This week felt a bit sluggish, but was otherwise ok. The sluggishness was caused by participating in a client’s group event on Monday afternoon and evening and Tuesday all day. With the pandemic measures relaxed as of last week, this event was face to face. This turned out to be remarkably intensive for me, clearly I had to get used again to having a room full of people and especially their conversations around me. After Tuesday I much needed time to rest which left limited time for other things.

This week I

• spent two days on a client’s all hands meeting
• learned that I will be a speaker at the FOSS for Geo Netherlands conference in a few weeks
• worked on a proposal for a client to submit to their client
• had planned to attend an in-person event of the Medinge Group, of which I used to be a member for a decade, but in the end decided against it based on a slightly runny nose and the intensity of the event at the start of the week
• got lots of positive feedback on my work on the EU legal framework for data, including an additional small assignment to match the new framework against a specific pilot project on data architecture
• had the usual weekly client meetings
• got asked to participate in a podcast session on note taking tools
• checked with the EC on the progress w.r.t. the EU High Value Data list, which turned out to currently stalled
• had an interesting conversation about knowledge .management with a client that saw significant growth in their team. This led me to resurfacing some projects I did 2000-2010 which I feel still have meaningful lessons to be taken from them, and writing notes about them
• talked about non-fiction book writing with E, which she suggested might be a useful thing for both herself and me. I find I feel a lot of resistance against the notion. Upon closer inspection this is based on a) mistrusting the (PR-)objectives of a lot of authors of non-fiction books, b) the notion that many such books are anecdote padded ideas that themselves would fit on a few pages, ideas usually more intuited than researched, and c) not seeing a topic that shouldn’t also belong on the heap of books that needn’t be written. At the same time I buy loads of non-fiction books, so there’s some paradox there to further explore.
• worked on a series of 4 sessions and workshops for a Dutch Ministry later this month
• had a conversation with colleagues at the World Bank about a potential assignment for digital transformation work in Jordan
• worked on the 2020 bookkeeping in preparation for doing the 2020 tax returns for both E and me
• did some preparation for a session on (open) data for anti-corruption efforts, which I will be presenting next week
• did some work in the garden, removing summer items such as parasols, and prepare for the next season
• gave most our apple harvest away to four neighbours, keeping enough for baking an apple pie for ourselves during the weekend