Who would have thought that I would spend most of my summer in Erfurt, out of all places? Granted, it’s a nice little town in the summer, with some interesting spots to spend your time if you know where they are – but it’s still Erfurt! At any rate, I’m busy with a number of projects that make vacation, or the idea of vacation, a distant thought for now. What am I doing exactly?

Sven Welters and I are working on the ideation platform for the participatory budgeting project for the City of Erfurt, as well as a website for a publishing house. Both projects I will post once they are completed. Additionally, I am trying to set up a twitter/blogging documentation platform for the upcoming Government 2.0 Barcamp in Berlin, which is happening in close association with the German Ministry of the Interior and spearheaded by Philipp Mueller and the CPMG. Then I’m also revamping the website of a really good friend of mine who’s also a political consultant, lobbyist and advocat, Wolfgang Gruendinger, who just released a new book which is causing white a noise in the media. Yes there’s also another research project and memo in the pipeline, the semester just hasn’t ended yet, and they just officially renamed the school I’m stying at from Erfurt School of Public Policy to Willy Brandt School of Public Policy (at the University of Erfurt), and we’re going to move to a new building and we will get a new website (where I’m hopefully involved in).

While doing all that, I was transferring most of the websites hosted on my old server to my new one, with a little accident happening in the middle of it, so the whole endeavor was not quite so successful. But all that is of course part of a whole other thing that has been occupying me for the last months: tomorrow’s theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino‘s new movie Inglourious Basterds, a movie that is already highly acclaimed. I was quite busy reporting on the film, attending the Berlin premiere, and doing lots of little maintenance work on The Quentin Tarantino Archives, my website started in 1999 that makes this all possible. The website has since spun off two sister sites, The Spaghetti Western Database and The Deuce, both of which are quite successful and famous as well. Between the three, visitor numbers are probably going to approach 10.000 by the end of the year, if I do a good job with marketing and improving these sites.

That’s it for now, it was about time for a little update. I might do more work on this website this fall.