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At the European PKM Summit the past two days, Frank Meeuwsen ran a continuous atelier where people could make their own ‘zines and lino cuts. A welcoming space to make something by hand at an event full of inspiring but abstract conversations and talks.

A simple ‘zine folded from an A4 paper provides six small pages, including the front and back. That forces you to be to the point.

I thought of a posting I wrote a little over a year ago, about how personal knowledge management is personal in three ways, and that generally you should always take the P in PKM even more personal than you’re already doing.
Three points to bring across sounded short enough to lend itself for a message in a zine.


The P in PKM is 3 fold personal. (jouw = yours in Dutch)


First, it’s your personal system. You take it with you. It enables and anchors your personal autonomy, and allows you to own your own learning path


Second, it’s your personal knowledge, building on your own curiosity and interests, with your associations, in your language. Your personal network of meaning.


Third, it’s your personal system. Your emergent structures, following your logic, stemming from your personal methods and workflows.


Personal KM is way more personal than you think. And still more.

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Bookmarked How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt by Margaret-Anne Storey

I enjoyed this short posting by Margaret-Anne Storey, a CS professor. The effect of using generative tools can indeed lead to loss of overview, and uncertainty about the project I recognise. It creeps in very quickly, especially if I’ve started from something exploratory, as opposed to planned. A cognitive debt accrues because of wanting to move fast or move at all, at the cost of understanding one’s actions in enough detail. It hinders being able to make changes later.

It also makes me wonder something completely different. Partially because of examples I saw last week in Madrid of how BMW and Airbus had sped up some specific tasks orders of magnitude with AI:

If we see companies as slow AI, i.e. context blind algorithms working towards a narrowly defined singular goal (this is where the notion of AI turning all the material in the world including ourselves into paperclips comes from), what methods have we come up with to deal with cognitive debt in organisations? My intuitive response is reporting chains, KPIs, and middle management. Consultancy too, hiring an external actor to blame if needed. That suggests to me we actually didn’t, as so much of that is management-theater. Does any board of any company above a certain size actually know what is going on in their organisations? Understand what consequences changes may have? There’s a world of hurt out there caused by ‘reorganisations’ that all too often seem ritualistic more than rational when seen from the outside.

It may also be why companies easily embrace AI, despite e.g. warnings about cognitive debt. It looks the same as current practice, just with the promise of higher speed.

I saw this dynamic play out vividly in an entrepreneurship course I taught recently. .. one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. … no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. … issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.

Margaret-Anne Storey

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After being informed about the intention of the Royal Library to archive my website, I wondered how some of the aspects my site has may affect what is being collected.
Specifically:

  • Most of my postings are kept away from the front page but end up in specific categories. These postings do show up in monthly archives and overview pages like for a tag or category.
  • Some of my postings are unlisted in the site, yet are publicly available. Mostly these are postings I originally only shared through RSS, such as my week notes. They are not in overviews, don’t show up as search results, but have public URLs, and you can navigate to them if you click next / previous post on their surrounding posts in the timeline.

The crawler that will be used for the archiving is Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive itself.
A quick test of some posts from both of the two types above shows they are likely not in the internet archive. I mailed the Royal Library to ask how Heritrix may or may not deal with my site’s quirks. Or perhaps I can generate a complete site map and make that available?

I think I’ll put this up on the front page 😉

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I have been interested in personal knowledge management (pkm) for a very long time. I have been an avid notes maker ever since I learned to write. Digital tools from the late 1980s onwards have been extremely useful. And a source of nerdy fascination, I confess. I am certain personal knowledge management (pkm) is of tremendous value for anyone who wants to keep learning and make sense of the world around them.

On March 20 and 21 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the third time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I’ve helped a bit, like for earlier editions with suggesting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year and the year before.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands (doing a bachelor’s or master’s) with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)? (note that it says interest, I don’t expect you to be highly sophisticated or experienced in it!)
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 20 and 21 March in Utrecht, but as a student you cannot afford the 254 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 20th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the sessions. If you have other ways to attend (by e.g. volunteering for the event staff) then that is preferable. This is specifically for someone who would otherwise not be able to go. I’d be happy to briefly meet you as well at the event, but if not that is perfectly fine too. It would be great however if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)! My contact details are in the right-hand sidebar.

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Belarus is prosecuting licensed ham radio operators for treason and espionage.
Because they use their equipment to have conversations with people around the world. Siarhei Besarab, callsign EU1AEY, describes what is happening movingly (archive link). Never mind that these are licensed radio operators, meaning there is a government register of everyone who is involved in this technical hobby, and there were technical exams before getting your license, so government cannot be confused as to the reality. The (mandatory) logs, and written confirmations of conversations (called QSL cards), are even used as ‘proof’.

It boggles the mind.

It figures too, because individual agency, and having individual technological capabilities, is subversive seen from an authoritarian perspective. Next to things like ham radio, and e.g. coders, this also applies to (digital) makers. When in Ukraine Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk fell to Russian covert invasion in 2014 something similar happened in the Donetsk FabLab. The guy who founded and ran the FabLab in Donetsk, K (whom I previously met because he contributed to some of the Dutch FabLabs too), saw himself confronted with one of his regular visitors and half a dozen uniformed others, all armed, coming to tell him his work was subversive and his FabLab was hereby shut down. He went home, picked up his family and drove west.

I have a ham radio license (callsign PE1NOR). Since I was 9 years old I was involved in the radio hobby, and I obtained my license when I first went to university. For some years I’ve let it lapse, but have since renewed it. At the time I thought about being registered as having this capability and the potential risk of that exposure. On the other hand, having the license and having the equipment at home, even if I am no longer active in the hobby itself, also means I can assist in cases of higher probability than prosecution in my own country: emergencies. In emergencies the first thing to go down is regular telephone communications. As long as there’s electricity, or charged batteries at least, my radio equipment will work. In the Netherlands a network of ham radio operators have formed the DARES Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and they have agreements with a range of Dutch ‘security regions’ (groupings of municipalities), to supply emergency radio connections for civil protection. That is how you build on the technological capabilities of people.

Abbreviations are widely used in ham radio, because when using Morse code it means you can convey meaning faster.
Besarab signs his posting with three of them:

73, goodbye
QRT, stopping transmission
SK, silent key (meaning a morse key that fell silent, i.e. the operator died)

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Early December I blogged about wanting to build a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotating in Hypothes.is (which sends everything on to my notes in Obsidian). Over the past month that has worked out nicely, with steady additions to my bookmarks and annotations, unlike before.

In that early December posting I mentioned wanting to fix two things:

Today I made a first version of tool to allow me to share to Hypothes.is from mobile. I reused the same code I made for posting within my feedreader, but with added precautions and checks because it needs to live on the open web to function.

The reason I wanted to build my own tool is that one way of doing this, through a proxy server run by Hypothes.is, will be switched off by February. The suggested replacement for mobile somehow doesn’t work in my mobile browser. I don’t know why, and felt it’s better anyway to try and build my own thing.

In this first iteration, it’s a regular webform served from one of my domains, that I bookmarked. While browsing online, I can copy the URL and e.g. the title of a page to the clipboard, and then open and populate the webform by selecting the bookmark, adding a comment and some tags. Hitting submit, sends it all to Hypothes.is. This works best if you have a clipboard on your mobile that can have multiple entries, so you have the material for one or more bookmarks and annotations on it.

So my second fix from last month I’ve now created. Probably I will iterate a bit on this, to see if I can reduce the number of steps involved.