Category: conferences

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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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This week at the EU Open Data Days in Luxembourg, Davide Taibi a senior researcher at the Institute for Educational Technology of the National Research Council of Italy, talked about his research into a possible European curriculum for data literacy.

He mentioned how, in the highly multilingual context of Europe, data literacy is an unclear term. In German data literacy translates to data competence, while literacy itself translates to alphabetisation. Other terms like information literacy and data science are used more commonly across countries.

On one of his slides (image) he wrote:

The term data literacy isn’t well known in most of the countries analysed. The most widely used terms are ‘digital literacy’, ‘information literacy’, ‘data competence’, ‘media literacy’, ‘statistical literacy’, ‘computer/IT literacy’, among others. In most countries it is closely related to digital skills.

I usually use Howard Rheingold’s shorthand for literacy as skills plus community. Skills benefit individuals, but for some when you add in the context of a community or network of skilled people in which that skill gets deployed, the value of usage sees a nonlinear effect, a kind of network effect basically. That communal aspect, and the jump in usage value is connected to my notion of networked agency. It works as a multiplier.

Looping back to the lack of clarity around data literacy as a term, I wonder.
Is it because we haven’t yet described clearly enough which _skills_ we mean when talking about data literacy?
Or is it because we don’t really know which communities would see which non linear use value, when deploying the data skills concerned?

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I have been interested in personal knowledge management (pkm) for a very long time. I have been an avid notes maker ever since I learned to write. Digital tools from the late 1980s onwards have been extremely useful. And a source of nerdy fascination, I confess. I am certain personal knowledge management (pkm) is of tremendous value for anyone who wants to keep learning and make sense of the world around them.

On March 14 and 15 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the second time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I assist with inviting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)?
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 14 and 15 March in Utrecht, but as a student can’t afford the 237 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 15th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the event. It would be great if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)!

During the PKM Summit last week I saw Zsolt Viczián do several amazing things with his Excalidraw plugin in Obsidian as part of his visual thinking efforts.
I’m very much a text person, but do recognise the role of visual elements as part of my thinking process. Shifting concepts around, thinking about connections, clustering etc. It engages the spatial parts of the brain, and humans are good at that. As most tools do either one thing or the other, when a tool can do both as just different perspectives on the same thing that draws my attention. It is why I’ve used Tinderbox and e.g. The Brain. Zsolt showed me how Excalidraw in Obsidian can do both too. Any Excalidraw-in-Obsidian image can have a regular note on the other side, and you can switch between them. All this because it’s just one note in markdown with some parts interpreted by Excalidraw and other parts by Obsidian.


A sketch of the elements needed to post my own slidedecks in a nice viewer, now that I’m no longer satisfied with how I’ve ‘brought slides home‘ the past four years.


The same file but now shown as text, where I’ve written a few tasks as part of creating the setup I’ve sketched in the image. Zsolt calls this the backside of the image. I’m more reminded of Tinderbox where you could see something as outline, as timeline, as tree map, as canvas etc. all interchangeable.

Zsolt very much gave me a great nudge to play with this more, and relearn that I do care about visual elements in my notes, and that it’s just that it wasn’t easy enough to build into my routines in making notes.

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Bookmarked Opening Space to Remember Harrison Owen by Nancy White

The originator of the Open Space technology, Harrison Owen, died March 16th. I am very grateful to Harrison Owen, as Open Space has been a key element throughout my working life in the past two decades. Open Space has allowed me to collaboratively set the conditions at various events for interaction in a way that fosters inclusion, allows all present to be heard, and works towards outcomes that are carried by all involved. You can find resources on Open Space at Openspaceworld.org. I first encountered Open Space as a format in January 2004, and was immediately convinced of its value. Since then I’ve facilitated it in a huge variety of sessions, that included our BlogWalk series 2004-2008, many conference side-events, Barcamps, IndieWeb camps, and the birthday unconferences E and I have hosted over the years. At times opening and especially closing the space can be an emotional experience. “Coming down to earth from creating and surfing the group’s collective energy and shared attention, from weaving the tapestry of the experience together” as I wrote two years ago.

…the person who birthed OST, Harrison Owen, who passed away earlier this month…

Nancy White


One of the guidelines of Open Space posted on the wall in our living room as nudge and reminder for the participants of our Working on Stuff That Matters birthday unconference in 2010.

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A little over a decade ago I was at a small conference, where I happened to share the stage with a British lawyer, Polly Higgins, seeking to internationally criminalise ‘ecocide’, alongside various other speakers. One of those others was a self declared rationalist running a data driven research start-up with billionaire funding. He believed the trickle down innovation trope that usually ends in pulling up the ladder behind them, which can be readily found around all things tech-singularity. And he called himself a futurist. After the talks we as speakers stood on and in front of the stage chatting about the things that had been presented. The futurist, addressing me and one other speaker, chuckled that ‘that eco-lady’ had a nice idea but a naive unrealistic and irrational one that obviously had zero probability of happening. At the time I found it jerkish and jarring, not least given the guys’s absence of expertise in the fields concerned (environment and international law). It’s one of the key moments I remember from that conference, as the condescending remark so strongly clashed with the rest of the event and atmosphere.

Meanwhile we’re some 10 years into the future of that conference. The futurist’s efforts collapsed soon after the conference it seems and there are no recent online traces of him. Polly Higgins is no longer alive, but her cause has very much outlived her. On 26 March the final step in the legislative path of a renewed Directive on the protection of the environment through criminal law has been taken, when the Council of the EU formally approved the text agreed (last November) with the European Parliament. In that new ecocrimes directive preamble 21 uses the phrase ecocide to describe specific crimes covered in the Directive (PDF).

Criminal offences relating to intentional conduct listed in this Directive can lead to catastrophic results, such as widespread pollution, industrial accidents with severe effects on the environment or large-scale forest fires. Where such offences cause the destruction of, or widespread and substantial damage which is either irreversible or long-lasting to, an ecosystem of considerable size or environmental value or a habitat within a protected site, or cause widespread and substantial damage which is either irreversible or long-lasting to the quality of air, soil, or water, such offences, leading to such catastrophic results, should constitute qualified criminal offences and, consequently, be punished with more severe penalties than those applicable in the event of other criminal offences defined in this Directive. Those qualified criminal offences can encompass conduct comparable to ‘ecocide’, which is already covered by the law of certain Member States and which is being discussed in international fora.

Good work barrister Higgins, and the Stop Ecocide organisation.


A photo taken by Polly Higgins of me as we had fun together driving an all electric ‘motor bike’ around the venue’s hallways at that conference in 2013.

Polly Higgins about to take the e-chopper for a spin through the venue.