A pretty regular week.
This week I

• With our internal finance team finished the 2024 budget and rolling forecast (wrt liquidity and project acquisition)
• Wrote an overview of output of a December workshop on what Dutch public sector bodies need / expect from the Green Deal Data Space, to be shared with the consortium that is doing preparatory work on that.
• Had a good conversation at SURF about the updated Digital Europe working program, and the calls it contains about common data spaces.
• Briefly visited the monthly Digital Fitness community meet-up as it took place one floor below the SURF offices.
• Spent Monday afternoon, rather than the usual Friday afternoon with Y.
• Had a shareholders meeting of my company, discussing some potential changes, and talking about how we see our role as shareholders (also in light of the organisational changes which basically did away with our roles as management team)
• Improved a little php script that can backfill Day log notes given a date range and a template.
• Enjoyed the wintery weather with Y after some snowfall. Snowball fights ensued.
• Had the weekly client meetings.
• Brought online a new client guide on the practical implementation of the EU High Value Data regulation in the Netherlands.
• Had a conversation with a few Danish and Finnish people and the JRC about national data space like structures. We compared notes about ongoing efforts, and on how to move forward.
• Visited the GP as I have a painful heel ever since a walk last June, that doesn’t get better.
• Calculated the new salaries for our team (indexing, and some raises) and the bonuses, to be paid out coming week. Our bonuses are a collective thing, where a percentage of turnover above the budgeted break-even is paid out to all employees equally based on the number of months and the fraction of the week they work with us.
• Had the monthly all-hands afternoon meet-up.
• Did some planning for the interprovincial ethics committee I’m secretary to.
• Met up with a professor in moral psychology to discuss both our work and to see if there are any cases from our work that can serve as example in an upcoming course on data ethics.
• With Y did some Scratch programming at home. Which led to me checking when the next Coder Dojo was planned.
• That turned out to be on Saturday, so we went and brought two of Y’s friends, one of whom brought their sister. So with four girls we spent the afternoon programming gif animations. Went for drinks afterwards.
• Had a pleasant conversation with a potential speaker for the planned PKM Summit end of March. I’ve volunteered to do some program curation and reach out to people across Europe to speak.
• Set up the ledger in a new book keeping program we will test internally this year in my company. I always had my own system, based on over three decades now of doing the books for a variety of organisations. As we now have additional team members involved in the company’s finances we are switching to bookkeeping tool that works for all involved.
• Did part of the Q4 book keeping, as the VAT returns are due end of the month.
• Explored the two preceding laptops I had before the one I’m writing this on. One I used 2010-2014, the other 2014-2020. I’m looking for some specific notes and data that I can’t find on my current laptop. Didn’t find it on my old laptops either, except for ‘rescuing’ a small 2013 bitcoin wallet. Next stop will be checking out some old network drives that are no longer in use.

Snow on parked bicycles at the neighbourhood railway station.