Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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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.

We’re scouting to replace our car (a 2006 Volvo V50). The challenge is finding one that has similar luggage space. The V50 has a box shaped boot, whereas other cars have either very sloping backs or lack depth in the boot. For newer Volvo’s this holds true as well. Cars have generally become bigger on the outside, but that has been used for padding and for the passenger compartment it seems, not for luggage space which seems to have actually shrunk for compact models like the V50. This ensures our camping gear won’t fit a car, where it does fit our V50.

E booked two test drives for this morning, both Toyota (a 2019 Corolla and a 2018 Rav4). Part of the test was an attempt at loading our camping gear in front of our house. The Corolla failed due to its sloping back, the Rav4 passed the packing test as its back is more boxy. The Rav4 is however hardly compact.

Reminds me of when we were looking for a car in 2004, and one of our key criteria was whether it could comfortably fit the rabbit cage that E’s rabbit lived in. Which is how we ended up driving a Citroen Xsara Picasso, after trying a much wider range of models.

For our current car we didn’t have such rabbit based criteria when we bought it early 2013. After Y’s birth in 2016 and getting a bigger tent for camping, everything still fit through adding a rooftop box.

What currently fits our V50’s boot must however also fit the replacement car (while we assume the rooftop box will remain a necessity for summer holiday travel). And it turns out that is a difficult requirement for other cars to fulfill.

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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?