During our visit to the Neues Museum in Neuremberg last week, this mind map stood out to me. Art collector, dealer and curator René Block (1942) made it as a sort of work autobiography for the period 1964-2014.
It stood out to me because it shows the evolution of his work, the connections between major phases and individual projects.
I have a list of a few ‘big themes’ I’ve been interested in, and have worked on. (in that order, as most often my work came out of a side interest during a previous phase, also when I was employed), and over time I’ve recognised the overall topic that carries them all, a fascination with the affordances of digital technology for our agency and how it impacts how we live, learn, work and organise.
In any given moment I can think that most of my activities are a coincidence, that I happened across them on my generally undirected path, but my blog archive has often shown me that I already mentioned topics and ideas much earlier.
There’s an evolution to them, and since I’ve spotted the ‘carrier theme’ I trust that evolution.
I’m sure I can make a mind map like the one above with the different client projects, activities and key events of the past 26 years. Maybe everyone should make such a map for themselves at times, if only to spot the adjacent paths within one’s reach in the evolutionary plane of possibilities. It seems Block made this at the end of his working life when he was 72. What might it have told him if he had drawn or redrawn it at earlier times?
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:
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.
A good week, although I didn’t feel very productive and doing things felt sluggish. In the past days I have felt very tired.
This week I
Was at home Monday as it was a national holiday. We used it to go to Utrecht to buy paddles and boat shoes. In the afternoon we went to the ‘Lepeltje Lepeltje’ food truck festival in the city center with the three of us, which was a lot of fun.
Had the weekly client meetings.
Did preparations for the Tactical Council on EU data strategy in two weeks.
Did preparations for the Interprovincial Ethics Committee in thee weeks.
Prepared a talk about the role of my philosophy of technology studies in the evolution of my work, which I then gave at a career event at my old university. It was fun to be back.
Had an interview with a client about the extension of our work for the next year or maybe two. By the end of the week I heard they plan to award us the contract above three other proposals.
Participated in the Ethics Workgroup of the 12 provinces, a meeting that takes place every 3 weeks.
Was interviewed by a PhD student at Delft University about the workings of the interprovincial ethics committee. Their PhD research looks at responsible design of decision making systems, and institutionalising ethical design practices for digital innovation in the public sector. As part of that they are looking at how different ethics committees in the public sector are constructed and with what aims. Specifically they are interested in the fusing and allocation of different layers of responsibility. A very interesting conversation I thought. They shared a paper with me that resulted from earlier steps in this research which I started reading with interest.
Had a pleasant conversation with Peter, catching up and reflecting on work, travel, going to conferences as a couple and organising your own private but professional interest oriented events and unconferences. Also met L. which was fun.
Started with putting together my work evolution mind map, an idea I encountered recently in a design museum in Nuremberg. I started out with adding together a number of lists I already had made earlier: the ‘grand narratives’ I had over the years, i.e. my main topics of interest, and the list of projects I worked on in The Green Land and the World Bank since 2011. I also jotted down other projects from roles before that, a list of key events, and several things that still stand out in hindsight from university and before. It’s a long list with well over 100 items. Next step is trying to put them on a timeline and make connections between them.
Went to pick up a Steel Case Perch. It’s a leaning stool that I came across in the same design museum in Nuremberg I mentioned in the previous bullet. I’m very pleased with it, as it is useful and has a story that appeals to me. It’s made from recycled e-waste, using pyrolisis resulting in polymers suitable for a product like this, which in turn is mechanically recyclable unlike the e-waste it comes from.
Took Y to her swimming lessons. She is now scheduled to get her B swimming diploma before the end of the school year.
Went to Utrecht on Saturday by train with the three of us to get the right pump for our inflatable kayak as well as to wave to my brothers in law and cheer them on during the Utrecht canal boat pride. I also splurged on two new hats at Jos van Dijck, a 100 year old hat shop now run by the third generation. Upon our return to Amersfoort, we enjoyed the sun on the terrace of the local watering hole Tjaps until evening.
Reconnected the irrigation system in our garden and on the living room balcony. I didn’t get around to doing the irrigation system on our third floor roof terrace yet.
With E and Y tried out our inflatable 4 person kayak for the first time. Already last year E and I had decided to buy one this spring, as we thought it might be fun to paddle around our very water rich neighbourhood and on the connected river Laak, now that Y can swim. This year we bought a kayak and today was our first foray out on the water. It was a lot of fun. We saw eye to eye with coots, geese and ducks, all with their young. Y enjoyed it a lot too.
This week it was 15 years ago that I became involved in open government data. In this post I look back on how my open data work evolved, and if it brought any lasting results.
I was at a BarCamp in Graz on political communication the last days of May 2008 and ended up in a conversation with Keith Andrews in a session about his wish for more government held data to use for his data visualisation research. I continued that conversation a week later with others at NL GovCamp on 7 June 2008 in Amsterdam, an event that I helped organise with James Burke and Peter Robinnet. There, on the rotting carpets of the derelict office building that had been the Volkskrant offices until 2007, several of us discussed how to bring about open data in the Netherlands:
Fifteen years on, what came of that ‘important thing to do’ and seeing ‘what I can contribute’?
At first it was mostly talk, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if ..’, but importantly part of that talk was with the Ministry responsible for government transparency who were present at NL GovCamp. Initially we weren’t allowed to meet at the Ministry itself, inviting ‘hackers’ in was seen as too sensitive, and over the course of 6 months several conversations with civil servants took place in a pub in Utrecht, before being formally invited to come talk. That however did result in a first assignment from January 2009, which I did with James and with Alper (who also had participated in NL GovCamp).
With some tangible results in hand from that project, I hosted a conversation at Reboot 11 in 2009 in Copenhagen about open data, leading to an extension of my European network on the topic. There I also encountered the Danish IT/open government team. Cathrine of that team invited me to host a panel at an event early 2010 where also the responsible official at the European Commission for open data was presenting. He invited me to Luxembourg to meet the PSI Group of national representatives in June 2010, and it landed me an invitation as a guest blogger that same month for an open data event hosted by the Spanish government and the ePSIplatform team, a European website on re-using government information.
There I also met Marc, a Dutch lawyer in open government. Having met various European data portal teams in Madrid, I then did some research for the Dutch government on the governance and costs of a Dutch open data portal in the summer of 2010, through which I met Paul who took on a role in further shaping the Dutch portal. Stimulated by the Commission with Marc I submitted a proposal to run the ePSIplatform, a public tender we won. The launching workshop of our work on the ePSIplatform in January 2011 in Berlin is where I met Frank. In the fall of 2011 I attended the Warsaw open government data camp, where Marc, Frank, Paul and I all had roles. I also met Oleg from the World Bank there. In November 2011 Frank, Paul, Marc and I founded The Green Land, and I have worked on over 40 open data projects since then under that label. Early 2012 I was invited to the World Bank in the US to provide some training, and later that year worked in Moldova for them. From 2014 I worked in Kazachstan, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia and Malaysia for the World Bank until 2019, before the pandemic ended it for now.
What stands out to me in this history of a decade and a half is:
How crucial chance encounters were/are and how those occurred around small tangible things to do. From those encounters the bigger things grew. Those chance encounters could happen because I helped organise small events, went to events by others, and even if they were nominally about something else, had conversations there about open data with likeminded people. Being in it for real, spending effort to strengthen the community of practitioners around this topic created track record quickly. This is something I recently mentioned when speaking about my work to students as well: making time for side interests is important, I’ve come to trust it as a source of new activities.
The small practical steps I took, a first exploratory project, creating a small collection of open data examples out of my own interest, writing the first version of an open data handbook with four others during a weekend in Berlin served as material for those conversations and were the scaffolding for bigger things.
I was at the right time, not too early, not late. There already was a certain general conversation on open data going on. In 2003 the EC had legislated for government data re-use, which had entered into force in May 2008, just 3 weeks before I picked the topic up. Thus, there was an implemented legal basis for open data in place in the EU, which however hadn’t been used by anyone as new instrument yet. By late 2008 Barack Obama was elected to the US presidency on a platform that included government transparency, which on the day after his inauguration in January 2009 resulted in a Memorandum to kick-start open government plans across the public sector. This meant there was global attention to the topic. So the circumstances were right, there was general momentum, just not very many people yet trying to do something practical.
Open data took several years to really materialise as professional activity for me. During those years most time was spent on explaining the topic, weaving the network of people involved across Europe and beyond. I have so many open data slide decks from 2009 and 2010 in my archive. In 2008, 2009 and 2010, I was active in the field but my main professional activities were still elsewhere. In 2009 after my first open data project I wondered out loud if this was a topic I could and wanted to continue in professionally. From early 2011 most of my income came from open data, while the need for building out the network of people involved was still strong. Later, from 2014 or so open data became more local, more regular, shifted to being part of data governance, and now data ethics. The pan-European network evaporated. Nevertheless helping improve European open data legislation has been a crucial element until now, to keep providing a fundament beneath the work.
From those 15 years, what stands out as meaningful results? What did it bring?
This is a hard and easy question at the same time. Hard because ‘meaningful’ can have many definitions. If we take achieving permanent or even institutionalised results as yard stick, two things stand-out. One at the beginning and one at the end of the 15 years.
My 2010 report for the Ministry for the Interior on the governance and financing of a national open data portal and facilitating a public consultation on what it would need to do, helped launch the Dutch open government data portal data.overheid.nl in 2011. A dozen years on, it is a key building block of the Dutch government’s public data infrastructure, and on the verge of taking on a bigger role with the implementation of the European data strategy.
At the other end of the timeline is the publication of the EU Implementing Regulation on High Value Data last December, for which I did preparatory research (PDF report), and which compels the entire public sector in Europe to publish a growing list of datasets through APIs for free re-use. Things I wrote about earth observation, environmental and meteorological data are in the law’s Annexes which every public body must comply with by next spring. What’s in that law about geographic data, company data and meteorological data ends more than three decades worth of discussion and court proceedings w.r.t. access to such data.
Talking about meaningful results is also an easy question, especially when not looking for institutional change:
Practically, it means my and my now 10 colleagues have an income, which is meaningful within the scope of our personal everyday lives. The director of a company I worked at 25 years ago once said to me when I remarked on the low profits of the company that year ‘well, over 40 families had an income meanwhile, so that’s something.’ I never forgot it. That’s certainly something.
There’s the NGO Open State Foundation that directly emerged from the event James, Peter and I organised in 2008. The next event in 2009 was named ‘Hack the Government’ and organised by James and several others who had attended in 2008. It was registered as a non-profit and from 2011 became the Open State Foundation, now a team of eight people still doing impactful work on making Dutch government more transparant. I’ve been the chair of their board for the last 5 years, which is a privilege.
Yet the most meaningful results concern people, changes they’ve made, and the shift in attitude they bring to public sector organisations. When you see a light go on in the eyes of someone during a presentation or conversation. Mostly you never learn what happens next. Sometimes you do. Handing out a few free beers (‘Data Drinks’) in Copenhagen making someone say ‘you’re doing more for Danish open data in a month by bringing everyone together than we did in the past years’. An Eastern European national expert seconded to the EC on open data telling me he ultimately came to this job because as a student he heard me speak once at his university and decided he wanted to be involved in the topic. An Irish civil servant who asked me in 2012 about examples I presented of collaboratively making public services with citizens, and at the end of 2019 messaged me it had led to the crowd sourced mapping of Lesotho in Open Street Map over five years to assist the Lesotho Land Registry and Planning Authority in getting good quality maps (embed of paywalled paper on LinkedIn). Someone picking up the phone in support, because I similarly picked up the phone 9 years earlier. None of that is directly a result of my work, it is fully the result of the work of those people themselves. Nothing is ever just one person, it’s always a network. One’s influence is in sustaining and sharing with that network. I happened to be there at some point, in a conversation, in a chance encounter, from which someone took some inspiration. Just as I took some inspiration from a chance encounter in 2008 myself. To me it’s the very best kind of impact when it comes to achieving change.
I’ve plotted the things mentioned above in this image for the most part. As part of trying to map the evolution of my work, inspired by another type of chance encounter with a mind map on the wall of museum.
The evolution of my open data (net)work. Click for larger version.
A busy week, one of those where I make a list for Monday and need until Friday to do it all, either because things got more complicated underway or new things requiring immediate attention popping up.
The weather turned much warmer this week and it hasn’t rained in weeks so the irrigation system I re-installed last week has been doing very good work. The frogs like it too, talking a walk in the garden after it’s been watered.
In just 4 weeks Y’s school will close for 6 weeks of summer holidays, and we’re working to ensure that we’re ready to leave for some of that time.
This past week I
Had the weekly client meetings.
Did preparations for the Tactical Council on EU data strategy the coming.
Did preparations for the Interprovincial Ethics Committee in two weeks.
Had the monthly meeting with my business partners. Had second meeting to discuss rebalancing the workload of me and a colleague.
Had a kick-off meeting of a four year collaboration between a client and the JRC, the EC’s research directorate, around the European data strategy and all it entails.
Discussed the progress and final steps in an ethics project for the National Police, wrote and submitted a proposal for the second half of this year.
Had a meeting with the data team of the association for municipal governments VNG to talk about how the EU data strategy laws affect them, and the opportunities they hold.
Held Y’s birthday party with her friends. With a group of eight children we went to an indoor playground, and we had pizza for dinner in our garden with all of them. I enjoyed being able to show hospitality to Y and her friends. I think it is important that she knows bringing people home is welcomed.
Within our team discussed our method and proposition for creating so-called algorithm inventories for public sector bodies. This is something that currently is a voluntary effort for most, but the Dutch government is running ahead of European legal obligations and likely to create mandatory requirements in the near future.
Did most of the monthly invoicing.
Took Y to her swimming lessons.
Had lunch in town with the three of us. Enjoyed walking around town for a while, as E and Y were getting a haircut.
Used the fact that is has been 15 years this week since I started in open data, to map out the evolution of that work, as part of mapping out my activities in general. It’s quite a bit of work. At the same time, my blog here and my Flickr photo collection makes it much easier to find the ‘receipts’ and ensure placing events correctly on a timeline.
Walking around town this weekend.