British entrepreneur Katie Lips explains how she used her tech knowledge to improve both her work and social connections.

A new Geek in town

My partner and I moved to Amsterdam from the UK in 2004 to explore more of Europe from a personal and professional perspective.

We work in technology and, as with many people in the industry, it's a passion as well as just a job. But moving here and knowing no one, we used our tech knowledge to get better connected both in terms of work and social life.

I read (and also write) blogs, and use a lot of online social networking services and knowing how much these online platforms have really helped us as expats in a new city, I wanted to
share some tech tips and tricks for feeling more at home with the rest of the expat community.

There are lots of technology events and groups in Amsterdam; it seems like
it's a hub of innovative new projects and startups, with plenty of
creative thinking coming from the bigger companies too.

The Dutch entrepreneurial spirit makes it easy to get involved in new things, so if you work in technology and are considering relocating to
Amsterdam I'd wholeheartedly recommend it.

First, get networked

Nowadays everyone I know in the UK is on Facebook, and lots of my
Dutch friends are following suit, but why were they slow to pick up
the Facebook craze? Perhaps because they had an ever-so-popular social network of their own. Hyves is massive in the Netherlands and it seems that everyone's a 'Hyver'. Created by then local college students it's
colourful, loud and sociable, and available in Dutch and other
languages. If you want to get networked in Holland you need 'to Hyve!'

Meetups, Meet-ins, Activities, Events & Coffee
To find out what's on a good place to start is an events site. It
seems there are a lot of them!

For meeting fellow expats:
Meetup
Meet-in

For finding cool events and seeing what Amsterdammers are up to check
out: Upcoming and Plazes. And you could of course research new venues on  Flickr.

For technology-specific events these are highly recommended:
Freelance Fridays
Mobile Monday
Open Coffee
IPAN (Technology Business Networking)
Amsterdam, the conference town

Amsterdam has so much to offer to so many and therefore attracts a lot of conferences; including technology and media ones. Many of the bigger ones are held at RAI just to the south of the city centre, but a lot are also held more centrally.  Chic geek conferences coming up soon include Vlogalicious and The Next Web. Of course for a full listing of what's coming to town, check out Confabb.
www.vlogalicious.com/
thenextweb.org/
confabb.com/
www.rai.nl

Open Source

The Open Source movement seems to appeal to a lot of our developer
friends in the Netherlands. Recently we've seen a lot of open ethos
events. If unconferences, collaborative software development or
learning how to make your own robot is your bag, you might want to
check out these sites:
Barcamp
Roomware
Mediamatic (New Media, Art and Society)

So if you're a new geek in town there should be plenty there to get
you started; just make time to do your day job!

Amsterdam's a great place to live and to do business in the technology industry. There's a lot happening here, it attracts an eclectic crowd and people are very willing to share ideas and knowledge. The startup scene is definitely bubbling, which is why we chose to work here to develop our own project Treasuremytext. I now work both in the UK and the Netherlands and enjoy that international perspective that we wouldn't have had if we'd stayed in the UK.  Working here has lead to a lot of fun and a lot of new geeky friends.

And of course, don’t miss out on using Expatica.com for keeping up-to-date on Dutch news and Dutch life in general as well as linking in with the expat community in the Netherlands. After all, this is why I’ve chosen to send in my tips to Expatica in the first place.


28 January 2008

Katie Lips runs a British/ Dutch web start-up company (beta.treasuremytext.com).

[Copyright Katie Lips + Expatica 2008]