A regular week, and an intensive one.

This week I

• started Monday with a half day meet-up with my business partners. Earlier we concluded we spend way too little time together to discuss things, and then to act on some of those things together. So we talked for a while and then worked out the details of various issues together, moving them steps closer to being dealt with.
• had an all-hands meeting with the team afterwards, where I did my monthly recap of where we are financially (tl;dr we’re doing more than fine)
• prepared a key meeting of a client with their board and advisory board
• played a bit with creating a single page in my WP site, with completely different theming
• had the weekly client meetings
• had the session with a client’s board and advisory board, taking them through an online workshop, which included working in subgroups. Some follow-up appointments have already been scheduled for next year.
• Prepared and updated English language slides on the emerging EU legal framework for data to present to the European working group of national hydrographic services, and gave the presentation.
• I received a spam message on a Yammer account I wasn’t aware of I still had. The last time I posted in that particular Yammer group was 11 years ago. Removed myself from that group, and deleted my Yammer account.
• Had a conversation about a potential project on the data governance and openness of the national database for flora and fauna sightings. We’ll be likely writing a proposal for them. Will also give my ‘EU data talk’ to them to have a discussion with their team how that changes their perspective or not
• Spent too much time getting a server outage of our Rocket.chat instance sorted out. In the end our hoster had to have people in the datacenter give the server box a good kick.
• Wrote out the rationale and key impacts of the ethics and principles behind the EU data legal framework on the reference architecture for a national digital twin of the built environment I’m helping to write, and discussed it with the team. Next week I’ll spend more time writing a first full draft on how it impacts capabilities of such a digital twin
• Prepared remarks and took part in a panel on open data, data as a service and intellectual property rights for an European Commission training. I was invited by Hans at Timelex, who was my colleague a decade ago at the ePSIplatform, the precursor to the European open data portal.
• Had lunch Friday afternoon with three former university friends, back when I was a board member of the electronic engineering student association at the start of the nineties. We haven’t seen each other since the mid nineties, though I met R once after university and he participates in my blog comments every now and then. It was a relaxed conversation, none of us had changed in any significant ways as a person. We shouldn’t wait another 20-25 years for a next conversation.
• Drove to the north-east of the Netherlands with E and Y to spend the weekend with E’s parents. We hadn’t seen them in a while. It was good to catch up. Y got to help out with decorating the christmas tree, and her grandmother had arranged for a few ceramic christmas ornaments Y could paint herself. We had our adopted christmas tree delivered Thursday, which we’ll bring into the house tomorrow.