Today it is Global Ethics Day. My colleague Emily wanted to mark it given our increasing involvement in information ethics, and organised an informal online get together, a Global Ethics Day party, with a focus on data ethics. We showed the participants our work on an ethical reference for using geodata, and the thesis work our newest colleague Pauline finished this spring on ethical leadership within municipal governments. I was asked to kick the event off with some remarks to spark discussion.
I took the opportunity to define and launch a new moniker, Ethics as a Practice (EaaP).(1)
The impulse for me to do that comes out of two things that I have a certain dislike for, in how I see organisations deal with the ethics of working with data and using data to directly inform decisions.
The first concerns treating the philosophy of technology, information and data ethics in general as a purely philosophical and scientific debate. It, due to abstraction, then has no immediate bearing on the things organisations, I and others do in practice. Worse, regularly it approaches actual problems purely starting from that abstraction, ending up with posing ethical questions I think are irrelevant to reality on the ground. An example would be MIT’s notion that classical trolly problems have bearing on how to create autonomous vehicles. It seems to me because they don’t appreciate that saying autonomous vehicle, does not mean the vehicle is an indepenent actor to which blame etc can be applied, and that ‘autonomous’ merely means that a vehicle is independent from its previous driver, but otherwise fully embedded in a wide variety of other dependencies. Not autonomous at all, no ghost in the machine.
The campus of University of Twente, where they do some great ethics work w.r.t. to technology. But in itself it’s not sufficient. (image by me, CC BY SA)
The second concerns seeing ‘Ethics by design’ as a sufficient fix. I dislike that because it carries 2 assumptions that are usually not acknowledged. Ethics by design in practice seems to be perceived as ethics being only a concern in the design phase of a new technology, process, approach or method. Whereas at least 95% of what organisations and professionals deal with isn’t new but existing, so as a result remains out of scope of ethical considerations. It’s an assumption that everything that exists has been thoroughly ethically evaluated, which isn’t true, not at all even when it comes to existing data collection. Ethics has no role at all in existing data governance for instance, and data governance usually doesn’t cover data collection choices or its deletion/archiving.
The other assumption conveyed by the term ‘ethics by design’ is that once the design phase is completed, ethics has been sufficiently dealt with. The result is, with 95% of our environment remaining the same, that ethics by design is forward looking but not backwards compatible. Ethics by design is seen as doing enough, but it isn’t enough at all.
Ethics by design in itself does not provide absolution (image by Jordanhill School D&T Dept, license CC BY)
Our everyday actions and choices in our work are the expression of our individual and organisational values. The ‘ethics by design’ label sidesteps that everyday reality.
Both taken together, ethics as academic endeavour and ethics by design, result in ethics basically being outsourced to someone specific outside or in the organisation, or at best to a specific person in your team, and starts getting perceived as something external being delivered to your work reality. Ethics as a Service (EaaS) one might say, a service that takes care of the ethical aspects. That perception means you yourself can stop thinking about ethics, it’s been allocated, and you can just take its results and run with it. The privacy officer does privacy, the QA officer does quality assurance, the CISO does information security, and the ethics officer covers everything ethical…..meaning I can carry on as usual. (e.g. Enron had a Code of Ethics, but it had no bearing on the practical work or decisions taken.)
That perception of EaaS, ethics as an externally provided service to your work has real detrimental consequences. It easily becomes an outside irritant to the execution of your work. Someone telling you ‘no’ when you really want to do something. A bureaucratic template to fill in to be able to claim compliance (similarly as how privacy, quality, regulations are often treated). Ticking the boxes on a checklist without actual checks. That way it becomes something overly reductionist, which denies and ignores the complexity of everyday knowledge work.
Externally applied ethics become an irritant (image by Iain Watson, license CC BY)
Ethical questions and answers are actually an integral part of the complexity of your work. Your work is the place where clear boundaries can be set (by the organisation, by general ethics, law), ánd the place where you can notice as well as introduce behavioural patterns and choices. Complexity can only be addressed from within that complexity, not as an outside intervention. Ethics therefore needs to be dealt with from within the complexity of actual work and as one of the ingredients of it.
Placing ethics considerations in the midst of the complexity of our work, means that the spot where ethics are expressed in real work choices overlaps where such aspects are considered. It makes EaaS as a stand alone thing impossible, and instead brings those considerations into your everyday work not as an external thing but as an ingredient.
That is what I mean by Ethics as a Practice. Where you use academic and organisational output, where ethics is considered in the design stage, but never to absolve you from your professional responsibilities.
It still means setting principles and hard boundaries from the organisational perspective, but also an ongoing active reflection on them and on the heuristics that guide your choices, and it actively seeks out good practice. It never assumes a yes or no to an ethical question by default, later to be qualified or rationalised, but also does not approach those questions as neutral (as existing principles and boundaries are applied).(2) That way (data) ethical considerations become an ethics of your agency as a professional, informing your ability to act. It embraces the actual complexity of issues, acknowledges that daily reality is messy, engages all relevant stakeholders, and deliberately seeks out a community of peers to spot good practices.
Ethics is part and parcel of your daily messy work, it’s your practice to hone. (image by Neil Cummings, license CC BY SA)
Ethics as a Practice (EaaP) is a call to see yourself as an ethics practitioner, and a member of a community of practice of such practitioners, not as someone ethics ‘is done to’. Ethics is part and parcel of your daily messy work, it’s your practice to hone. Our meet-up today was a step to have such an exchange between peers.
I ended my remarks with a bit of a joke, saying, EaaP is so you can always do the next right thing, a quote from a Disney movie my 4 year old watches, and add a photo of a handwritten numbered list headed ‘things to do’ that I visibly altered so it became a ‘right things to do’ list.
(1) the ‘..as a Practice’ notion I took from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Ness Labs posting that mentioned ‘playfulness as a practice’.
(2) not starting from yes or no, nor from a neutral position, taken from the mediation theory by University of Twente’s prof Peter Paul Verbeek
@ton My response: https://www.downes.ca/post/71520
Yes, the ‘do the next right thing’ was a bit of a joke I added (it comes from the Frozen II movie my 4yo watches, did you follow the link?). The context of the remarks was working with data inside organisations. There are no obviously right answers to questions mostly, even in that more limited context. Key is that ethical considerations should be part of an individuals professional instrumentarium, now not always the case with e.g. data teams, business analysts etc I was referencing. And indeed turning ethics into a matter of compliance is one of the things I warn against, but that is what regularly happens in practice.
I changed the end of my posting to reflect that always ‘do the next right thing’ wasn’t my actual advice.
Definitely an improvement.
Looking at your post again, I like your criticism of this: “ethics basically being outsourced to someone specific outside or in the organisation, or at best to a specific person in your team, and starts getting perceived as something external being delivered to your work reality. “
I’ve been using Obsidian a little over 100 days now. So, with over three months of daily use it’s good to review the experience. I will do this in some detail, and it will span several blogposts. To explain both the evolution over time, as well as how I currently work with Obsidian in practice in a more detailed way, as Frank (rightly!) requested.
My system leads the use of tools
First off, a key point to make. I am using a system for myself to plan and do my work, maintain lots of things in parallel, and keep notes. That system consists of several interlocking methods, and those methods are supported by various tools. What I describe in my review of 100 days of using Obsidian, is not about Obsidian’s functionality per se, but more about how the functionality and affordances of Obsidian fit with my system and the methods in that system. With a better fit with my system and methods, I can reduce friction in my methods, and reduce the number of tools I need to use in support of those methods. At the same time, the use of a new tool like Obsidian influences the practical application of methods, it creates a different daily practice. Those shifts are of interest as well.
What I started with
The image below shows you how my overall system of work and taking in information looks. It’s a personal knowledge management system, that both takes care of the networked nature of making sense of new information and evolving interests, as well as the more hierarchical nature of working on projects and executing tasks. Both start with my general notion of where I want to be headed (‘goals’).
I used different tools for different parts of that image:
Excel (orange) for: listing goals (3-10 yrs out), the 3 month planning cycle I keep (along the lines of ’12 week year’), the habits I want to maintain or introduce, and tracking of those habits and project progress/fulfillment.
Things (red) for: areas of my life I’m active in, projects within those areas, and tasks in those projects.
WordPress (darkblue) for: daily logs (which I started keeping end of April this year, on an internal WP instance), week logs (internal draft blogposting), and of course for public blogging itself.
Evernote (blue) for: a list of all my current interests/favourite topics, all types of note taking, related to my work/projects and my information diet.
Other tools (grey) come into play for feedreading (Readkit), blocking time (Nextcloud calendar in Thunderbird), book reading (Kindle, Nova2), keeping references (Zotero since June, Evernote before that)
While evaluating my system, I tried Obsidian
In the spring I had started evaluating my system. I found I was not keeping up several parts of it, had fallen out of practice with a number of elements, and had changed some of my practices without adapting the flow in my tools. It had therefore suffered in its usefulness. Being at home because of the pandemic allowed me to allocate some time to take a better look, and to start testing some changes. On the tool side of that evaluation, I want to get rid of Evernote (as a silo and single point of failure) since some years.
One change in my system I was experimenting with, was keeping better atomic notes about the core concepts and key elements in how I work. Late last year I thought a bit about atomic notes, i.e. cards with individual snippets, and bringing those collections of snippets and the process of curating them and threading them into e.g. a blogpost or a line of argumentation. In January I came across Zettelkasten and took a closer look, in the spring I read a book about Zettelkasten and knew I wanted to adopt parts of it into my system (linking notes first and foremost, and storing references in a better way). That’s when I started using Zotero to keep references, and stopped doing that in Evernote (Zotero can take website snapshots and store them locally, something I used Evernote for a lot. On top of it if you give Zotero a reference it will find and store a PDF of a scientific article, very useful to read more deeply).
I started to keep atomic notes, sometimes called ‘evergreen notes’ which I to myself now call Notions, capturing concepts from my work (so not work related notes, but conceptual notes) first in both WordPress and Evernote simultaneously. WordPress (a local instance on my laptop, not online) because I already used it for day logs since April, and it allows relatively easy linking, and Evernote because it is much easier to keep notes there than WP, but linking in Evernote is much harder. I also played with some note taking tools, and that’s when I came across Obsidian. It immediately felt comfortable to use it.
How after 100 days Obsidian has covered my system
After over 100 days of Obsidian my use of it has expanded to include a much larger part of my system. Along the way it made my use within that system of Things, Evernote and almost Excel obsolete. It also means I sharpened my system and practice of using it again. This is how the tool use within my system, with the use of Obsidian in green, now looks
Obsidian now contains some 1200 mark down files. 500 are Notions, atomic notes almost exclusively about my own concepts and other core concepts in my work, in my own words. Mostly taken from my own blogposts, reports, and presentations over the years. The other 700 are some 115 day log / week log / month maps, about 100 proto-notions and notes that contain conceptual info to keep from other sources, and some 500 work and project related notes from conversations and work in progress. This sounds as a very quantitative take, and it is. I have in the past months definitely focused on the volume of ‘production’, to ensure I could quickly experience whether the tool helped me as intended. I think that monitoring the pace of production, which I’ve done in the past months, will no longer be relevant by the end of this year. I used the quantity as a lead indicator basically, but have been on the lookout for the lag indicators: is building a collection of linked notes leading to new connections, to more easily creating output like blogposts and presentations, having concepts concisely worded at hand in conversations to re-use? And it did. One very important thing, central to the Zettelkasten method, I haven’t really tried yet however, which is to use the current collection as a thinking tool. Because I was more focused on creating notions first.
On Obsidian as a tool
There are four things in Obsidian that are to me key affordances:
it is a viewer/editor, a fancy viewer/editor, on top of plain markdown text files on my laptop. It builds its own local database to keep track of links between notes. Whatever happens to Obsidian, my data is always available.It being ‘just’ a viewer is important because Obsidian is not open source and won’t be. There is a potential open source alternative, Foam, but that tool is not yet developed enough.
being ‘just’ an editor means using regular text files, it feels like coming full circle, as I have for the most part been note taking in simple text files since the late ’80s. Textfiles always had my preference, as they’re fast and easy to create, but it needed a way to connect them, add tags etc., and that was always the sticking point. It means text files are available outside of Obsidian. This allows me to access and manipulate notes from outside Obsidian without issue, and I do (e.g. on mobile, but also with other software on my laptop such as Tinderbox that I used for the images in this post).
it makes linking between notes (or future links) as simple as writing their filenames, which is supported by forward search while you’re typing.
it shows graphs of your note network, which to me is useful especially for 2 steps around a note you’re working on.
I use Obsidian as simple as possible; I do not use plugins that are supposed to help you create notes (e.g. the existing Zettelkasten and Day log plugin), because they make assumptions about how to create notes (how to name them, which links to create in them). I created my own workflow for creating notes to avoid functionality lock-in in Obsidian: day logs are created manually by keyboard shortcuts using Alfred (previously TextExpander), as are the timestamps I use to create unique file names for notes.
Timeline of three months of Obsidian use
Below is a timeline of steps taken in the past months, which gives you an impression of how my use of Obsidian in support of my system has evolved.
November 2019 I discuss the concept of cards (i.e. atomic notes), curation and writing output
January 2020 I first looked at the Zettelkasten method and some tools suggested for it. I mention the value of linking notes (possible in Evernote, but high friction to do)
May 2020, read the book about Zettelkasten by Sönke Ahrens, adopted Zotero as a consequence.
7 July started with deliberately making Zettelkasten style atomic notes in WordPres en Evernote in parallel, to move away from collecting as dumping stuff in your back yard. Atomic notes only concerning my concepts in my work.
8 July started using Obsidian, after having just started creating ‘evergreen’ notes
15 July having made 35 atomic notes, I make a new association between two of them for the first time.
28 July I’m at 140 conceptual notes. I named the collection Garden of the Forking Paths. I switched my digital tickler files (a part of the GTD method) from Evernote to Obsidian. I had stopped using them, but now it felt normal again to use them. The post I wrote about this, was made from atomic notes I already had made beforehand.
5 August I find I haven’t used WordPress anymore for my day logs ever since starting with Obsidian, and that I also added week logs (an automatic collation of day logs), and monthmaps (a mindmap at the start of the month listing key upcoming things and potential barriers). My Evernote use dropped to 4 notes in 4 weeks, whereas it was 47 the 4 weeks before it. After almost a month of Obsidian, I am getting more convinced that I am on a path of ditching Evernote.
12 August I renamed my ‘evergreen’ notes, that contain my concepts mostly, to Notions, as the generic word notes doesn’t make a distinction in the character of some the things I’m putting into notes.
12 August I write a first long form blogpost made from Notions
13 August Added Nextcloud synchronisation of the note files, allowing mobile viewing and editing of notes
31 August I keep track of tasks in Obsidian and drop Things. There was a time I always did such things in straightforward text files. Being able to do so again but now with a much better way of viewing and navigating such text files and the connections between them, makes it easy to ‘revert’ to my old ways so to speak.
13 September I am at 300 Notions. These first 300 notions are mostly my notions, the things that are core to my thinking about my own work, and the things I internalised over the past 25 years or so, of doing that work. I expect that going forward other people’s ideas and notions will become more important in my collection.
13 September I describe how I make notions and notes
September / October I increasingly use my conceptual Notions as reference while in (online) conversations.
5 October I gave a client presentation (about the Dutch system of base registers) pulled together completely from existing Notions.
7 October added a ‘decision log’ to my note keeping.
16 October 100 days in Obsidian, 500 Notions and about 700 other types of notes.
16 October reinstated a thorough Weekly Review (a component of GTD) into my system.
21 October I gave a brief presentation Ethics as a Practice, the second this month pulled together from existing notes.
This all as a first post looking back on 100 days of Obsidian.
Part 2: Hierarchy and Logs
Part 3: Task management
Part 4: Writing connected Notions, Ideas, and Notes
Part 5: Flow using workspaces
Part 6: Obsidian development vs my usage
A pretty regular week, in which I had a harder time getting up early. But, that is now fixed thanks to daylight saving time having ended: I woke up at 5:30 this morning.
This week I
Some bookkeeping as a variety of VAT and annual tax returns are due by the end of next week
Renewed my Tinderbox license, so I could upgrade to version 8, which allows me to dynamically incorporate Obsidian notes into Tinderbox maps
Worked on digital transformation issues for a client, ao preparing an assessment for a department
Had a (remote obviously) breakfast meeting with my business partners
Had the weekly meetings with clients
Prepared and delivered my Ethics as a Practice remarks as part of our company’s informal event for Global Ethics Day.
Did an extensive team evaluation with a client for a microsubsidies for energy poverty project we did last year
Did a weekly review again, something I restarted last week. This second one was already much smoother than last week’s when there was a bit of backlog of things to get into the reviewing mode again
Met payroll for the company. It feels good that we are doing well as a company and team in these times
Made small bits of progress on trying to make my own IndieWeb compliant theme, that might turn this site into ‘neither a blog nor a wiki’.
Spent some time watching and reading GitLabs material on managing remote teams.
Started reviewing my experience using Obsidian for note takig in the past 3+ months
Spent quite a bit of time outside with our 4yo daughter in the pleasant fall weather. The park around the corner has many fly agarics popping up right now. We used the phone camera to have a look underneath.
In this next part looking at my use of Obsidian I want to describe in more detail what notes I take and how I take them.
Taking better notes is the actual reason I started using Obsidian. Using Obsidian for my work, day logs, and task management came later, and that covers the hierarchical part of my PKM system. The note taking part is the networked part of it. The system works for me because it combines those two things and has them interact: My internal dialogue is all about connected ideas and factoids, whereas doing activities and completing projects is more hierarchical in structure.
I make four types of notes: Notions, Notes, Ideas and work notes.
That last type, work notes, are the project and task related notes. Things I write down during meetings, notes from interviews, or ideas on how to move forward in a project. These live in the hierarchical structure I described in Pt 2. They can be linked to Ideas, Notes or Notions, or may give rise to them, but they serve a purpose firmly rooted in ongoing work. They are always placed within the context, and folder, of a specific project. This post isn’t about those notes.
The other notes live in the non-hierarchical, networked part of my system. They are added as I go along based on things I think about and information I come across. They become part of the system and get context not by the folder they are placed in (as is the case with work notes in a project folder), they become part of the system because they get linked to existing notes that I associate them with. They are never not linked to at least one other note. The links over time form patterns, and emergent patterns lead to new insights. Those new insights get expressed in additional links and in new notes.
These networked type notes come in three shapes, Notions, Notes, and Ideas. Each has their own folder to keep them separated from other material.
The folders are named Garden of the Forking Paths (for Notions), Notes (which I may yet rename), and the Ideas-greenhouse. I will discuss them one by one.
Ideas-greenhouse
The ideas-greenhouse holds ideas I have, ideas that seem like something that can be put to action more or less quickly. They may be connected to notes in the other two folders, or to notes in the project folders. An example would be, that I jotted down the idea of making a digital garden for my company two months ago, triggered by a posting on how a community should have its governance documented in combination with having reread the communication handbook of Basecamp while thinking about remote working. It has since morphed into building a collective memory, and turned into a budding internal website documenting the first few things. This is useful when we are onboarding new people, and as a reference for all of us, so colleagues feel better equiped to decide something on their own or ask better questions if they do need someone else’s advice on a decision. So the ideas greenhouse contains ideas that can be acted upon after some tweaks. They may be refined over time, before such action, or connected to and recombined with other ideas in the greenhouse.
Notes
Notes, things I come across that strike me as interesting (filtered by my current favourite topics, but not exclusive to it, to aid serendipity), which I jot down while adding why I find it of interest. They’re more like general resources, in which I can keep/find examples, quotes or pointers, extended with some notes on what I think of them. Notes are things that may result from work notes (something someone said in a meeting, an example held up), or from feed reading (pointers to things, perspectives found in someone else’s blog), regular browsing and reading, or questions that I come up with. It’s a mix of stuff, and that’s why it still is called simply ‘Notes’. I may yet come up with a different name for them. An example would be a note I made last week, called SensRnet. SensRnet is the attempt at creating a national database of sensors placed in publice spaces, by local and national government entities. It came up in a meeting with a client. I jotted it down, adding a few links to its source code on GitHub published by the Dutch Cadastre, and links to articles written by some local governments about it. I also mention the outcome of a project my colleague Marc did a few years ago writing local regulations governing the placement of such sensors in public spaces, and doing an analysis from the legal viewpoint. That’s how a Note starts. I may copy some text into at some point, and summarise it over time, or add other context in which I encountered the same thing again. Notes are ‘factoid’ like, resources written down with the context added of how I found them and why I was interested. That’s different from Notions which are already at creation more about the future use it may have.
Notions and proto-notions
Notions are conceptual notes taken from my own work and experience mostly, and give my own perspective on these concepts. Most of the current well over 500 come directly in my own words from my blogposts of the past 18 years and presentations I gave during that time.
As they are more conceptual than factual I started calling them Notions to distinguish them from the other more general resource Notes. I keep these Notions in a folder called Garden of the Forking Paths (see the name explained)
Each Notion links to at least one other Notion, and while I write them I think about how what I am writing connects to other things already in the Garden of the Forking Paths (GotFP). I may also add additional links or tags, as I come across a Notion while pursuing something else.
Usually while writing a Notion, I show the graph of how it connects to other Notions/Notes alongside it. I set the graph to show not only the 1st level links, as that only shows the links already apparent from the text I have in front of me. I set it to show 3 steps out at the start, and reduce to two steps when there are more links. That way you see the entire vicinity of a Notion, and it may trigger additional perspectives and associations. It’s a way to leverage the ‘weak ties’ between Notions, which is the place where new information generally comes from.
Below you see two graphs for a Notion called ‘3D to navigate information’, gleaned from a 2006 blogpost I wrote. The first image is the graph for direct links, showing two links. The second image is the graph for a distance of 2 (links of links), and it shows a much wider picture. It may well be that seeing that graph being created alongside a Notion while I am writing it, leads to adding in another link.
The Notion ‘3D to navigate information’ is linked to two others, one on how the physical and information landscape overlap and correlate, and one about what I think would be useful functionality for social software tools.
If you look at the same graph with distance 2, the layer of additionally visible nodes show how my new Notion might be connected to things like online identity, using the environment to store memory and layered access to information. This triggers additional thoughts during the writing process.
I spin out notes and potential Notions from my project notes, as I encounter things in my work where some idea or thought jumps out. Those potential Notions I put in a folder called proto notions, inside my GotFP.
Processing notes and proto-notions
Both the notes and proto-notions I touch upon every now and then, further summarising them or adding explanation and perspective, rewording them, linking them to other notes (this is what Tiago Forte calls progressive summarising). Proto-notions may yet become Notes and not evolve into Notions. Some of what starts as a Note may become a Notion in the GotFP, but most will always remain notes. Most ‘factoids’, even if reworded and put into the context of why I find them interesting will always be Notes. Notions usually are about concepts pertaining to vision, values and practices. Linking them is a key part of those concepts, as it binds them into my network of concepts and thoughts, it puts them as atoms into the constellations that make up my perspective of things. Notes can be specific examples of Notions.
I previously described how I use certain tags and referencing and naming conventions for Notes and Notions.
Using Notions and Notes
I use Notions and Notes in my work directly, pulling them into project notes, by transclusion, or e.g. when writing project proposals. I regularly call them up in conversations when something related gets being discussed, so I can re-use parts of them.
I also use Notions to create new blogposts and presentations. Last month I gave two presentations which were entirely created from collating a few Notions and adding a line or two to have them flow over into each other. One was on government core (base) registers, the other on Ethics as a Practice. Two months ago I blogged about how I see the role of cities, and that too was constructed from Notions.
Next to actual output, I pull together Notions, and sometimes Notes in what I call ’emergent outlines’ (Söhnke Ahrens in his book about Zettelkasten calls them speculative outlines, I like emergence better than speculation as a term). These are brief lists to which I add Notions that I think together flow into a story. As I use transclusion I can read them using the underlying Notions. Emergent outlines are a lightweight and bottom-up way to write more, that has a much lower threshold than thinking up a writing project and sitting down trying to write it out.
Feedreading and Notes / Notions
Feedreading is a source for Notes, sporadically for Notions. I notice a rising need with myself for higher quality material as input. Blog reading is conversational to me, and for a long time I’ve been content with that conversation as it is. Now I more often want to look into things more deeply. A blog conversation is no longer mostly the endpoint and more frequently the starting point for an exploration, leading me down a trail of links deeper into a topic. In the past three months I’ve read more scientific articles than in the past 3 years I think. Scientific articles and other documents I keep in Zotero, and from my notes I reference the Zotero entry. This difference in how I perceive my feed reading will likely shift my focus to how to read those feeds much more ‘inside-out’, i.e. starting from a question or topic, and checking what specific people in my blogroll say about them. This is funcionality more or less missing from feed readers, so it may lead me to want to tinker some more.
This concludes the 4th part of describing how I use Obsidian. There’s one more coming, which is all about Obsidian’s functionality as a viewer on my markdown files: the use of workspaces.
In the oil industry it is common to have every meeting start with a ‘safety moment’. One of the meeting’s participants shares or discusses something that has to do with a safe work environment. This helps keep safety in view of all involved, and helps reduce the number of safety related incidents in oil companies.
Recently I wondered if every meeting in data rich environments should start with an ethics moment. Where one of the participants raises a point concerning information ethics, either a reminder, a practical issue, or something to reflect on before moving on to the next item on the meeting’s agenda. As I wrote in Ethics as a Practice, we have to find a way of positioning ethical considerations and choices as an integral part of professionalism in the self-image of (data using) professionals. This might be one way of doing that.
It’s the end of December. This means it is time for my annual year in review posting, the ‘Tadaa!’ list.
Ten years ago I started writing end-of-year blogposts listing the things that happened that year that gave me a feeling of accomplishment, that make me say ‘Tadaa!’, so this is the eleventh edition (See the 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 editions). I tend to move on immediately to the next thing as soon as something is finished, and that often means I forget to celebrate or even acknowledge things during the year. Sometimes I forget things completely (a few years ago I completely forgot I organised a national level conference at the end of a project). My sense of awareness has improved in the past few years, especially since I posted week notes for the past few years. This year was different as well as the pandemic and resulting lock-downs meant a more introspective year than usual. Still it remains a good way to reflect on the past 12 months and list the things that gave me a sense of accomplishment. So, here’s this year’s Tadaa!-list, in no particular order:
We started the year, as per our tradition, celebrating New Year with dear friends that live in Switzerland. Of course this year we can’t travel to Switzerland, and miss seeing our friends. I’m glad we did go last year. We quarantined ourselves from before Christmas, so we can visit E’s parents around NYE. We haven’t seen them since late August.
Jamming into the new year 2020 in the Swiss Alps
Around the start of the first pandemic wave in March I spent a considerable amount of time pushing for still pending signatures on projects and for prompt payments on outstanding invoices. It meant my company entered the lockdown with some confidence. No projects were postponed by clients, no invoices went unpaid. It provided the team with reassurance. We did not need to apply for any economic support measures, leaving them for companies in more need.
I’ve been working remotely for 16 years, and all of us were accustomed to working in a distributed way, but we had just opened our own office last year in Utrecht. The office served as a safe working spot for one or two people living nearby really needing to get out of the house. We distributed some office chairs to the homes of our team members early on, as we didn’t want them to sit on kitchen table chairs for week, months, a year on end. In the end, due to the many video calls, we saw more of each other and more of us at the same time, not less this year.
In a distanced line at the bakery, when it was still novel. Showing new cycling skills to grandma on video.
Our team became much more of an actual team this year, caused by being more visible to each other. We built and depended much more on each other. Each of us struggled mentally at times, working from within the same four walls each day, but the support of the others was there to get through it. In March we let go of our just previously set company goals for 2020, and made team stability our major aim.
Acknowledging the new reality, as well as our mental response, the team’s reflex was to step on it. With great results. Simply getting on with it resulted in our best year yet, with an 18% increase in turnover compared to 2019, despite having a policy of not setting financial goals, and also letting go of the original 2020 goals we set. There’s a lesson in that. Because we did well, we could extend E’s contract with a year in June, newly hired P in September after the completion of her internship and Master thesis with us, and offered S a fixed contract in October. We brought our colleague J on board as a shareholder and fellow entrepreneur (making him the only one we fired from the company, in January)
Ethics,not as an abstraction, but as a practice, became a much more central element in our work concerning data, data governance, and responsible data use. I helped facilitate a great workshop with colleagues in the Amsterdam Arena early in the year, we injected ethical discussions in most of our ongoing projects, and created a data-ethics card game as a end-of-year present to clients.
I don’t ski, E’ does only a little, but we decided to join a group of friends for their skiing trip in the French Alps in February. Enjoying the snow, simply hanging out with friends, playing with Y building snowmen, under a sunny sky was great. It also turned out to be the only trip we made this year, so the memories of that fun week have served us well.
In the snow in the French Alps, in the Ajax Amsterdam Arena for data ethics
In May, in the midst of the first lock-down, I turned 50. E had arranged a week of spread out activities, centered around the theme ‘play’. Part of it was an evening of playing Trivial Pursuit with dear friends online, including a question card deck about my own past 50 years. Another part was a treasure hunt with another dear friend through the neighbourhood. All fun yet within social distancing and other guidelines.
Video conference Trivial Pursuit. We had the board, every participant their own card deck to ask questions from.
When the pandemic hit, the NGO I chair was in a much different place than my company: various projects got postponed indefinitely, others never materialised. On top of that the director decided to leave and take up a position long on her wishlist, and a key project manager left as well. It left us scrambling during the summer to ensure the organisation’s future, financial stability, find a new director and replace key people all at once. The NGO’s team and the board pulled it off together. Our board is normally very hands-off, but now we jumped into the day-to-day operations. I’m really glad our joint efforts had an impact. We found a new director and two new project leads within weeks, and all could start almost immediately. The renewed team then pulled hard on ensuring stability. This month we approved the 2021 budget, and the NGO is once more financially ok, the team is actually larger than 6 months ago, and we’re on the look-out for one more staff member. The economic support measures were essential to get through the first few months, but the organisation now no longer needs them.
At the Kröller-Müller museum
E and I have known for years we can travel very well together. Now we know we can be very well at home together too. Both of us miss not having much or any time for ourselves, especially when Y is at home during school closures, both of us miss being able to go places for inspiration. Both of us struggled at times. We’re tired and didn’t have any real off-time for 9 months. Nevertheless we managed and complemented eachother well I think. We went for walks and visited a museum or two when conditions allowed, we took care of our home and garden to help ensure our wellbeing.
Enjoying our downstairs terrace at the water. Many walks through our neighbourhood.
I finally dumped Facebook completely, including Whatsapp. I had left Facebook three years ago, and then created a new more low-profile account. During the first months of the pandemic I realised that both the rationalisation I had for still being on FB (some connections I had only there), and the increasing level of pandemic-inspired conspiracy-stories (don’t ever call them theories!) and related toxicity made my ongoing presence there unbearable. So I left. Because FB as a company isn’t doing anything meaningful to fix the mess of their own creation, I decided I don’t want anything to do with the company as a whole either. So WhatsApp got uninstalled as well. I don’t miss the never ending doomscrolling on manipulated timelines. I sought out more distributed conversations instead (see further down).
Desinfection is the new sexy. Socially distanced cycling traffic light waiting zone
Renovated my personal knowledge management (PKM) system. Making notes differently means a very different pace of learning. I wrote some 800 notions, conceptual notes representing the core of my internalised concepts of 20+ years of work. That can now serve as the base of further learning. Addtionally 100 notes geared to more fact-oriented things, which will grow from being connected to my feed reading inputs, and now that my first focus on establishing the main body of concepts is over. And several hundred immediate work related notes, helping me to get things done. Kept a day log since late April, which was helpful to see the work I did also on days the fragmentation of tasks would otherwise obscure it. All in all, my PKM didn’t change fundamentally, but I reduced the friction of sustaining it a lot. It has already paid off in various ways, and I’ll get better at wielding it in the coming months to help me create, write and work better.
I had two periods where I struggled this year. Towards the summer, when I was struggling in getting the narrative for a report together, and in the volume of fragmented and overly diverse material I had couldn’t find my way out. And a worse period last month, where for a few weeks I felt increasingly awful. From the relentless efforts without time off, the endless video calls, and no longer being able to easily go outside as the days got greyer and wetter. In both instances I am glad I reached out to others about it, and that act alone already improved much. For the coming months I will try and keep my calendar relatively empty.
I started my days at 6am in the spring, and kept it up after the summer until now. That first hour of the day, before Y wakes up, I use to read and write a bit. A small sliver of my own time.
A long September weekend hiking in the hills of Limburg, southern Netherlands
Took a very deep dive into meteorological data and earth observation / environmental data in the EU, as part of the work to write upcoming European legislation on mandatory open data releases in areas of high socio-economic value. It was a long, and at times hard, process, but I’m pleased with the results in both the thematic areas I was responsible for. If even the low end recommendations are adopted it will mean progress unheard of in about 2 decades of discussion in the meteorological field. If it moves above that low end, it will also mean a very logical but still the biggest open data step for the entire INSPIRE program.
Enjoyed our home a lot, appreciating it even more than before. So glad we’re in the house we’re in. Allowing us to have different in- and outside spaces to use, to avoid feeling caged in. Growing and picking berries, seeing apples grow. Having our own office space to withdraw in. Y having space to leave her toys around, without it getting in the way. Little details help too, like the smooth feeling door handles we bought when we moved in. Now that I’ve grabbed many more door handles at home this year, I’m oddly thankful for them each time.
A visit to the Amersfoort Kade Museum, and to the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden
Still happy I treated myself to a Nova2 e-ink reader, allowing me to read more non-fiction in a way that fits my routines, and have a seamless way of processing the notes I take from that reading.
Enjoyed the distributed conversations and connections through my blog, now 18 yrs old. Conversations that cross over different topics, through different modes of communication, and different aspects of life. Thank you all who frequented my inboxes this year.
Finally, it feels good that professionally there is enough lined up already for the better part of next year. It gives quiet confidence, and creates space to deal with the logistical and mental challenges the ongoing pandemic will still pose.
Internet retail turned from a convenience to a necessity this year. For groceries, and for DIY material, games, pencils etc to entertain Y. I bought several pieces of art as Christmas gifts, and they arrived within days from across the EU. I could support independent stores I like from behind my desk.
I’ve worked 1646 hours this year according to my timekeeping spreadsheet, which was 100 less than last year. For the first time it is on average near to my nominal 4-day work week, when counted over 52 weeks. However, in reality it was significantly more, definitely. This as when you’re at home you tend to only count the hours you’re ‘really’ working. Normally if you’re at the office or with a client, you count from arrival to departure as work time. I’ve told our team they should allow for that difference by using a multiplication factor of 1,3-1,5, but I did not really take that advice myself.
It was a year in which our lives took place in a much smaller space. Being connected, having the world at our digital disposal was good and needed. We’re healthy, doing ok, and professionally secure. That’s a lot already to be thankful about. Onwards to 2021!
Take care, stay well, reach out. Happy 2021!
A pretty regular week thankfully, although it started with a day of school closing (due to ice rains). At least during the mornings both E and I had our hands free the other days. At the start of the week there was still snow and just last Sunday we were out on the ice. This weekend it was sunny and warm, and Y played in the sandbox in the garden. Quite a contrast.
This week I
Had a few conversations on some work w.r.t. intra-governmental audits, which turned into a clear assignment description. Always nice when a client insists on my involvement.
Was interviewed by our new intern I for her bachelor’s thesis, in which I emphasized ethics as a practice
Had (the annual) discussions with our family financial adviser, on financially enabling our needs and wishes
Made quite a few new notes and notions in my pkm, to my own surprise. Hit some inspiration at a few points during the week
Did the (remaining) January invoicing
Had the weekly meetings for the Rotterdam citizen science on air quality project
Participated in the award session for the local short story competition, which E won!
Had the weekly client meeting on translating EU data related initiatives to Dutch government choices
Migrated all my old book blog posts to my book notes section in my PKM, some 70 in total.
Did some early spring garden pruning (the laurel, and the Buddlejae)
Fixed my expired PGP mail encryption keys
This week in….1930Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto on photos made in January, on February 18th 1930. It was the first object discovered in the Kuiper Belt. First categorised as planet, it was recategorised in 2006 as a dwarf planet (around that time, 2005 and 2008, two other dwarf planets were discovered in the Kuiper Belt).
Pluto as imaged by NASA’s New Horizons mission in July 2015. Photo public domain, credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI