Favorited Backup by Jeremy Keith

Jeremy recounts some conference experiences he himself and Michelle Baker have made with last minute tech issues in getting your slides up and running at a conference. Like Jeremy I prefer to use my own laptop. But, yes, that sometimes turns out to not work or be impossible at the venue. A key reason to use my own laptop is I like to work on my slides while already at the event when I’m speaking later in the day. It allows me to adapt wording to what the participants are using, better contextualise it to the event’s atmosphere, replace some examples that have been used already in other people’s talks, or connect my story to those by others.

That said I do also make sure to have a prepared slidedeck with me (nowadays that is, it definitely wasn’t always so). Especially when working abroad I usually travel with that slidedeck in Keynote, a powerpoint formatted export, and two PDFs (one with just the slides, one slides with my notes). The PDF with just the slides, I usually have available online already as well. Where venue equipment glitches it means I can do my talk with or without my own laptop, or with or without slide projection altogether. Each of those additional versions I carry has been added as precaution after first having been issues encountered. The ‘slides as images’ Jeremy mentions is also a useful tip, so one can share .key or .ppt files with the correct fonts and locations of everything.

One thing Jeremy describes I’d never do: put my slides on a usb stick handed to me by someone at the venue, to add my files to their central machine. I’ve worked in countries and with governments where giving someone else access to your hardware is sure to result in additional installed features without my consent. I therefore always carry blank USB sticks with me on which I can put files to share with others which they can then keep, so that I never have to use someone else’s usb stick with my laptop. I have red ones and blue ones, and allow people to choose 😉

I think I’ll be making image-only versions of all my talks from now on. Hopefully I won’t ever need them, but just knowing that the backup is there is reassuring.

Jeremy Keith


A red and a blue usb stick, you can choose and keep. You can also choose whether to believe I am a nice guy handing out free usb sticks or a cautious one not letting your usb sticks near my laptop.

I’m at FOSS4G-NL today, the Dutch annual meet-up of the FOSS4G community. This morning I gave the opening keynote titled “A map is the greatest of all epic poems“, and talked about how data is a matter of geopolitics and ethics by design, even if you’re a geo-data pro somewhere in a small municipality working on some hyperlocal data set. The invitation came as a result of my keynote at the global FOSS4G conference in Germany 2 years ago. Slides in Dutch can be downloaded at tzyl.eu/foss4gnl and are embedded below. Will post a transcript in English later.

My Dutch language slides of the keynote I gave at FOSS4G NL 2018

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

I am honoured to be invited to give a key-note at Online Educa in Berlin early December. This is the 14th international conference on Technology Supported Learning and Training.

It promises to be an interesting event, that will feature much more than just presentations. Bloggers have been invited to cover the event, and there are a number of fully interactive sessions as well. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, the anthropologist that created the ‘Machine is Us’ and other videos with his students will be presenting as well, and I am very much looking forward to hearing him speak.

My own presentation, as well as my contribution in the panel discussion that will follow it, has the title “Networked life, networked work, networked learning. Or the consequences of accidentally reconfiguring my life.” It will be a combination of the story of what my fully networked and connected day looks like, and the more fundamental shifts in underlying cultural categories that go with it. The changes I made these past 6 years in the way I live work and learn have not been preplanned, but happened in response to a changed environment. Once I noticed those responses I turned them into more conscious strategy.

When we look at how children respond to the technology available as well as to the societal changes that already caused, it is much the same process. We need to adapt our teaching, because the world these children grow up in and respond to has already changed due to the new affordances that mobile communication and internet give us. Our teaching needs to empower children to consciously shape their strategies using the tools and environment they already adapted to without noticing.
In preparation of the conference the organizers published a short interview with me, and there is a short article featuring some quotes on TrainingZone.

Am looking forward to visit Berlin again. It’s been a long time since I last was there.