The first full week back home, but I didn’t work much really. Most clients are still away, so almost no appointments, and time for some slower focus work and things left for later earlier this year.
Y has one more week before school restarts, so we make time to also do things together.

This week I

• Started the week by catching up with our team, first with my business partners, then with the entire team.
• Installed Mobilizon on our VPS to see if we can use it as an alternative to Meet-Up and Eventbrite etc. for our own and our network’s events.
• Received and set-up my new Kindle e-reader, after the previous one broke down (it seems due to the book itself as admitted by its editor/author 😉 )
• Spent two days at the local conference Koppelting, organised by De War a collective of technologists, artists and other makers. Koppelting is focused on strengthening the commons, discussing various projects, ideas etc. Tuesday I participated in sessions about citizen science, together with my colleague S (she’s involved in community stewarding citizne science groups in another part of the country). Sunday I presented about the incoming EU data legislation and how it provides new legal tools that can be used by citizens and civic initiatives to use and share data around their own concerns. I missed a session on open source LLMs, but I will try and watch some of the material recorded. It was also the first time I visited the De War collective on their new premises. And I helped make two t-shirts.
• Did the monthly invoicing for July for my company. It was a slower process than usual as I was having a strong cold, picked up from E who had been ill from it earlier, which eroded my focus and energy.
• Took a long walk with E.
• Started reading the Systems Convening booklet as preparation to the training our entire team will be participating in early September.
• Discussed some early ideas for a European PKM conference in spring next year with Martijn Aslander of the Digitale Fitheid community (‘digital fitness’)
• Had a conversation about the Green Deal dataspace efforts with the national program for a federated government data system and TNO who run the Dutch chapter of European efforts towards federated cloud and data sharing infrastructure.
• Together with Y visited the ‘Art & Zoo’ exhibition in the local Flehite museum, that included a polar bear pissing in the city canal. Before that we had lunch in a Thai street food bar, where Y had her first Thai meal (fried noodles, fresh spring rolls and fish cakes), and for the first time used chopsticks to eat. After the museum visit we went for an ice cream and took the bus home.
• With the three of us visited ‘s-Hertogenbosch by train. To both E and me that city is ‘far away’ (due to us having lived on the German border a long time), but as an isochrone map shows, it’s actually only an hour away, which makes it part of what we should see as our ‘local’ environment. We had coffee, strolled the streets, bought some books, took a look inside the cathedral, had a leisurely lunch and took in an afternoon theater session. When we arrived we saw that there was a theater festival ongoing, and booked tickets during lunch. The performance was called ‘The woman who choked on her undies‘ and took its cue(s) from the slighly absurdist mix of observations and fantasies of young children when invited to comment on scenes. I thought it was fun, although it appealed less to Y, even if the listed age group was 5+

Cycling to the Koppelting conference I came across this ‘Russian palace’ in a part of town I hadn’t been before. Built in 1993 by architect Piet Blom (known from the Rotterdam cube houses) for a Russian pianist and her husband a Dutch building company owner. That part of town contains a range of houses from the early 90s all designed by known architects as a way to introduce more different sights in the city.