Grumble
we had an earthquake today. Nothing fancy, the walls only shook a little bit.
Art
My mom sent me a copy of an article from a local Dutch newspaper today. The Delft municipality is paying for an online user driven database of art in public spaces. Have you heard that before? Well, if you’ve known me for a while, you should have: Beeldenstad.net, where I added Delft in March 2003! No doubt, they’re spending thousands of euros to get a website up and running which, according to the article, won’t be going live until October this year.
I’m a bit annoyed about this since this is the second time I’m being passed over for supplying functionality I’ve already created which, as a result will be recreated from scratch at what, undoubtedly, will be several times my cost. Years ago, at the time when Beeldenstad.net went live, I discussed the possibility of facilitating the municipality of Rotterdam with a system like this. They were very non-committal and ‘kept me on a leash’ with a lot of maybes. I decided to build my own when, shortly after, it turned out they had payed for their own system. Sure, it’s a nice system, but that’s mostly because of their access to the right information.
Now, for Delft. A few years ago, I started of a discussion with several individuals in very different positions inside the municipality, all somehow related to public art and/or culture. I suppose to hedge my bets, in the hope that at least one of them would lead to me being able to expand Beeldenstad.net for Delft, properly, and being payed for it. But then, too, a lot of maybes, postponements and whatnot, until I gave up. And now this.
What’s the lesson here?