Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Starting up in Berlin

Our agent Alper has recent­ly moved to Berlin to estab­lish a pres­ence over there and he will be report­ing on his progress from time to time.

For rea­sons both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al I have relo­cat­ed to Berlin to start afresh in that great Athens on the Spree. Berlin is see­ing a resur­gence of digital/creative activ­i­ty that is gar­ner­ing quite a lot of atten­tion not to men­tion spec­u­la­tion. Let the rea­sons for that be what they are, what mat­ters to us is that it is a prop­er metrop­o­lis with both oppor­tu­ni­ty and urgency for play­ful experiences.

Hav­ing just arrived, the help of (friends of) friends1 has been invalu­able to get start­ed quick­ly. The tem­po­rary office space, knowl­edge of the local bureau­cra­cies and the con­nec­tions made, that would oth­er­wise have tak­en months of attend­ing mee­tups in shady bars, have all been invalu­able. I am sur­prised how seam­less the tran­si­tion from a city in one coun­try to anoth­er can be with our pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions and cul­ture homog­e­nized by the internet.

Overcast Berlin sky

Pic­ture by Edi­al Dekker

Last week, my first week in Berlin in earnest, has been focused on look­ing for office space and get­ting some work done that had been left because of the move and the hol­i­days. The start of the week I spent doing a thor­ough tra­ver­sal of Berlin’s cowork­ing spaces2 and these last cou­ple of days have been more pro­duc­tive work­ing at the cen­ter of most things dig­i­tal here, the Beta­haus.

Set­ting up shop for Hub­bub as well as my oth­er pro­fes­sion­al affil­i­a­tions, I’m look­ing for a shared stu­dio3 to go to every morn­ing, where I can have a desk and where I can put my screen and books. This place would be prefer­ably locat­ed some­where in or near Kreuzberg. I have some promis­ing leads, but if you can add to those, do get in touch.

In time we are plan­ning to expand into a loca­tion where a hand­ful of peo­ple can work on projects in a com­fort­able fash­ion. The Berlin stu­dio will always remain tight­ly con­nect­ed to the Utrecht moth­er­ship, but it should be able to oper­ate autonomous­ly in the same loose fash­ion that most of our col­lab­o­ra­tion takes place. A colony on anoth­er plan­et, if you will, though right now Berlin is a bit more hos­pitable than Mars.

With regard to con­nec­tions, I have met up with the local indie game devel­op­ers dur­ing a pre­vi­ous vis­it and Hub­bub will be out in force for the Glob­al Game Jam Berlin at the end of this month. Even though I am a debu­tant in that par­tic­u­lar for­mat, we hope to present a respectable show­ing with the help of some more expe­ri­enced team mem­bers. I am par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in meet­ing peo­ple busy with games for social/organizational change in Ger­many and com­par­ing notes with what works and what does­n’t. But if you are oth­er­wise inter­est­ed in play­ful expe­ri­ences to get peo­ple to engage and cre­ate I would of course also love to get in touch4.

  1. Just to name Third Wave, Gidsy, Hybrid Plat­tform, Mozil­la besides many more. []
  2. I vis­it­ed Stu­dio 70, Wos­tel, Weser­land, Pul­sraum, Nest, Co-up, Tante Renate and Beta­haus. []
  3. The tran­sience of cowork­ing is not that appeal­ing to me though I have found­ed and helped man­age sev­er­al cowork­ing spaces in the Nether­lands. []
  4. Email alper@ this domain. []
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