Tag: Europe

Posted on
by

Vor aller Augen, before everyone’s eyes, this German language collection of chapters takes us through art history. For a series of famous paintings of women, each story gives voice to the women portrayed outside the artefact’s frame. Sound concept. Some of these vignettes felt contrived however, and some I would have loved to read several chapters more, or a full novel even, to see the story develop. Picked this 2022 book up in a Zurich bookshop in February, after reading the 2021 Die Erfindung des Ungehorsams last year. Clavadetscher (1979) is a Swiss playwright and author. Looking forward to reading more fiction by her.

Read in April 2025.

Posted on
by

Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

Posted on
by

On 22 February we as the ePSIplatform team organized a big conference in Warsaw on Open Government Data. With 300 people registered from 30 countries, and 40 speakers, it was almost as big as last year’s conference we organized in Rotterdam.

As this was our last big event under the ePSIplatform contract, which ended 1 March, we decided to use the Opening Keynote to provide an overview of what was achieved in the past few years in Open Data, and especially what is still to be done, and the challenges and pitfalls connected to that. I will provide a full transcript later, but below you find the slides and the video (first 20 minutes) of the presentation.

The State of European Open Data, by Ton Zijlstra

Posted on
by

While I drove Marc Smith, his son Eli, and Andrea Ben Lassoued back from the G.O.R. conference in Bielefeld to Enschede to meet up with Lilia Efimova, it was Marc that started the thoughts for this blogpost rolling.

At some point, after discussing opinions on the EU, and how living in a border town felt and feels, he concluded "then you are part of the international class".

True I guess. But what does that mean? Over the past 5 years the mycelium of my social network has indeed come to encircle the globe. It means my empathy now flows to a much wider range of people on almost all continents. Their local news becomes my local news too, and from it I build patterns and notions of what is going on in the world. That is a good thing: having a sense of world events build on my empathy for the emotions and experiences of distinct individuals. It brings it all home in a way the main stream media never can hope to achieve.

We do build a class I think, as Marc called it. We spend money, time and effort to meet eachother in different European capitals, we invite people we never met face to face before into our homes to stay. Going to a conference like Reboot or BlogTalk brings multiple days of very intense conversations, and exchange of ideas, while we recognize ourselves in the other. It is a heady mix and it’s addictive.

But is it as diverse as it is international?

I and others say it often: Europe’s true innovative potential lies in it’s diversity.
Not in emulating other parts of the world, best practices make you runner up at most, but in what defines us most: the patchwork of local cultures, languages and traditions that is this continent. That diversity worked against us in numerous wars and feuds across the centuries. Over the past 50 years we are increasingly finding ourselves under the roof of the EU, establishing common ground. It is a remarkable political experiment: a supranational construct that does not lay claim to any specific geographical area. Now that we start to see our common ground better and better, how to learn to build on our wonderful diversity?

What can I do, what can I take as an action list to start celebrating diversity. And what about you?
What on the agenda of an event like Reboot 8, would help us do that?

Your thoughts are appreciated.