A week at home, not overly busy, but as it is in between two weeks of travel abroad, plenty of small things I don’t want to have to take care of while traveling.

This week I

• Picked up my renewed passport at city hall.
• Had a conversation with Y and her teacher. She’s about a year and a half ahead of her cohort’s expected level, or at least that’s the level they stopped testing at (apart from reading, where she’s over 3 years ahead). So we need to pay attention to keeping her engaged and challenged.
• Had the weekly client meetings
• Had a group meeting with representatives of various government entities. We are writing a guide for chapter II of the Data Governance Act, which allows re-use of some protected data categories, and these government entities will play a role in providing feedback on our drafts.
• Had a meeting at the Ministry for the Interior in The Hague about the same work.
• Had the monthly all-hands face-to-face meet-up of our company. Colleague J and I presented an overview of the landscape our EU data policy work is taking place in, to discuss the connections with our other domains of expertise.
• Had an informal meet-up at the office with a range of people from our network, with a presentation by Kars Alfrink of his PhD work on contestable AI. It was fun to meet him again, we go back twenty years, and also fun to me that it was my younger colleagues who connected to him in another way and invited him over.
• Had a meeting with the interprovincial working group on digital ethics.
• Worked with colleagye F on moving our work for the provinces forward.
• Had the kick-off meeting with SIDN Foundation for a project they are funding in support of the largest Dutch Mastodon instance. (I’m on the board of the foundation that is the vehicle for mastodon.nl)
• Had a conversation with our office manager about things they can let me delegate to them.
• Had a conversation about the longer term numbers for our work portfolio.
• Had a haircut
• Talked with representatives of a number of provinces to discuss how to ditch US owned cloud and software usage, as the Dutch government is on the brink of loosing any digital sovereignty they still might have.
• Drove to a hoilday park in the north of the Netherlands to celebrate E’s mother’s 80th birthday over the weekend.
• Finished reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, I Starship by Scott Bartlett and Saturation Point by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Started reading Exodus by Peter F. Hamilton.