Category: Personal

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Technology, working in technology, is inherently impacting society, and must concern itself with the democratisation of access and use, and the flow of information. My focus has always been the agency technology can provide, specifically to those who don’t have such agency without it. How it can strengthen community and autonomy. Unintended consequences and externalised effects of creating and using technology do always exist and impact different groups too, and need to be considered in any technology choice. My work in government data is about information and power asymmetries, my work in digital ethics more generally seeks to incorporate a wide range of other values and considerations, my work in tech regulation and standards similarly is to enable agency and confirm and embed values. Ethics is not about saying no to things, it’s about shaping our actions towards each other. Seeing each other as part of every question, not othering others to cut them out of deliberations. Democracy is at its core.
My day to day work in my company is carried by it and my voluntary board work reflects it as well.

My work in technology has always been what I’ve come to call constructive activism. It’s an often less visible way to enable change though than through e.g. overtly campaigning for such change. You can work in relative quiet. There are times however when it becomes needed to more visibly get involved, to be seen to get involved. I increasingly feel we’ve been sliding into such a situation in the past years here in the West.

Defend Democracy is a young civil society organisation, working in Brussels, to strengthen democracy, and defend it against eroding forces from here, elsewhere and from technology. Like my other voluntary board memberships enabling agency is key here. At the Open State Foundation it’s about citizen’s agency based on increased government transparency and better information. At the Open Nederland association of Dutch makers in support of Creative Commons licensing, it’s about makers’ autonomy in what happens to what they make and how it can contribute to society. At the ActivityClub foundation it’s enabling public discourse through a non-toxic common infrastructure (mastodon.nl a.o.). At Defend Democracy it’s about what those other three organisations have in common. Strengthening and defending democracy.

I am joining the board of Defend Democracy as its treasurer.

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I’m not looking back at 2024 with lots of excitement. I spent it mostly feeling burned out, grumpy and tired, and that carried detrimental effects for my family and my colleagues. Reading back last year’s overview I see I felt much the same then at the time of writing (my burn-out I now know goes back to the fall of 2022, so not a surprise I see it shining through in last year’s review). This time too I don’t feel much like making the annual review. Likely that makes it more important to do so. I’ve been doing this every year starting in 2010, making this the 15th edition. The original reason is still valid: I tend to forget a lot of the things I actually do, moving on to the next thing immediately, resulting in thinking I haven’t done much at all. Leafing through my notes and calendar at least once a year tends to resurface things and make me more aware of things I take a sense of accomplishment from. I’m also slowly moving to a place where I see things opening up again, moving away from burn-out, even if I’m not there yet. So here are the things that I count as some level of accomplishment in 2024, in more or less random order.

  • While my burn-out is obviously not making this list as an accomplishment, I am glad that once I realised what was happening (or rather Y and E helped me see) I sought assistance from a psychologist and actively worked to change things.
  • Gaining new habits in order to address my burn-out, that also helped me change long standing patterns, and taking up systems again that have been helpful in the past but had fallen aside. If anything it makes my note making more key to my functioning in the various aspects of my life. Interstitial journaling is the latest addition to these habits, and it tends to make the difference between a good day and a bad one.
  • My company has been doing well this year. We added 4 people to the team this fall, including an office manager. We’re now a dozen people. Business was good, we achieved our budgeted turnover, meaning revenue grew by a third. Our portfolio for 2025 is already filled up to 75%, which is a very solid starting point. Most important of all we worked on data policy, data governance, digital and AI ethics projects that are meaningful beyond the scope of the projects themselves, and had a good time doing so. I’m amazed at the bright and fun people I get to work with all the time.
  • We created new internal structures, holacracy based, spreading the ownership of roles and tasks across the entire team, and doing away with me and my businesspartners as management and sole decision makers. Colleagues stepped into new roles, one joining me on the financial management side of things, another doing amazing work w.r.t. recruitment. My burn-out stems largely from trying for too long to close gaps left by others, and the changes in our organisation this year have contributed much to my ability to let go of various things because team members stepped in so well.
  • This is also now resulting in me looking at my company more like something that is also there to support me in what I want to achieve, as opposed to something I’m only in service to in order to keep it afloat.
  • In 2023 with our company we took a Systems Convening training, which more or less puts method under my natural behavior of making connections where they are missing, of taking into account a much wider context when considering interventions. This year with one client I’m pleased to see that I’ve been able to more purposefully move with them to a different position, where they have more agency towards their core mission.
  • I’ve been slowly but steadily losing weight again, by avoiding carbohydrates mostly. I easily overindulge when I’m stressed, and the past few years it showed. I’m down 9 kilograms since the summer, about half way to where I’m comfortable. It took me a bit to start the process, but once I could it hasn’t been hard to keep up.
  • There wasn’t much travel this year, something I missed. Yet I did enjoy visiting several conferences, including the Belgian national geographic conference BeGeo where I organised and hosted an entire conference track on the European (Green Deal) Data Space(s), with different DGs of the European Commission.
  • I didn’t interact much socially or with friends this year. Yet I did enjoy it when I did. Visiting dear friends in Switzerland in February, which included an awesome private viewing of great art, visiting other dear friends in Switzerland for their 50th birthday in June, and having friends visit from afar. It is a wide variety of kinds of wonderful to me to see how ripples of interaction spread out, how networks of meaning emerge. Awareness of intermingling layers of complexity is where my sense of beauty resides. Working through my burn-out to a large extent is about strengthening my original sense of wonder, and the webs one weaves with friends are a good source of it.
  • I helped shape a European conference on personal knowledge management, PKM Summit, that took place in March. I got involved because I wanted to make it more pan-European, varied, and less strictly formatted. I helped find a wider variety of speakers, introduced several things to loosen up the program and do away with the distinction between speakers and audience. I also aimed to not just have people speak who have turned speaking about PKM into their main professional activity. I like people who normally just do PKM to talk about what it helps them achieve and how. It was a fun event, and I was happy to bring several of my colleagues to it as participants. Also because I think PKM is a prerequisite for the systems convening I mentioned above. One participant who had been to Reboot in 2005 remarked to me about how it achieved that sense of wonder and inspiration. I’ll take that compliment! The event also helped my company to do more with PKM internally and across our team. Preparations for next year’s edition have just started again.
  • Around the conference the national government academy for digital awareness and skills for civil servants had programmed a monthlong series of webinars and events about PKM and digital skills. It was fun to do a webinar with them, and I enjoyed creating an overview of my perspective on PKM (in Dutch) and provide people an insight into how I do things for myself.
  • One of the outcomes of that PKM conference for me was doing more with visualisation in my notes. I have never done much of that, because any illustration tends to be a frozen artefact, an outcome even, of an otherwise ongoing iterative process. Thanks to Zsolt’s Excalidraw plugin in my Obsidian note making tool, text and image are now part of the same note and seamlessly interact and flow into each other. That integration has been key for me.
  • I’ve enjoyed making tiny software tools for myself. Such as a local small form to directly search my Flickr.com photos by date, or creating an RSS-feed from the things I bookmark in Mastodon and import that into my notes. Even better when it turns out such a tool is useful to someone else, such as the person who let me know they adopted my Mastodon RSS thingy because their RSS reader is the only way they can interact with the web.
  • It’s been 22 years now since I started blogging. The past 12 months I didn’t write much, but did keep up my weekly notes, and have changed some of the ways how I write and prepare blogposts. Hopefully that will manifest itself in the form of more postings in this space over time.
  • I’ve read over 75 books this year, half as much as last year, about 90% fiction and just over 10% non-fiction. Reading fiction is key to my wellbeing. I’m also pleased that I’ve found better habits for myself to read non-fiction. Even if it doesn’t really show in the number of books, interacting with non-fiction works consistently during the year (about 1 book per 6 weeks or so) is something I enjoyed.
  • Watching Y, now 8, grow and develop is a delight. Like me and E she reads a lot (and listens to yet more books), and we have many fun conversations based on things she picks up on in her reading. Exploring Roman history in our region and in nearby Germany, the etymology of words and names, and visiting locations she reads about like the Botanical Gardens in Berlin. Her creativity, her music and sense of humour, and the general sense of wonder behind it I hope she can sustain for a very long time.
  • Traveling together is something we’re good at. E aims to come up with something most weekends to go do or see somewhere, and during school holidays we plan various day trips or go away for a few days. We spent time vacationing in France, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and made a city trip to Berlin. We visited museums and different cities in the Netherlands. I still strongly appreciate what a difference it makes that since some years we live in the exact center of the country, bringing so many things within easy range.

That concludes this year’s Tadaa! list. Still a good number of things to mention all in all, despite the grey veil that covered my year. Onwards!

E and me during a walk earlier this week along the Laak river, silhouetted over the fields by the low sun in our backs.

(CW: mental health, death)

Today I received the news that someone I didn’t know well but have known for a long time passed away by her own hand. Over 20 years ago she was a community steward and editor on a work related platform I spent a lot of time at. She was creative, intelligent, and our conversations were inspiring. Not all our conversations though, because at times we talked about our mental health. Me having resurfaced from a deep long depression shortly before that time.
After that professional community, over the years she would every now and then pop up in my inbox, my feedreader or messages. We chatted about tech, Fablabs, tinkering and 3d printing. Until about 9 years ago, although as E remarked today I kept mentioning her on occasion.

We never met. She lived in New Zealand, right at the center of Middle Earth she used to joke. We only ever connected over the open web, both about the same age, both from a generation privileged to see our world suddenly meaningfully widened by internet, through which we could channel our many interests and find likeminded people. Before the slop and silo’s.

E alerted me to a post from our mutual friend J sharing the news of her death, and J shared the backstory. A change in medications tipped her into the darkness of deep depression.

I’m sad. I cried. Not because we were close, we just shared affinity over a long enough period of time to make it mean something. But because I know how among people I know, their spark of brightness, intelligence and creativity is too often tied to the abyss of depression. Because she is not the first from the inspiring connections we made in the early 00s. Because I know into which place she was thrust. I’ve been in that place, and not once. That raging place of darkness, groping around in the ashes of everything, where nothing else exists or penetrates but that fatal way out. By coincidence and circumstance I found other ways to leave that place. It could have just as easily have been me who didn’t come back out again. Like others didn’t. Like she didn’t. It is so deeply sad.

Bookmarked 23 What was 9/11 by Anil Dash

Anil Dash writes his yearly post remembering the terrorist attacks on NYC in September 2001. This time he looks back at how it was, how it felt to be in the city at that time. There is much in there that I recognise from how it felt when disaster struck my home town a year earlier in 2000, and its echoes when I visited NYC shortly after 9/11.

The solidarity and drawing together of people, in contrast to the military in the streets to prevent an expected escalation that really is not how people respond to these things.

The role of ‘imaginary’ online and remote friends reaching out that over time turn into key members of your social environment, something I very much tie to that early web scene of the 00s.

Feeling compelled to go outside, into the streets. E and I simply had to go out and found ourselves walking towards the towering column of smoke in our town, despite ash and glowing snippets floating down on us in our street, and confused people coming towards us heading the other way.

In our case the shockwave of the blasts that our bodies experienced that forever drew a line between those who felt it, and those who were not in the city that day. That shockwave still lives inside of me, as I wrote 20 years after the fact.

And the smell, that smell. E and I visited NYC 3-4 weeks after the attacks, visiting a friend. Something planned earlier as a mere tourist visit had become checking up on how he was doing. Standing at ground zero, it was the smell that suddenly and overwhelmingly catapulted me back to a year earlier in our hometown, and brought all of it back in tears.

How Anil Dash describes how that was turned into something different, into war. I was at Penn station when the news broke that the bombing of Afghanistan had started. A visible and audible ripple went through the crowds in the main hall, people fell to their knees, people broke out in tears. News camera crews suddenly appeared. Only when we sought out a tv screen, in a sports bar, it became clear what just happened.

The similarities also took the shape of the exact same rumours going around in NYC and in my city the year before to try and make sense of the senseless. It taught me how rumours and conspiracy fantasies are a coping strategy. A way to square the enormous impact of something on oneself with the banality of daily life going on. I wrote a paper about it for my philosophy of technology studies at the time, using Heidegger’s hermeneutics. That was my own coping strategy, I suppose.

Anil Dash ends with “If you’ve ever been told a story about 9/11, ask that person how it smelled. Ask them the greatest kindness that they saw. Ask them how they changed.” They’re good questions, not just about then, but also in general.

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Since yesterday evening I am residing at the top floor of our home. This as I fell ill with Covid. Sleeping away from E and Y hopefully reduces the risk of them also getting infected. I had opened the door to our small roof terrace for ventilation (helped by it finally not raining and being sunny). Already earlier today two magpies were making noise out on the terrace. I woke up from a nap because of similar noises, and assumed the same source. Somehow it sounded nearer though. Turns out one of the magpies had decided to explore inside, and then didn’t find the way back. I sort of chased and guided it to the door opening, and then it settled in the tree across the watercourse yelling at me.

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Every year I write a list of things that gave me some sense of accomplishment. I started writing them in 2010. This year, in an end of year session with my team I said there isn’t much this year I’m proud of from the top of my head. That probably is a good reason to make the list anyway, even if I don’t particularly feel like it. I easily tend to forget things, and leafing through the calendar and my notes is always a useful exercise. So, in random order, here are the things for my 2023 Tadaa! list.

  • It was a busy year professionally but without stress. No hectic firefights, no curveballs.
  • With our entire team, my company took a training in Portugal with Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner. It was great to do a training with the entire team, on a topic that is very dear to me and highly relevant to our work, and having Bev and Etienne lead us through it. Bev I’ve known for decades, and Etienne’s work on learning and communities of practice has been central to my professional perspective for as long. Many different layers of meaning combined in that week for me, personally and professionally, and clarified how deeply I am emotionally tied to social learning, agency and change in my work. It was beautiful.
  • We added two people to our team, in February and October, and grew by almost a third in turnover. That we had a fun year together with good projects and providing us all with a stable income every month is something that gives me great satisfaction.
  • My role in supporting the interprovincial ethics committee, that started last January, I enjoy a lot, and there is plenty of potential there to do more. The advise by the committee on how/whether to use generative AI in public tasks was welcomed and the first in its kind. Something we’ll return to in the next year for an update.
  • Likewise I enjoy helping Dutch government entities implement the European open data law I helped write three years ago. Here too there is plenty of potential to build my role out, with the creation of the European common data space as general context.
  • I had a small role in our work on AI ethics for the national police, but it is I think important and rewarding work.
  • Have been blogging on this site for 21 years now, and it still feels like a place I can experiment, and just do whatever, and which still creates conversations with new people.
  • E and I used Y’s school holidays and weekends for many little trips and visits. Musea, movies, cities, the beach, flying a kite, theaters, a circus, kayaking, geo-caching, restaurants. E surprised both Y and me with a visit to Nuremberg and the Playmobil Funpark in late April as an early birthday gift, which was lots of fun and giving me closure for a very disappointing attempt to visit the Playmobil factory in the late seventies when I was Y’s age.
  • Got to be there for friends. Friends got to be there for me.
  • Did some travel for work, to nearby Brussels, Portugal and to Malta, which I had never been to before. Attending and speaking at conferences, which I enjoyed.
  • Enjoyed presenting about my ‘career’ after a stint studying philosophy of science and technology at my old university. Stressing and for myself rediscovering that following my interests always yielded work activities over time, that I always have worked in roles that didn’t exist beforehand and I never applied for jobs, that there is no linearity to a ‘career path’, that the twisting path is the point, that that’s where meaning resides. And that meaning is important and emotional to me (see the training in Portugal mentioned earlier)
  • Enjoyed tinkering with some home-cooked coding. Improved my own interactive feed reader, and imported my old calendar and Amazon purchases into my notes by writing small tools. It looks like GitHub Co-pilot might make it easier for me to do more of that.
  • Got more involved in the Dutch personal knowledge management (PKM) community, helping shape a PKM conference next year, and hosting a large Obsidian-users meet-up, but doing so staying away from PKM discussions for their own sake. PKM needs to be for something, a practice working towards a purpose outside of it.
  • Read plenty of books, though less than the 1 per week on average which has been the overall rhythm these past years. Partly because some were very long, partly for reasons I don’t know.
  • Inched closer to a more deliberate reading practice for non-fiction. This is something that I have wished for for years, never really getting around obstacles in my mind and in my actions, but it now finally feels like things are shifting. By this time next year, I hope I can see the results of that.

Usually we spend the last days of the year in Switzerland visiting dear friends, this year we met them in the Netherlands in the past days, and we will see in the new year at home.

Ever onwards!