A week late, it’s been busy, here are my week notes for the last week of September.

This week I

• Gave a presentation to 120 or so statisticians at the national statistics office about how the new EU data regulations may impact and aid their work.
• Spent too many hours on the phone with ABNAMRO bank fixing a big administrative mess w.r.t. the NGO I chair. What started the week before with a seemingly simple call to activate a newly received online access card somehow turned into them not having anyone on record as being the rightful representative of the NGO’s accounts. This meant all of a sudden none of the cards worked, none of us had access to the account and they weren’t allowed to talk to us about any details as they couldn’t verify who we were in their system. As we were supposed to pay the salaries the week before, this was highly disruptive. In the end I privately fronted this month’s salaries for the team of 9. By the end of the week I and other board members were re-registered again with our accounts, meaning we could finally talk details again. New banking cards were sent on Friday, and should arrive after the weekend.
• Did a first selection with a client for people to ask for an interprovincial digital ethics committee.
• Had the weekly client meetings.
• Worked on a project proposal for my client’s client for next year. If all goes well, this also means my continued involvement next year.
• Prepared a session for October 13th with a group at the national statistics office about the Green Deal data space, energy transition and the role of the statistics office.
• Created a short overview on how to start writing short factsheets about the coming implementation of the EU High Value Data list and the Data Governance Act for Dutch geo-data holders and proposed translating them to English for wider use.
• Revisited some old work on procurement conditions and public tender criteria to ensure data sovereignty for the public entity doing the procurement. This for a province who asked to use it in a negotiation they’re currently involved in.
• Had lunch with E in town, after picking up a Nintendo Switch which we’ll introduce to Y during her fall week off.
• Played some more with DALL-E now that it is made available to the general public.
• Started preparing my talk and slides for BeGeo, the Belgian annual conference for all those involved in geospatial data, organised by the Belgian national geographic institute.
• Saturday we drove to E’s parents to visit an art exhibition which include a few of my mother in law’s photographs. The venue was a newly renovated hall, and looked fantastic.
• Sunday, having stayed the night at E’s parents, we drove to Enschede. There we first visited the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, for an exhibit about the Italian futurists. Such fantastic art work attempting to catch movement, time and dynamics in paintings. Too bad Marinetti, a poet, got very much involved in Italian fascism as a way to break out of the conservative and stale place Italy was in when the 20th century started, and glorified war for its disruptive potential. Afterwards we visited our neighbours from when we lived there and had good afternoon catching up with them.

The ‘Marinetti and futurism, manifest for a new world’ exhibit at Rijksmuseum Twenthe

E and Y discussing the art work.