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Gabrielus Landsbergis, until late last year the minister for foreign affairs of Lithuania, has joined the advisory board of Defend Democracy, a Dutch non-profit based in Brussels. Since a few months I’m serve on Defend Democracy’s board as treasurer.

Gabrielius Landsbergis served as Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2020 to 2024. Born under Soviet occupation, he witnessed Lithuania’s fight for independence, led by his grandfather Vytautas Landsbergis. Throughout his career, he has fought for freedom. As Minister, he positioned Lithuania as a global advocate for freedom, strongly supporting Ukraine and backing democratic movements in Moldova, Georgia, and Taiwan. Since leaving politics he continues to challenge authoritarianism..

I’m pleased and a bit awed that Defend Democracy is able to gather the advisory board it has. Such as former Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld, whose work I much admire. And now Luthuania’s former MFA. A clear sign how well regarded our executive director Alice Stollmeyer is.
Late next week I will be in Brussels for in person meetings with the other board members. Much looking forward to it.

Dutch homes, like most in northern Europe aren’t built to keep heat out but to keep heat in. As for most of the year it is colder than you’d like as inside temperature.

With the current heat wave I finally arranged a few things to keep things cooler. I ordered a few different types of ventilator, one silent enough to also be useful at night.

To keep the sun out we have screens in place on the east / south side of the house, already for some years. But on summer days the western side catches quite a lot of early evening heat too. And that means Y’s bedroom is warmest just as she goes to sleep, my office is not usable in the evening, and the kitchen catches a lot of sun right when I’m cooking dinner. On the lookout for a cheaper solution than remote controlled screens a colleague at a client suggested on window screens made to fit. So ordered those today, als of for the roof terrace door and window, on the east side.

Let’s see how that works out this summer.

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My longtime blogging friend Roland Tanglao recently posted something about the horizon for Tesla to reach full self driving, and how it keeps being a decade away.

It was the same a decade ago. In 2015 I posted a little rant about the false ethical dilemma’s involved, and the blind spot they result from.

We’re still in the same spot, despite a decade of advances.

The faulty assumption is that ‘self driving’ means that the car needs to do all the work autonomously.
Whereas ‘self driving’ only means that the human driver no longer has to do any of the work. Everything else is assumption.

The car is not the sole locus of sensing, everything else is a way more relevant locus of sensing

The car is not the sole source of data, it’s more likely the smallest source of data, relating only to its current behaviour and intentions in order to broadcast that to everything else.

The car is not the sole unit of decision making, it’s more likely it needs to be the recipient of mostly outside instructions from other decision making nodes.

A self driving car is not autonomous, it runs guided on tracks of data. Those tracks are external to the car.
Yet all involved attempt to make the car do all the work.
That’s the blind spot I think ensures that the self driving time horizon is moving backwards as fast as the projects progress, as it has done for at least a decade.

Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.

Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.


The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.

Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.

These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.

The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.

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Y turned nine at the end of May, which we celebrated with a trip to Lego House and Lego Land in Billund, Denmark as it coincided with Y having a few days off from school. But it wasn’t the only Lego related fun we organised around her birthday party. Yesterday with 5 invited friends we visited Roy Scholten‘s workshop at the Hilversum graphics center, where the group tried their hand on Lego printing.

Using flat Lego pieces you create a design, and then ink them up and put them under a press. Next to the 6 kids we were 3 parents, and we all had a lot of fun. When it was time to stop and clean up (before heading home for a small mountain of pancakes for dinner) no one really wanted to quit. I was impressed with how this little group of 8-9yr olds worked with abstract forms, experimented with colors etc, and stayed focused the full time without needing much aid or prompting.


Roy Scholten providing instructions to the group.


Searching for Lego pieces for our designs


A few iterations I made.

I originally met Roy during the pandemic in a conversation about personal knowledge management, and appreciated his bird prints made using Lego. We since acquired a few. Our friend Peter also uses a letterpress, and after making introductions, to my delight came to visit from Canada with his partner L to work with Roy. Yesterday some of their production together still adorned the walls of Roy’s atelier.


Lining up several iterations of my ‘river’ print.

You can book his workshops (and by other members of their collective) for company / team outings, or for training, as well as birthday parties. E has done a training with Roy, and we also gave her mother a workshop with friends for her 80th earlier this year. See Grafisch Atelier Hilversum’s website.


The two prints I like best. At the top one I retro actively dubbed ‘soccer player heading a ball’, that reminds me of De Zaaier by Theo van Doesburg we recently saw in the Drachten DaDa museum. Below the ‘river’, where I flipped the paper 180 degrees before printing again. The result of a much lighter blue second river course reminds me of how old river meanders stay visible as oxbow lakes in the landscape when the river bed has moved on.

Y turned nine this week. Part of celebrating that is visiting Legoland and Lego House in Billund.

Especially Lego House was a lot of fun, spending a full day building stuff in a relaxed and not overly crowded environment. You can leave the venue for lunch or a walk outside and re-enter again.


Y climbing a huge Lego brick in front of Lego House


Lego mosaic image of us three at Lego House