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. My weekly notes, that only RSS subscribers get to see, talk 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
For most of last year 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. I am looking forward again but my resilience is still 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.

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’s reading skills are over 4 years ahead of her age and is increasingly starting her own individual learning journey, making good use of the local library, bookstores and an e-book subscription. It’s great to watch. I thoroughly enjoy living in our hometown, even over 7 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 the coming 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.
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 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. Preparations for the coming conference (again in March) have started, and I will again aid in finding speakers and bringing people to the conference from around Europe.

Work
I’m fully booked for the entire year. I currently have two main roles.
One 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 also the lead for digital ethics at the organisation in which the 12 Dutch provinces collaborate. Within that role I’m the secretary to the interprovincial ethics committee that I helped shape last year. Next to that I am involved with smaller projects for the Ministry for the Interior on open data and implementing the various EU data laws from the now ending Commission period.

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 the ethics of data. I enjoy that, having done a few years of philosophy of technology focused on the ethics of technology development and use.

Our company team has grown the past three years to 12 people now, and that means my role as an employer and as guide to our team members has grown too. My attention there is on balancing people’s working time, ensuring learning and mental health.

I nominally work four days per week although it mostly means Fridays are ‘buffer overflow’ days. Since my burn-out I’ve been more strict again with keeping Fridays free, although it doesn’t yet mean I can let go on those days.

In the past year or two I have noticed that I find the conceptual angles of my work extremely interesting, but regularly struggle somewhat with finding ways to enjoy the actual work connected to it. Some type of shift in attention and activities seems to be in order, but I’m as yet unclear to where or what such a shift needs to take me. I used the summer of 2022 to explore that in more detail, but two years on haven’t reached any conclusions yet, so I am still searching. This also ties back to the need I feel to do more with my knowledge and experience towards other/different outputs, that I mentioned above concerning learning.

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 expanding 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.

I’m 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.

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 as a geopolitical force, personal knowledge management and learning in the networked age.

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