When I was living in Amsterdam, one place that I sometimes visited was the Lag Lab in the Binnenpret squat in Schinkelbuurt. It's a relatively small and unfortunately not very active hackspace, but they have events every so often and there's some really nice people in there.
The gardens of Binnenpret, the famous old squat in Amsterdam.
Their website is here: https://laglab.org/
It's been about a year since I was there, but I'm pretty sure that at least some of the people will remember me.
Project laglab-witness:
What I am thinking to do, now that I am heading back to Amsterdam, is to try and get a witness running from their location, and try to gather a group of devs to start working on projects that require access to a full witness node. I am not sure where the money will come from for the setup, but a couple of server boxes and some battery backup, and most of the work being done by me, it should be possible for me to get it to the standard of reliability required for a witness in the top 19.
It is vaguely possible that there is already hardware laying around, they have quite a bit of stuff. A system with 16gb of RAM is the main requirement. Beyond that, a second node for backup purposes, battery backup, well, one thing at a time...
Getting the initial capital to do it might be a little difficult at first, but people will probably be more interested when I explain how much money a top 19 witness node earns, it would cover their rent, and accumulate quite a pool of surplus after a few months that a lot more could be done down the track.
Getting a Steem Developer Hub started in Amsterdam
My primary purpose, however, is not so much about the money side of it, but enabling people to get working on applications that interoperate with the Steem blockchain. I know that for sure within Amsterdam there would be people who would want to do this sort of work, if they were aware of it, and there was a central hub where work could be done. The Lag hackspace would be an ideal spot to get a steem developer hub up and running.
Numerous members there have the skills to do this kind of work, and I would hope (nay, expect) that at least one or two already know about it. With SteemFEST coming up next month, it could be a very good time for me to attempt to launch something like this.
Well, it's something for me to do. I am in the midst of tidying up my laptop so I am prepared for travel, and I will be leaving for Amsterdam in the very near future, maybe a few days time.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
Loki was born in Australia, now lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration.
I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel
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All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me