An intensive week, so I’m keeping this short:

  • Spent a day working for a province
  • Spent a day for another province doing an impact assessment of the implementation a data register, as first step of a procurement path we are assisting with
  • Wednesday I left for Copenhagen where the Techfestival was taking place until Saturday evening. I went seeking inspiration, in search of putting words to a certain sense of urgency I suppose. As part of that I
    • Took part in a full day ‘public data summit’ where we dived deeper into how to use open data for urgent societal topics, such as climate adaptation
    • Met up with various people, some I hadn’t seen in years. It was good to just hang out, share food, experiences, and thoughts
    • Took lots of notes, thousands of words, still in need of some processing
    • Listened to a very good key-note by Aza Raskin
    • Enjoyed an excellent on-stage conversation between Marietje Schaake (former MEP, now at Stanford) and Casper Klynge, the world’s first and Danish Ambassador to the tech industry, of which I hope a video will be available soon. I didn’t take notes, as I wanted to listen, not in that moment reflect or take observational distance
    • Participated 20 out of 24 hours in the think tank Copenhagen 150. An intensive and fun experience, with a wide variety of highly fascinating people, under the Chatham House rule. More on this and the other things later. Results to be announced.
    • Saturday afternoon I left Techfestival and the Copenhagen 150 early. This to get to Sittard, 2.5 hours to the south-east of Schiphol airport in Limburg, just before 19:00
  • Saturday evening we celebrated our dear friend M’s 50th birthday in a restaurant in Sittard‘s 14th century city center. None of the 11 of us around the table live anywhere near Sittard, E and I live closest having come 170kms, and half came all the way from Switzerland including M herself. M and H used to live in Sittard, and we all returned for once. We all go back at least 25 years, from when we were all at university, and room mates in various constellations. M said she felt privileged to have all of us around the table last night. She’s right, and all of us realised it.


36 by Andy Maguire, license CC-BY

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