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It didn’t look like it at the start, but it turned out to be an intensive week nonetheless.

This week I

  • Discussed work division and budget of our European research project for the new open data regulation
  • Planned strategic interviews for that project on meteo and earth observation data
  • Worked with our new colleague on this project, starting stakeholder mapping for various sectors in all EU MS
  • Worked on our energy poverty micro subsidies project, which is now ready for launch
  • Had a long conversation with the team behind ClimateView
  • Worked out notes of our goal setting session a few weeks ago
  • Had an all hands meeting with our company, including group dinner
  • Switched our company to using our own cloud, running NextCloud on our own server (in a Frankfurt data center)
  • Discussed data ethics around data collection concerning SME innovation subsidies and their impact
  • Went to the zoo with E and Y

This week in … 1836*

Henri Fantin-Latour was born 14 January 1836, and a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. He died 25 August 1904. One criticism on his work was that his group portraits were on large canvasses giving it a significance larger than its subject. I quite like this setting out of the mundane as the momentous. Our most momentous life events are mundane to most others. The most momentous is just a collection of the mundane as it happens, and usually only momentous in hindsight.

His work is in the public domain (although a surprising number of online photos of his paintings have a copyright claim attached, which is nonsense. Straightforward photos of public domain artefacts are themselves in the public domain, as there is no new creative work involved in making such a reproduction.)

Henri Fantin-Latour - By the TableCoin de table, by Henri Fantin-Latour, portrait of the Parnassus poetry group (1872). Musée d’Orsay, Paris – Public Domain

La leçon de dessin dans l’atelier (1879) by Henri Fantin-Latour, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels – Public Domain

(* I show an openly licensed image with each Week Notes posting, to showcase more open cultural material. See here why, and how I choose the images for 2020.)