18 reactions on “Two Decades of Blogging, The Free As A Bird Edition”

1. De twintig jaar club …give or take

2. @ton Welcome to the twenty years club! 😉

3. @ton Congratulations! Twenty years is a long time for blogging and good job keeping it going

4. @pratik thank you!

5. @ton congrats Ton! Very nice achievement! I started blogging in 2001. But I have not kept it going for a long time and only started back in 2020 probably. I always admire when I see sites like yours where we can navigate to many years of archives.

6. Congratulations on your 20 years of blogging. 🙂

7. @ton That is a huge achievement, congratulations sir!

8. Congratulations, Ton!
   
   
   
   

9. “Conversation is key, and that is why I blog.
   Here’s to another year of blogging and conversation.”
   

10. @ton thanks for your perseverance

11. Vind het heerlijk om te zien hoe een rijke man als een olifant door zijn (net gekochte) porseleinkast loopt waar zoveel miljoenen mensen gebruik van maken. Laat weer goed voelen hoe fragiel private sociale netwerken zijn. En daarmee de tijd die we daar doorbrengen, de data die we daar delen en de mensen waarmee we ons verbinden.

    Maar het zet mensen ook aan tot nieuwe avonturen. En zo zijn er vele duizenden mensen ineens Mastodon aan het (her)ontdekken.

    Had ook ooit een account aangemaakt. Maar die server bestaat niet meer(gaat nu naar porno). Je kunt mijn profiel en sommige post nog wel vinden in het netwerk via @erikvisser@mastodon.network. Maar dan als een soort geest die lijkt te leven maar dat niet meer doet. En heb geen idee hoe ik dat kan verwijderen.

    Daarom ben ik erg terughoudend geworden om weer een nieuwe account aan te maken op een server van een ander, je weet nooit of deze in de lucht blijft.

    Liefst heb ik dat mijn eigen site de plek is waarop mensen mij kunnen vinden binnen In het federale netwerk waar Mastodon deel van is.

    En dat blijkt te kunnen! De onderliggende software die al die servers met elkaar laat kletsen is Activitypub. En met een eenvoudige zoektocht vind ik een gelijknamige plugin voor WordPress die veel zegt te doen en zelfs vriendjes is van Webmentions.

    Maar mijn schip strandt al snel. Na een makkelijke installatie en een eigen fediverse id “erik@rkvssr.nl”. Blijkt mijn id niet vindbaar en lijkt mijn verificatie op webfinger ook niet helemaal goed te gaan. Wordt weer pijnlijk duidelijk dat ik van toeten noch blazen weet en ook niet het dev1 brein heb om dat goed te snappen.

    Gelukkig zijn er vele mensen zoals Sebastiaan Andeweg, Ton Zijstra, Ben Werdmuller en Frank Meeuwsen die druk aan het experimenteren zijn en mij inspireren en soms een stapje verder helpen.

    Dus afwachten of ik het schip de komende tijd weet vlot te trekken en uiteindelijk glorieus vaar op een fijne verbonden zee.
    0eloper↩VerwantVijfhonderd plus“Visitor 74871544 has entered your site”Goed bezig GreenpeaceGOED = VRAGENMijn wereld is groot genoeg

12. I didn’t blog my Week Notes last week. It was a busy week, with an active weekend that included a museum visit, and it just didn’t happen. Mostly because I spent the entire Sunday doing the bookkeeping for the quarterly VAT returns, and had enough of my laptop screen to do the week notes in the evening.
    This week was a busy one too. I

    spent quite a bit of time on financial stuff for the company, not all of it very productive in the end but quite demanding in terms of attention.
    Edited a MoU for a client between them and the EC

    Participated in a session of all the provinces discussing a national AI algorithm register, and the expected impact of the EU AI Regulation
    Reached out to the consortia for both the Green Deal Dataspace and the Data Space Support Centre preparations to meet-up
    Had the weekly client meetings
    Had two meetings at Y’s school for conversations about how they support faster-than-average learners, and how they specifically cater to Y’s learning needs. This was very good and helpful, also because during the pandemic we simply weren’t able to do this type of sit down and chat. I trust this is well organised and pedagogically sound. Y’s a happy pupil now, and I’ll remain alert to see it stays that way. My own experience is a clear example of the type of thing to avoid.
    With the help of colleagues am accelerating the tracking work I’m doing w.r.t. EU datspaces, related legislation outside the 6 major parts of the EU legal framework for data and digital, and a few events to discuss them.
    Evaluated a recent session with the National Statistics Office, and discussed with them the next steps to take.
    Went and got a covid booster jab. The next day I had a major headache, and heightened temperature for part of the day, so I took to be for a few hours and slept.
    Discussed the angle to take and outline of a position paper I’m writing for the Dutch national geo-information board, with the primary client within the Ministry for the Interior. A helpful conversation to ensure that the contents of the paper get used
    Saw my blog reach 20 years, which I had to commemorate with a blogpost.
    Spent more time than I should have on watching the #twittermigration to Mastodon unfold. A very large influx of my network into this environment has been going on.
    Launched a Mastodon instance for my company on the back of that migration wave. An experiment to see if it can mean something different for how we interact with our business ecosystem.
    Joined Y and E in their exploration of ‘Texel’ our island in Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch that we have had here for the past two weeks. It’s fun because it’s collaborative in setting, allowing the three of us to interact in different ways. Y is the island’s spokesperson so she has more control over how things unfold than we do.
    Took Y to her swimming lesson
    Dropped off a car load of baby and toddler gear at the neighbourhood circular / second-hand shop, for other parents to put to good use.
    Helped E connect her blog to her new Mastodon account (on my personal instance, which now is a household instance)

    Like every year the park around the corner is exploding with fly agarics this fall. This one was almost like a satellite dish, pointing slightly tilted at the sky.

13. @pimoore thank you!

14. @pcora thank you!

15. Two Decades of Blogging, The Free As A Bird Edition

    zylstra.org/blog/2022/11/t…

16. Happy bloganniversary!

17. Starting in 2010 I have posted an annual ‘Tadaa’ list, a list of things that made me feel I had accomplished something that year. I started doing it in 2010 because I tend to forget things I did after completion. Like last year I didn’t feel much like writing this. It seemed a greyish year, passing in the shadow of the war that Russia wages on Ukraine. A year where Covid is still very much around us, yet things sort-of returned to normal. But for a different value of normal, a somewhat twisted normal, a parallel one. An appearance and pretense of normal perhaps more than an actual normal. An intransitive year almost, taking me from 2021 to 2023, but without object. Or maybe it’s because the last few months were extremely busy, pushing through more than being in the here and now, which sapped the colour from the months preceding it. Which is as good a reason as any to try and list the things that did bring a sense of accomplishment. I do have my day logs from the entire year, as well as kept up posting week notes here, so I can look back at what went on these past 12 months.
    So here goes, in no particular order:

    The European High Value Data list has become law in December. Two years ago I had a defining influence on the data it lists for earth observation, environment and meteorology. Even if the implementation period is 16 months and some datasets may get a temporary exemption for another two years, and even if it doesn’t go far enough (mostly on company information) to the taste of many, it is an important milestone. It draws the line under discussions about paywalls and exclusive access rights that were already old when I got involved in open data in 2009, in favor of mandatory pro-active publication for all to use freely. I’m glad I could translate my experience in this field into something now enshrined much more solidly in EU law.
    We took regular breaks as a family. We started the year in Luzern, spent a week in Limburg in April, spent three weeks in Bourgogne doing most of nothing. Had weekend trips, to various musea for instance. One of the things E and I decided, while hanging out in front of our tent in the Bourgogne last summer, was to mark all school holidays in our own calendar in the coming year, to either take them off ourselves, or to keep them free of work appointments. I think it should be possible without impacting my output, but it will require careful planning.
    I’ve kept an actualised guide about the incoming EU data legislation in Dutch for a client. It gets automatically generated directly from my own working notes in Obsidian which appeals to me in terms of nerdy workflow, and it is highly used by Dutch government data holders and regularly mentioned as a very useful resource which speaks to its utility.
    I enjoyed homecooking a few software tools. Early in the year I adapted my OPML booklists so they are generated directly from my own book notes. (Although the negative side effect has been I did not blog about my reading at all, which I intend to change soon) I particularly enjoyed enabling myself to post through Micropub to my various websites. Through it I can post from various sources bypassing the WordPress back-end, inluding directly from my local notes in Obsidian, and from my feedreader. Every time feels like magic despite the fact I wrote the scripts myself. I think that sense of magic stems from the reduction of friction it affords.
    I helped the foundation I chair through a inconvenient period of administrative issues. Nothing serious in itself, but right at a moment where it did have consequences for the team, which I was able to cushion. We also extended the number of board members, laying a better fundament for the coming years.
    The influx of many new users into the Fediverse spurred my involvement in the use and governance of Mastodon. I helped plan a governance structure for the largest Dutch instance, and intend to help out in the coming year as well. We’re building a non-profit legal entity around it, and secured initial funding for that from a source in line with that non-profit status. I enjoyed also kicking off some discussion within the Dutch forum for standards that prescribes the mandatory standards for the Dutch public sector.
    I keynoted at BeGeo, the Belgian annual conference of the geo-information sector, at the invitation of the Belgian national geographics institute. It was fun to create the story line for it, as well as enjoyed the sense of traveling and meeting with a professional community I’m normally not part of. It’s the type of thing I often did for years, and I miss it I noticed. Something to look out for in the coming months.
    My company had a great year, apart from a hick-up after the summer, to the occasion of which the team rose fantastically. We grew despite that hick-up, adding two new team members in May and September, and signed an additional new hire in December. As of February we will be ten people. The work we’re doing is highly interesting, around digital ethics, data governance mostly, engaging new clients frequently. Our team is a great group of people, and I think we all take good care of eachother. We completed the 11th year of my company which I think is already an amazing run. For next year our portfolio is already mostly filled.
    During the pandemic lock-downs in 2021 we hired cabins for all team members at a holiday park to work and hang out together for a week while maintaining social distancing advice. We realised we wanted to do that yearly regardless of pandemics, and did so in 2021 again. It’s an important thing for both the social and professional dimensions of our company.
    I took my homecooked projects as the starting point for a presentation at WordCamp Netherlands to plead for more general adoption of IndieWeb principles, specifically webmention and microformats in WordPress which met with good responses and helped spur on at least one coder to finish and publish a plugin. I’m mostly a boundary spanner in these settings, at the edge of communities, in this case the WordPress community, and being able to bring a story and suggestions for change into a commmunity from another context and see it getting a response is something I enjoy.
    Seeing Y grow and thrive, in school, socially, reading, swimming, skating.
    Decided to join my old fraternity on their 30th anniversary trip to Montenegro, and am glad I did. Montenegro is a beautiful and rugged country.
    I’ve been writing in this space continuously for twenty years now. Even if my writing here in the past few months has been less frequent, an expression of how busy it was in other aspects of my life, blogging has been a constant and a key to creating new conversations, connections, ideas and experiments.
    I explored new tools to integrate in my personal workflow, like annotating with Hypothes.is, using machine translation (DeepL) and AI text and image generators. This as starting point for turning them into personal software tools in future months.

    We spent some days around New Year in Switzerland, visiting dear friends. As years go by, such things become more important, never less. The simple fact of time passing means old friendships carry ever more context and meaning.
    Ever onwards! (After having the first week of January off and spending it with the three of us that is.)
    E and Y discussing artworks in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe. A great way to spend time together.

18. Last Wednesday I gave a presentation at the ‘career-day’ of the Master program philosophy of science, technology and society (PSTS), where I studied two decades ago. This is a transcript with some adaptations.
    I titled my talk:
    “What is it you do, again?”
    It’s a question I often got and get asked in my work, as well as what I remember PSTS students being asked a lot. There’s a certain ambiguity to being active at the crossroads of technology and the consequences of using technology. There’s a lot of nuance and context involved, which lends itself less wel to clear labeling.
    I keep a list titled ‘I’m a what now?’ of things people thought I was, or at least the label they used that best fit their perception of what I was doing for them. It runs from lawyer to politician, from professor to author and researcher, from historian to data-psychologist and jukebox (ask a question and out come a lot of stories).
    To give you a more direct overview, listing current roles and activities is the easiest route. I’m a cofounder of The Green Land, a consultancy on open data, data governance, and digital ethics. We’re 11 people, and almost always work for public sector clients, mostly here in the Netherlands as well as for and elsewhere in the EU.
    The two projects I’m currently spending most of my time on are:

    being the lead for the interprovincial digital ethics program, and the secretary to the recently launched interprovincial ethics committee, both to support them organisationally as well as w.r.t. subject matter expertise.
    And I have a similar role for the Dutch government tactical council on the EU data strategy. There I help government data holders (CBS, Cadastre, etc) with implementing the current wave of EU digital and data legislation which are in part values based. A few years ago I helped write part of that legislation and now I help implement the consequences of that.

    Since a number of years I also work for the World Bank on occasion, usually in non-EU eastern Europe and Central Asia, former Soviet Union states. Focus there is how to use data to jump over development issues, and creating national data action plans. Next to my work I am the Chair of the Open State Foundation, focused on Dutch government transparency, which came out of an event I helped organise in 2008. And I’m on the board of the association that promotes and safeguards the Creative Commons licenses in the Netherlands.
    My twisting path
    The organisers asked me to talk about my career path after PSTS.
    If you look at profiles on LinkedIn or in any CV you easily get the impression of a lineair logical path. The reality is a much more evolutionary path, that twists and turns, from some point to one adjacent possible and from there to the next one.
    
    A few weeks ago I came across this mind map in a design museum in Nuremberg. A German art curator made this sketch at the end of his working life, to sketch out the various things he worked on over the years, and how they are connected, transform into each other. This image immediately spoke to me, and I’ve started making one of my own. It isn’t finished yet, but some elements of it I can explain here. It’s a twisting path, as life usually is.
    That twisting path starts well before I studied PSTS. I originally studied electronic engineering from 1988. That probably wasn’t the right choice for me in hindsight, as I found it more fascinating what happens when people start using technology, and that never really was a topic in electronic engineering.
    It did bring me one key thing though, next to an understanding of technology. From my second year in late 1989 I had internet access, which had just come to the Netherlands a year before. The growth of internet since my early access has been a unique and strongly shaping factor in my work, as it quickly determined my professional peer network, and allowed niche interests to gain momentum.
    I worked as a technical consultant (1997) for different clients, where in all cases the impact of deploying technology was a key thing. After a few years (1999) I joined one client organisation and became (2000) its knowledge manager and quality manager. Both were new roles, that I mostly designed and shaped myself.
    Working in KM is what brought me to PSTS (2002). What passed for theory in KM at the time was collections of US case studies along the lines of ‘do what Fortune 500 companies do and you’ll be one yourself’. That was very thin. In philosophy the nature of knowledge has been a topic of discussion for several millennia, and that’s how I reconnected to the UT. I entered the 2 year Master program, and started following courses next to my full time job. I very much enjoyed it and realised I better had opted for the PSTS path when I was still in electronic engineering.
    In late 2003 I realised most of my work at that time was done, and I decided to go independent. But I also realised I lacked several skills to be able to run my own business and I joined a small consultancy firm to fill those gaps (2004). They weren’t on the lookout for new people, in fact they phoned me because they wanted to sell me their services in my previous role. But we got talking and I joined them. When I switched jobs I also left PSTS. What I learned played and continues to play a role in my work. I made myself independent in 2008 when I realised that I was doing projects on my own mostly, and that my interests began to diverge from my employer’s.
    The role of the informal and personal interests
    In parallel to those steps in my working life, my early internet access and resulting network had its own evolution. While enrolling in PSTS I also started blogging to find others active in KM across Europe. I started visiting conferences and meet-ups around internet related themes, and did so together with my wife. I started organising meet-ups across Europe and globally around those same topics.
    All because I was hungry for interesting conversations.
    My wife and I started hosting such events ourselves as our birthday party. It started as a joke: we thought no-one from our broader network would come to Enschede just for a bbq, so to better explain it to their employers and families we came up with a conference. The first one was in the Drienerburght conference center in 2008, pictured here. The topic was work-life balance in the digital age. Fitting for a conference on a birthday.

    I highlight those activities next to my work because after deciding to go independent in 2003 and more strongly after doing so in 2008 there was much less distinction between activities out of interest and professional work. Between personal and professional contacts. In 2008 I privately visited a conference in Austria to discuss online political communication, where someone mentioned re-use of government data. The week after that I hosted my own event, GovCamp, and mentioned it in passing, which created some interest resulting in a first project with a Ministry on open government data. I’ve been active in that field ever since.
    Other side interests, digital making, and narrative inquiry as a tool for intervention design in complex situations, communities of practice all turned into client work too. They still form components of how I and my company work.
    I get deeply into certain topics, and professional roles result from it. Not the other way around.
    In 2011 I started The Green Land with a few colleagues, and in 2015 I joined the World Bank for part of my time.
    Patterns along my twisting path
    Looking back over the past 25 yrs the patterns that stand out are:

    I never applied for a job. The jobs I held came from bumping into someone and getting into a conversation in the context of something else and then being offered a job.
    Most of my roles didn’t exist before I took them on.
    And that means I usually entered roles without previous experience.
    Side interests, broad interests, but always concerning the impact of digital technology on how we work, learn and organise, have been key in this.

    So I keep deliberate space for side interests, because I trust that my next steps will come from it. They are what carries the whole.
    One of the participants of our 2018 unconference birthday party, Heinz, described his experience of my activities as follows:

    Ton engages on a very practical level with the possibilities of combining the personal and personal relationships with the wider contexts in which one lives, from the local community to global developments. He has a technical, pragmatic and practice oriented approach. Also he can explain to others who are not part of a digital avantgarde what he does.

    The unconference of last week is an example of how one can do things from a highly personal motivation – like meeting friends, talking about topics you’re interested in, … – and make it easy for others to connect to that. What you find or develop you don’t keep for yourself, but is made useful for others, and in turn builds on what those others do. So it’s not about developing an overarching moral claim in a small context , but about shaping and networking one’s personal life in such a way that you collectively expand your capabilities to act.

    Heinz is right. A focus on agency for contextualised groups using technology, and making no fundamental distinction between the personal and professional, or between the individual and community are a good way to describe my twisting path. Agency is my working definition of knowledge and reshaping that agency, the ability to change, my working definition of learning.
    Current work at The Green Land
    That was a lot about me, and how I work and have worked as a former PSTS student. Let’s look at the ongoing work and recent work at The Green Land.
    Within The Green Land we roughly divide the things we work on in three broad topics, although they are very much overlapping and entwined: People / living environment, Ethics of data and AI, EU/Dutch data policy.

    The distinction often only lies in the starting point with or for the client, and usually we cover all three in each project. I can of course go through this entire list, but let’s not do that. Perhaps it’s better to start from your own interests: which of these project names sounds interesting to you, and I’ll say a few words about them.
    If you look at those projects this list of building blocks and concepts stands out:

    Practice is a key word, where all of our client work needs to get expressed
    Complexity and uncertainty are things to embrace and roll with, not to ‘solve’
    ’Going outside’ , networks, communities, involving all stakeholders, are the primary benchmark. Organisations have their own internal logic, and we try to add the logic of the world outside to it as the true measure of impact.
    Strategy and operation need to be joined at the hip, ongoing work informs strategy and strategic awareness needs to inform day to day decisions and actions.
    Increased agency for the stakeholders involved is the general aim, and addressing information asymmetries and externalities is part of that
    Providing a macroscope and multiple perspectives is often the key value we bring.

    PSTS as macroscope for meaning
    Let me stress that last one, the macroscope, because I think this very strongly gets to the permanent role of PSTS. A way to see multiple scales and perspectives at the same time when addressing an issue.
    A macroscope allows us to see how your own situation fits in a wider global whole.
    A macroscope allows us to see what the aggregate of a large volume of small interactions looks like. It makes the processes and systems that surround us visible and explorable.
    A macroscope shows you where you are, and where within the bigger scheme of things at the same time. It’s like seeing the entire city from wherever you are in town. Like seeing the geopolitical ramifications and the limitation of any data vis-a-vis the world outside all at once when working on e.g. a local data visualisation project.
    A macroscope allows us to understand something much bigger than us as humans, at human scale. It gives us a sense of place in the complexity that surrounds us, and it gives us a sense of meaning.
    A sense of meaning. That is where my motivation comes from.
    Creating agency, through technology. Collaboratively creating meaning.
    Meaning to me is a deeply emotional thing.
    And my sense of beauty resides in the many interconnected layers of complexity.
    So that’s me, that’s our work and why we do it.
    I finished by saying a few things about my company and how we are organised and invited the participants to think of us when they start looking for an internship or thesis project.

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