Category: Personal

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(I wrote this in September, only posting it now)

I started blogging in late 2002. In May 2003 Rob Paterson popped up in my comments, based on Prince Edward Island, Canada. He was connected to other bloggers I had regular interactions with. From that first comment over the years a connection grew. The ‘real world’ neighbours of another blogging friend, Nancy White, dubbed her online connections as her ‘imaginary friends’ and when we showed up for her fiftieth birthday in 2008 we had a laugh about it together with them. Rob was one of my ‘imaginary’ friends I’ve made over the years. An extremely kind and gentle one. After connecting through our blogs, we met in Copenhagen in person, and later at his then home on Prince Edward Island in 2008. He picked us up at the PEI airport at midnight, because in his words “no one should come to PEI unmet”. Most recently we met in 2019.

I’m not sure how to explain how people can loom very large internally although you hardly interact and meet, but that’s how it is. Rob always felt near, from that very first comment on my blog. Around the time I went independent and quit my job, he shared advice that E and I have taken to heart ever since, a way of thinking which has helped secure our autonomy. He connected me to other people who became close, such as Peter, who since our first coincidental meet-up has become a dear friend, while being an ocean away as much as Rob. A weaver of connections, and regularly that is how I describe my own role and work, as weaving a network of connections. No small thing, as it’s the basket that carries humanity. It seems way more relevant in this day and age, although I suspect it has never been different and never will be.

Rob was diagnosed quite suddenly and unexpectedly as having mere weeks to live last summer. I am grateful we exchanged messages in the days before his death August 20th, to be able to express my gratitude for our connection over 22 years and vice versa. These past months saying goodbye and grief was my modus operandi, and Rob’s passing was not the main point of my attention this summer. That doesn’t change my feelings about it however.

Rob touched my life. In a good way. Taught me to be more forgiving, to judge less, without letting an absence of judgment erode drawing your own lines. To be more curious in an open way, like how Clarke described meeting Rob some years ago. Other blogging friends such as Chris Corrigan have phrased it well, and his daughter Hope did so beautifully.

Rob’s choices in the way he died and Frank‘s, my friend and business partner of 15 years, both around the same time, both through medical assistance, I look at as loving, humane, and dignified, as well as an expression of autonomy, something that is at the very top of values for myself. I am glad that such expression of autonomy, taking the direction of the end of your life into your own hands is legally supported here in the Netherlands, for physical medical reasons at least. Last week I signed a petition for that same autonomy for a self determined ‘completeness of life’. An elderly gentleman asked me to at Utrecht railway station and was handing out folders. I had already passed him by, before I realised what he said. I went back and accepted the information I needed to sign. Staying autonomous means taking action too.

Thank you Rob, for your gentle presence. Over the past 22 years, and, as I’m sure, moving forward too.

(I had written this last September, when my friend and business partner of 15 years Frank had just died, and Rob two weeks before that. It stayed in my drafts since then. Not because the text wasn’t ready: I made a few small edits before posting it now. Mostly because I wasn’t ready, I suppose, in the turmoil that early September and the summer before it meant. Rather than delete it, and leaving it unsaid in this space, I’m posting it 4 months delayed.)

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I didn’t make a Christmas card, but I did print a card before Christmas.

At the end of October we got ourselves a small lino press, after Y got inspired at an art fair, and E suggested we might make our own Christmas cards. We also arranged for other tools and things we would need.

Ideas are plenty of course, it’s action that counts, and this has not been the year for that much. But I did want to make something by hand.

On December 14th, the three of us sat down around our big tinkering table up in the attic, and started making our own designs. Both E and Y wanted to do a linocut, I opted for what Y used back in October: a stamp made of easy to shape foam.
I started out with some sketches of half formed ideas, some of which turned out to be too difficult immediately. I needed something that could be done in 1 printing step.

Sketches

I chose the sketch of a person reclining against a tree, working on a laptop, while an Obsidian comet blazes in the sky. Not christmassy, as I reckoned it wasn’t certain I would finish it before then, let alone be able to distribute some of the results. But if so inclined you could read Christmas in the shining star and the suggested fir tree, and that I aimed for a snowed upon effect.

Having transferred the sketch into foam, with the alterations that come from the tactile feedback of cutting the foam and moving it around on a piece of paper, I glued everything together in the past few days.

The stamp made of foam cut with scissors

And today it’s Christmas Eve. The fridges are bursting with stuff we will be lucky to finish before the year’s out. The house is quiet, and early evening we will celebrate Christmas with the three of us.
If I wanted to make some first prints before Christmas, it had to be this afternoon.

Bringing out the press, using a piece of plastic (meant for laser cutting years ago) as an inking plate was the first step. And where it gets ‘real’ for the first time. Getting my hands dirty and all that. Luckily, in the spring for Y’s birthday party we did some printing together, and also at the art fair I mentioned above, which lowered the mental threshold for me to get going.

The inking and press set-up

The first print I used too much ink. The second print to soak up the excess had too little because of it. I made a few more, looking at where more ink, and where less was needed, and where to be careful with the inkroller.

First prints

After those first few, I made the first that sort of looks like what I intended.

First more or less ok print

Good enough to tell myself I made a card (be)for(e) Christmas.

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2025 was not a good year, like the one that came before. I spent it burnt out. My colleague J during my team’s Christmas dinner last week described it as a year in which we had to fight and slay a range of different dragons, and indeed we did.

Every year, since 2010, I post a list of things that gave me some sense of accomplishment, things about which you can say ‘Tadaa!’. This is the 16th edition. And like last year, I’m writing it with hesitance. I’m struggling to write the list this time. Where in other years I looked forward to look back over the past 12 months this time I really don’t. All the more reason to do it, I suppose.

The original reason for this posting 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.

So here goes, in more or less random order.

  • We are still standing. My company still exists. The illness and death of my business partner Frank, and the path we walked together, at work as a team, at home as a family was this year’s main focus. In June, me being the de facto CFO since its founding in 2011, I doubted the company would still be there in November. Yet, it is. We didn’t make any progress, but we did reach the end of 2025 in more or less the same shape as we started it. Without Frank sadly, but with everyone else still standing. Shell-shocked but picking up the pieces. Everyone of the team showed up with what they could muster throughout the year. We took care of each other, found new clients and projects, were open about our pain and grief amongst ourselves and to the outside. Friends from around our company’s network had our back too. A dozen households had bread on the table, several felt able to plan ahead for life events, several could afford to become first time home owners, or support their partner migrating from abroad to live here. That counts for something, that our company can be a building block for it. As we sat around the dinner table last week with our team, reinventing our end of year traditions together, and I looked around, I was proud of us, not just as colleagues but as family. We know what we have carried together, and wherever each of us may end up over time, that will remain.
  • We, our family of three, are still standing. E and Y both have had to carry all the things I brought home too, my own diminished mental health. I’m immensely grateful to them both. All those days I felt lost, E and Y were why I got up in the morning. Traveling in the past 26 years together has always been healing for E and me, and E made sure we did things together throughout the year. We played in the snow in Switzerland, spent a lovely day building things together at the Lego House in Billund for Y’s birthday, drank in the beauty of Hockney’s work in Paris which left me crying on the floor of the museum, breathed the calm and freedom of the Austrian alps. We had many little day trips, near and further away. Being together is the best thing.
  • Being open about my diminished mental health has helped a lot in making space, deepened interactions and connections. All of us carry something. Thank you for sharing.
  • Traveling for work is dear to me, and I deliberately did some more of it than in the last few years. I worked in Warsaw, Brussels, Luxembourg, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Milano. I alllowed myself to be there in the present and in a single context. Simply walking where my feet would take me, and doing a few things outside my comfort zone, like buying a last minute ticket to take in a concert in the Teatro alla Scala. I made efforts to keep myself comfortable while traveling, to take care of myself in ways I normally find hard to do. Going swimming in the midst of a conference day for instance, and return refreshed an hour later.
  • I reached out to friends and spent two weekends, in May and in November, with them in Switzerland where they live. We normally don’t call or interact much at all, but they recognised me reaching out if I could drop by as the urgent bat signal that it was. Thank you dear friends.
  • With our team we spent a week in Sesimbra, Portugal, under the kind guidance and deep expertise and experience of Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner. A week in April that, next to the training and learning, also served to, as a team, get to grips with what was about to happen, and I’m glad Frank was able to come along. We also saw dolphins up close. Bev and Etienne deserve our team’s and my personal deep gratitude in how they accommodated the unusual situation we were in.
  • Reading was a source of relaxation and learning. I’m glad I kept up my reading throughout the year. A little over 80 books this year, mostly fiction. And for the first time not a cent of that was spent at Amazon. I fully moved away from Amazon for ebooks and physical books. Once I decided, it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.
  • Writing was helpful too. Even if less of it ended up on my blog. I’ve been blogging for 23 years now, and that’s a stretch of time that gives any writing another layer of meaning. Some of you have been along for the ride all that time, others have been here shorter but reading consistently, and our resulting conversations across the web, through email, and in person are dear to me.
  • Letting go of a range of tasks, not being able to keep all contacts going, all juggling balls up in the air, is a lesson I am slowly learning. I transferred my company internal tasks to others on the team and external help. I will not pick those tasks back up when I’m ‘better’ either. It takes time though, and only now after 4 months of purposefully shifting things away from me I’m at the point where I emptied my plate of everything except one client project. Sometime in the next months I’ll start thinking what new and other things I may want to add. I had to let go of various parts of client work and obligations too, and that is something that goes counter to all my impulses, that feels like a personal failure. The grace and understanding with which the clients concerned let me navigate those cliffs I deeply appreciate.
  • Tinkering with personal software tools is a source of joy. I’m glad I did some of that this fall. Like adapting my feed reader, so I can write better directly from it. The sight of having self-written bits of coding work like I want them to on my laptop feels like magic always still (even 43 years after writing my first lines of code).
  • I stood on stage for a few presentations, one at the UNGGIM Europe plenary and one locally, and enjoyed doing them. Sharing stories and seeing that it reaches and touches people is hugely rewarding. I’ve missed that.
  • Went to a few events just because I felt like it, to hear some new things.
  • I look at the coming year with some confidence, work for me and my team is largely secure, and though I still need more rest, I also see ways forward for myself.

More a sense of gratitude than of accomplishment, more a sense of weariness than one of results. In recognition of the love received and moments of joy through it all. It is what it is. Kintsugi.

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My (since recently former) colleague I. gave us a deeply thoughtful and touching gift during our team’s Christmas dinner last week, as her personal goodbye to us.

She gave us a broken vase.

We talk amongst our team about picking ourselves up after the loss of Frank and all that entailed this year and last in terms of collecting the shards and building ourselves a new vase from them.
My personal sense of beauty resides in the layering of all our human emotions, the scars we carry that make joy and happiness more noticeable and richer. I’ve remarked on that before.
Colleague I. said she feels that’s true not only on a personal level, but for groups too. The shared experience has its own intensity of meaning, a separate layer in what beauty is made out of.

She gave us a broken vase.
One she put together again, Kintsugi style, not trying to erase the damage, but making it a key part of the identity and beauty of the renewed object.

And she filled it with multiple layers of encouraging messages and compliments from people, organisations, clients around us expressing what we as a team mean to them. Messages from our company’s extended family members, she said. For the moments in which we feel broken, so that we can pick a message at random and can be encouraged, comforted.

Such an awesome gift. Beautiful. Thank you I.

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On this day 23 years ago at 14:07 I posted my first blogpost.

After the very stressful time I (and my team and my family) had until mid-September, I have finally turned to my recovery from burn-out. Still very tired, but as I mentioned earlier my head is becoming somewhat more active. Part of that recovery is rekindling my sense of wonder.

Already last year in conversations with a psychologist I defined for myself three things to help me do that. Building more exploration into my activities again starting from my sense of how things could be, and by engaging more again with my professional peers. Stressful and urgent events intervened for a long time, but now I find myself returning to it.

Two weeks ago when we spent a few days in Antwerp as a family, I came across the essay ‘Ode aan de verwondering‘, an ode to wonder, by the late Belgian scientist Caroline Pauwels, in the Stad Leest bookstore.
A timely find and read now that I have slowly moved a bunch of activities off my plate, and except for a single client stopped working until February or so.

My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage).

Blogging is a feedback loop on one’s sense of wonder.

Just yesterday I wrote about a notion I had (resulting from reading this book), to find interesting European non-fiction books by authors in languages I cannot read. It resulted in several reactions already, including a kind mail by Sven who mailed me about two books in Swedish he enjoyed, plus some links on how to acquire non-fiction books in Sweden. (Thank you!)
My blog over the years has resulted in many such and much deeper connections, reinforced by meeting people at a variety of conferences, and then interacting through other channels and in person (see the mention of peers above).

I find myself writing more again these days, and some of it ends up here. At the same time I see myself withdrawing from several other platforms. I don’t much like being drawn into my Mastodon timeline currently, nor my feedreader, as I seem to seek them out not out of curiosity but as grazing. I need to do my stuff in my own space for now it seems. I’m taking my blogging as an indicator of how I’m doing for the coming months.

Here’s to another year of blogging and conversation.

(In the years 2015 – 2022 I posted a reflection here on the role of my blog. (15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years of blogging), then I skipped/missed a few ‘anniversaries’.)

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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.