Vanuit mijn school kwam ik in aanraking met DSE.
Ik heb jarenlang met veel plezier mijn website hier op deze server gehad.
Helaas kreeg ik op de bijeenkomst te horen dat er met webhosting wordt gestopt vanaf eind volgend jaar (2019).
Deze weblog https://www.dse.nl blijft wel behouden. Het is fijn dat men binnen DSE mee dacht aan een nieuwe server en bepaalde andere dingen in de loop der jaren.

Heel veel succes met je opleiding!

To me DSE / DSEnieuws is a platform that provides the space to speak out. Or to simply publish a written story about next to nothing, simple things. What I like a lot, is that there is no Facebook or Google watch, nor is there any influence of the (local) gouvernment. Messages of stories are being checked though and also you might receive comments on your writings. This is done by a group of co-readers / editors that also keep freedom of speech in mind. As long as the language used is okay and there is no hatred or other undesireable stough presented, you are free to write about it.

News presented by the town council or the famous Eindhovens Dagblad (paper of the Brainport region) is being commented on by several authors here at Digitale Stad EIndhoven. I think it is a very good thing to have democracy with media like this website. It is to bad that there is not more discussion about certain themes. I do think our city needs more interaction between the ruling powers and the people living in Eindhoven.

Good luck on your work and with your learning of the language!

Cheers,

Bob

Above the 1997 homepage.

In 1997 the available webspace was 50KB. So those homepage’s where very simple.
Here you can find some users homepages from that time:
https://web.archive.org/web/19970419233613/http://dse.nl:80/bewoners/.
Later on the available webspace became about 100MB and you can always ask for more via our helpdesk

Some of the supported initiatives are seniorweb, a lot of schools and kennisweb which nowadays have their own domains. Maybe this is a good example about an rather “recent” initiative: https://glowoff.dse.nl/
In the early days our volunteers where giving some extra support. In rare cases depending on questions raised to our help-desk I myself gave some support “on site” But most of the time it is/was help with e-mail and screen-dumps. See also our extensive https://www.dse.nl/helpdesk/ pages
Al those initiatives had the possibility to announce them on our homepage.
As you mention ” I think that it is great that here citizens can discuss, share ideas and speak as equal” This is really one of the benefits of which I hope to be available for a very long time.
Therefore we also need young people who are interested in supporting us with IT and moreover having a pleasure in writing on our homepage.

Thank you very much for your answer Rien. I looked at dse.nl also, and i am still going through it. Having a website ready within 15 minutes must have been great especially in 1995’s when domain and hosting services were probably very crude. I assume that lots of the people in this community had the html skills to make a website. Was it common to provide web design & coding services to other local people who didn’t have the knowledge and wanted a website?

Could you please name a few local initiatives that were supported by DSE? Was the support based on making these initiatives publicly known, by advertising them on dse website or by hands-on help, for example: creating a website for them?

I agree that privacy, zero data collection and zero advertisement is what really sets de digital stad apart from any other current ‘global’ online community. It seems that newspapers have their own communities on facebook nowadays for example http://www.ed.nl, however they are centralised and communicate mostly only top to bottom. I think that it is great that here citizens can discuss, share ideas and speak as equal.

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