What are you doing now?
A Now-page is a hybrid between the About page and my weekly notes. The About page says something about my background and general activities. The weekly notes I used to post, that only RSS subscribers get to see, talked about actual activities in the past days. This Now page contains the general activities I’m spending time on these days. It contains the things I’d mention if you would ask me in a conversation what I’m doing currently, after we haven’t spoken for a while.

Self
Since spring 2024 I have been dealing with burn-out. As a result I have to pace myself, and am in the process of establishing habits and routines that keep me balanced. I’ve had help from a psychologist, which was valuable but now no longer much needed. A strong contributing factor has been the departure of a business partner due to medical reasons and then his passing, which put my recovery on hold for 9 months. I am somewhat looking forward again but my resilience is still very low and fragile. So I’m treading carefully. Reading fiction, something I’ve done at about 1 book per week for many years, is important to me. I’ve noticed that my interest in some things is returning. I also notice I find it hard to focus on anything work related.

Family
We’re in a steady rhythm since some time. E is good at coming up with things to go do and see over the weekends, and we’re good traveling and exploring things with the three of us. Y is now 9 years old and has just skipped a year in primary school, moving from group 6 to 7 half way through the year. I thoroughly enjoy living in our hometown, even 8 years after our move here I’m consciously happy with that decision several times per week. We aim at using all school holidays to travel together this school year. We haven’t interacted much with friends and family in the past year in my burned-out state. Something I hope to pay more attention to the coming months.

Learning
For years I’ve wanted and struggled to read more non-fiction. In the past year I’ve slowly assembled a reading practice that is starting to work for me, mostly reading non-linearly.
Since mid 2020 I’ve revamped my personal knowledge management system (PKM, using Obsidian as tool of choice), and that leads to more purposefully seeking out new knowledge.I take joy in it as a thing in itself, but is also very useful in my activities. Exploration and the sense of wonder it provides are an important element in my recovery from burn-out.
Part of this area for me is creating tiny personal software tools, that carry out single tasks for me, or reduce friction in bringing together information in a way I can work with it, one the one hand, and help me push it out to this blog and other online places on the other.

Blogging (since 2002) is as important to me as ever, but I feel a disconnect between my (private) personal learning notes and this blog. Blogging is about conversations to me, and I’d like to more easily encourage them in connection to my personal learning notes. How to properly bridge the boundary between often fragile internal deliberations and more public writing without too much friction is an open question. I am using Hypothes.is as a public annotation tool, that directly feeds into my own local notes, but also allows others to follow along and respond. One thing that I spotted as pattern is that my learning notes don’t often cover my current work, it’s outside of it. Even though I also learn a lot in my work context, somehow I hesitate incorporating it into my PKM and mentioning it more in my blog. I wonder why that is. In the past months my blogging was at a low pace, mostly just my weekly notes. I hope as I recover mentally my writing will follow again. Like with non-fiction reading I have developed a few new practices around writing, the outputs of my PKM system, and I hope that will become visible here in due time.

Last year and the year before I helped curate the line-up for the a PKM conference. I’ve helped identify potential speakers and had preparatory conversations with them. This because I wanted to make sure that personal knowledge management would really be the central topic, rather than e.g. the productivity vibe a lot of pkm efforts tend to have these days. Learning and personal interests are more central than productivity. For the 2026 conference (again in March) I have aided in finding speakers and bringing people to the conference from around Europe, but at a much lower level of intensity.

Work
I’m fully booked for the entire year, but do have space for e.g. keynotes, or short consultations.
My single client project is for the Dutch government tactical council on EU information policies, keeping track of the many data related EU programmes and regulations with an eye of tying them to Dutch initiatives and representing the Dutch position in Europe.
I’m interested in also working and speaking EU-wide on these topics like before, but not yet clear how I would want to shape that. Our team does a lot of work related to digital ethics. I enjoy that, having done a few years of philosophy of technology focused on the ethics of technology development and use. Digital autonomy and tech sovereignty has come into focus for the current EC, and that is a good reason to wide my scope, building on the data policy work that was my focus the past 6 years or so.

Since September I’ve (slowly) handed over all my company internal tasks, and will not pick them back up. Our company team has grown the past three years to 12 people now, and tasks I have handled from our start are no longer good to allocate to just me, or me at all. When I’m recovered more, I will spend internal attention to knowledge management, digital policy and digital sovereignty.

Some work related travel comes from my involvement in the CEN/CENELEC JTC25 work on European standards for data spaces, based on the Data Act. In January I spent a week in Warsaw, the coming months there will be working visits to Spain, twice, and Oslo.

Voluntary work
The Open State Foundation I chair has been in good shape the past few years. We had some changes in the board, and are currently looking to expand the number of board members.
I’m the treasurer of the Open Nederland membership association, which brings together makers that use Creative Commons licenses.
I’m also the treasurer of a non-profit entity, Stichting ActivityClub.eu, which was created in support of the largest Dutch Mastodon instance (4k+ au). Through the non-profit donations for upkeep are easier to (publicly) account for. It is also a starting point for other activities in seeing what role ActivityPub can have in supporting public discource.
Early in 2025 I joined the board of Defend Democracy, a Dutch registered, Brussels based non-profit aiming to strengthen democratic resilience. Here I’m also the treasurer.

I’m generally open to other voluntary board positions of organisations that fit with my current thematic interests, EU wide or in the Netherlands.
With the new wave of EU regulations on data and digitisation I am interested in weaving the type of networks and community we created in the early open data movement in Europe. At the same time, my current mental health makes it unlikely I will add another role in the near future.

Current interests
Current interests remain: networked agency, ethics as a practice, digital transformation but distributed, self automation, civic tech, machine learning for civic tech and households, seeing my work as (political) activism, European and global developments w.r.t. data and digitisation as a geopolitical force, personal knowledge management and learning in the networked age.

These interests inform my reading and information gathering at the moment.