabitants. It is a nice production giving you an insight in rural life in Romenia. It is great to hear the man with the flying dream and to listen to the songs of the village.
It is clear that non-linear storytelling is virgin area to be explored. We are only at the beginning now of developing storylines, but also of developing software.
BTW the software used by Paul has a funny name: Korsakow. To me this name is related to dementia. Given my age I can joke that I forgot my password: 'last time it was Korsakow or was it Dementia?'


Prague is a beautiful old city.