Week Notes 22-40 – Interdependent Thoughts

A week that flew by, with me finally catching my breath Friday afternoon.

I started the week with finishing my talk for the BeGeo conference, and sent it to the organising team for inclusion in their production. I used some DALL-E generated images, one of which to underscore a point on what would be missing if geo-spatial didn’t claim its own role well enough in the EU data space.
Monday afternoon I traveled to Brussels by train arriving early evening. Arriving at the hotel I got a message asking to redo my slides in a different format because of the huge widescreen they would be shown at during the event. This meant replacing some of the images with higher resolution versions and re-arranging the lay-out of the slides.
Tuesday I spent at the BeGeo conference and provided the opening key-note right after the Belgian defense minister opening remarks. It seemed well received. The rest of the day I sat in on some interesting sessions mostly in the geoAI and digital twins tracks. By the end of the afternoon I took a train back home.
After last week’s trouble with ABNAMRO our new bank cards arrived and I activated the one in my name. Although none of the cards currently work as intended, and the online banking interface keeps throwing cryptic errors, we at least regained access to our accounts. Meaning the NGO could refund the salaries I fronted last week and pay taxes as intended.
Had the weekly client meetings.
Reached out to my World Bank colleagues of the past years. I think my experience w.r.t. the EU regulatory framework on data and in data ethics will be useful in their programs. My work for the WB had stalled due to the pandemic. I’ll have a conversation next week with the ICT global practice of the WB, and hopefully later with the good governance global practice as well.
Had some conversations on how to get through the work load I have before me until the end of this year, and did some project planning with clients for next year. For the rest of 2022 I’ll bring in some of my team members to take tasks from my plate, to ensure some more speed and more results before December.
Spent Thursday completely in video calls, which is extremely tiring. Nevertheless had good discussions with the national environmental institute about a potential project, on digital transformation with a province, on our project proposal for a responsible AI maturity assessment with the police, on preparing a session with water authorities about the EU data rules, and on the digital ethics committee for the provinces.
Did some of the invoicing for September
Took Y to her swimming lesson.
Took it slow during the weekend, went for coffee in town with E and Y on Saturday morning. It’s the annual children’s books week, so we browsed our usual bookstore for some new books for Y. She’s starting to read on her own, so it’s a mix of things she can practice reading on and things to read to her, that she can read herself later.
I arranged both a public transport card (free) and a Museum year card for Y, ensuring we don’t have to arrange tickets for her on our trips.