This was, despite the dreary weather, overall a week that felt good. It started less auspicious as I was woken from deep sleep by Y very early Monday morning and it took me the entire morning to find my sea legs again so to speak. It ended with much nicer weather over the weekend, ending on a sunny note. This week I:
- Had a ‘new style’ all-hands meeting on the company’s financial situation and finding new projects. This used to be part of our monthly half day all-hands meeting, but we felt it distracted from other points we try to address on such meetings (how we are doing personally, learning, reflection, doing something together). So we lifted out the financial and sales stuff, and gave it its own monthly 1-hour spot. I, as the company’s financial guy, report on how we’re doing, and then we discuss ongoing efforts to land projects. (We are fully transparant about our financial situation to all employees, liquidity / invoicing, all of it.)
- Processed feedback I received on a reports, as well as answered a range of questions from EU governments about the report.
- Experimented with Zettelkasten-style note taking extensively, both in WordPress and Evernote and then for the second part of the week with Obsidian. That tool seems to provide the most frictionless experience for how I am trying to work.
- Worked on digital transformation topics for a province
- Wrote a proposal for a project extension, and got it accepted
- Planned a range of interviews for next week concerning the re-use of open data
- Discussed how to connect a CKAN platform to a province’s infrastructure, the national INSPIRE portal, and the national open data portal, and have it all sync up without creating doubles and unintended feedback loops
- Relearned markdown
- Worked an afternoon with the team of the NGO I chair, and on our search for a new director
- Spent an evening with my company’s partners to discuss more long term aspects
- As a result of that launched a 9 month training for our team about networking and sales in our own company’s style
- Helped E with proof reading an extensive blogpost
- Had my first haircut since the pandemic
- Visited E’s brother and partner in Utrecht for the first time since the start of the pandemic
During a walk around the neighbourhood we came across this ‘camping ground’ in the tiny backyard of a house: four tents and pool!