With now 7 weeks at home, I this weekend fought the feeling I somehow should have been more productive in the past almost two months. To a certain extent that is true. First as now the deadline for a big piece of writing is starting to loom large, and if I don’t get up to speed now it will be problematic. Second, as for another project I still haven’t finished creating things I had expected to have had finished before this lock down even started. The core sentiment is, where have those 7 weeks gone? I take solace in the fact I’m observing I’m definitely not the only one having this feeling.

• Monday was King’s Day and a national holiday, so didn’t work other than some reflection
• Worked 2 days on a provincial project, including topics like circular economy, strategic knowledge management
• Made 2 walks with E and Y, realising I’ve been cooped up too much
• Had a board meeting of the Open State Foundation, that I chair
• Had a management team meeting of my company. A.o. decided not to make use of the government support measures for businesses.
• Had a call with the EC on our progress on the EU High Value Data lists, that are part of the new EU open data regulations
• Spent a day with Y
• Ordered, received and read (twice) a book (link in Dutch) by my friend Danny about the Enschede fireworks disaster that is now 20 years ago (which killed 23, wounded a thousand, and destroyed several hundreds of houses, right in the heart of our city). Danny as a freelance reporter made the footage that went around the world, his colleague Marcel died in the blast. I was one of two friends who phoned Danny with a tip about the fire that led to the blasts. His now published diary notes from then were a time capsule, that, because I figure quite a bit in his notes, surfaced old emotions and led me to reflecting on my own memories from that bizarre event and its aftermath.
• Based on last week’s conversation on wikis, in the past 7 days I kept day logs in my laptop based blog, as a jumping off point for wikifying and blogging material. That worked surprisingly well for me.

Enjoyed our walks around our water rich neighbourhood, under what we call ‘Dutch skies’ (blue skies with large cloud formations, often featuring in paintings by old masters)