Category: conferences

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On 22 and 23 March, roughly in a month, the first European personal knowledge management (pkm) summit will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Over two days a varied line-up of PKM practitioners will present, show and discuss how they shqpe their personal learning and information strategies.

Personal knowledge management is enjoying a wave of renewed attention due to a new group of note making tools that has emerged in the past few years (such Roam, Logseq, Obsidian, Notion et al). But personal knowledge management is way older. People generally notice things around them, and strive to make sense of the world they live in, wether on a highly practical level or a more abstract one. The urge behind PKM therefore is deeply human. The methods and availability of tools have changed over time, as has the perspective on what constitutes personal knowledge.

Over two days a long list of well known and less well known practitioners of personal knowledge management is lined up. I had the pleasure of finding and approaching people to participate as speaker or as workshop host. This includes experienced voices like Harold Jarche. Next to invited speakers and hosts, there will be ample time on the schedule to do your own impromptu session, unconference style. The program will be shaped and finalised in the coming week or so.

The event is organised by the Dutch community ‘Digital Fitness’, and a non-profit effort. There is space for at most 200 people, and there are still tickets available. Tickets are 200 Euro for the two day event. The venue is a short walk from Utrecht Central Station, at Seats2Meet.

I hope to see you there!

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Over drie weken, op 18 december vindt de PKM / Obsidian gebruikers meet-up plaats! De Digitale Fitheid community en de PKM groep van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Informatieprofessionals (KNVI) zijn de gastgevers. Vanaf 19:00 duiken we bij S2M Utrecht in hoe we persoonlijk kennismanagement doen, en hoe ieder van ons dat al wel of nog niet in Obsidian implementeert. Elkaars werkwijzen zien en bespreken is altijd enorm inspirerend, en levert nieuwe ideeën op hoe je je eigen PKM-flow kunt tweaken en hoe je je Obsidian gereedschap scherper slijpt.

We willen veel tijd nemen om elkaar dingen te kunnen laten zien. We gebruiken daarom in ieder geval 2 projectieschermen naast elkaar, zodat we ook dingen kunnen vergelijken en we sneller meer mensen iets kunnen laten tonen.

Leidend is telkens de vraag “Hoe doe jij X in je PKM systeem, en hoe heb je dat geïmplementeerd in je Obsidian set-up?”
Waar X een onderwerp kan zijn als:

  • hoe zoek en vind je in jouw PKM systeem?
  • hoe begrens jij jouw PKM systeem, hoort productiviteit/GTD er bij, of alleen leren? Is jouw PKM flow generiek, of gericht op bepaalde thema’s?
  • naar welke outputs / resultaten werk je in je PKM toe (schrijven, vertellen, creatieve ideeën etc.)?

En daaromheen zijn er interessante thema’s als:

  • Welke overgangen van analoog naar digitaal en vice versa zitten er in jouw systematiek? Hoe speelt analoog een rol in je leren?
  • Welke visuele elementen spelen een rol in je PKM systeem?

Tot slot, omdat Obsidian werkt op lokale bestanden, is ook een onderwerp:

  • Hoe gebruik je vanuit andere programma’s of werkwijzen die lokale files buiten Obsidian om?

We vragen je iets dat jij graag wilt laten zien uit jouw PKM systeem in Obsidian voor te bereiden. Aan het begin kijken we wie graag bepaalde voorbeelden wil zien of laten zien. Vanuit dat overzicht van onderwerpen gaan we dan aan de slag.

Gratis aanmelden kan op Digitale Fitheid. Tot 18 december!

In reply to Een rsvp op Seblog by Sebastiaan Andeweg

Have fun, it’s been a while since I visited (or rather organised) an IndieWebCamp. Dropped of the radar somewhat. Mostly as I was playing around with the local stuff that interacts with my website but isn’t my website, and with ActivityPub. Less IndieWeb in other words than indie personal tools. Didn’t feel those tangents fit the IndieWebCamp community or efforts.

Maybe we should organise an IndieWebCamp in NL at some point again?

I will be going to IWC Nuremburg this weekend.

Sebastiaan Andeweg

(also posted to Indienews)

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I and my team at The Green Land are looking for a self-hosted version of event organisation tools like MeetUp.com or Eventbrite. Both for small scale events as part of projects, such as meet-ups of citizen scientists, as well as for ourselves, such as small gatherings we organise around AI ethics with our professional peer network.

We don’t want to use Meetup.com or things like Eventbrite because we don’t want personal data to be handed over to US based entities, nor require the participants to do so just because they want to attend a local event. We also notice a strong hesitancy amongst participants of events when it is needed to create yet another account on yet another service just to let us know they will be joining us for something.

Nevertheless we do want an easy way to announce events, track registrations, and have a place to share material before, during and afterwards. And I know that events are hard in terms of discovery, because although there are a plethora of events, for most participants as well as event organisers they’re incidents (years ago I came across a blogpost describing this Events Paradox well.). Additionally, for us as professionals it is usually more logical to host our own events than find one that fits our needs.
So we need a way to announce events where we can assure participants there’s no need to hand over personal information, and where material can be shared.

There seem to be two FOSS offerings in this space. Mobilizon by Framasoft and Gettogether. In the past weeks my colleague S and I tried to test Mobilizon.

Mobilizon is ActivityPub based, and there’s a Yunohost version which I installed on our VPS early last month. Mobilizon promises several strong points:

  • Fully self-hosted, and able to federate with other instances. There aren’t many visible instances out there, but one NGO we frequently encounter in our network does run its own instance.
  • you can maintain different profiles in your account, so that for different parts of your life you can subscribe to events, without e.g. your historical re-enactment events showing up amongst your professional events in a public profile.
  • People can register for an event without needing an account or profile (using e-mail confirmation)

Working with Mobilizon turned out less than ideal at a very basic level. Accounts couldn’t log in after creation. As an administrator I could not force password resets for users (that couldn’t log in anymore). Not being able to do user admin (other than suspending accounts) seems to be a deliberate design choice.
I still had access through my Yunohost admin account, but after an update yesterday of the Mobilizon app that stopped working too. So now both instance admins were locked out. Existing documentation wasn’t much help in understanding what exactly is going on.

I also came across an announcement dat Framasoft intends to shift development resources away from Mobilizon by the end of the year, and thusfar there’s little momentum in the developer community to pick up where they intend to leave off.

For now I have uninstalled Mobilizon. I will reach out to the mentioned NGO to hear how their experiences are. And will look at the other tool, although no Yunohost version of it exists.

I’m open te hear about other alternatives that might be good to try.

Bookmarked The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI by Maggie Appleton

I very much enjoyed this talk that Maggie Appleton gave at Causal Islands in Toronto, Canada, 25-27 April 2023. It reminds me of the fun and insightful keynotes at Reboot conferences a long time ago, some of which shifted my perspectives longterm.

This talk is about the impact on how we will experience and use the web when generative algorithms create most of its content. Appleton explores the potential effects of that and the futures that might result. She puts human agency at the center when it comes to how to choose our path forward in experimenting and using ‘algogens’ on the web, and how to navigate an internet where nobody believes you’re human.

Appleton is a product designer with Ought, on products that use language models to augment and extend human (cognitive) capabilities. Ought makes Elicit, a tool that surfaces (and summarises) potentially useful papers for your research questions. I use Elicit every now and then, and really should use it more often.

An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content

Maggie Appleton

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Ik zag (op Twitter, jawel) dat de video van mijn presentatie op WordCamp Netherlands van afgelopen september is gepubliceerd. De video heb ik aan de presentatie toegevoegd, maar zie je ook hieronder.

Op WordCamp NL deed ik een oproep om standaard microformats en webmention in WordPress core, blocks en themes te ondersteunen zodat de 40% van het web die op WordPress draait ineens ook betekenisvol met elkaar kan verbinden: “WordPress sites tot IndieWeb alleskunners maken”.