Das Biblionetz ist eine einzigartige Website, die mehr Aufmerksamkeit verdient. Es beschreibt viele tausende Bücher, Artikel, Texte und Ausschnitte, und deren Verbindungen und Zusammenhänge auf Grund von Begriffe, Erwähnungen, Fragen und Aussagen. Ein Beispiel wie Texte im Biblionetz untereinander verknüpft sind, und diese Vernetzung navigierbar macht Bereits 1996 hat Beat Döbeli (blog) das Biblionetz angefangen. […]

Last March I made an export from my blog, so that I have all my blogposts since 2002 (some 3800 posts) in my notes locally. This makes it easier to find and link to my own blogposts while I am working, thinking, or writing in my notes. What I did not do in March was […]

The past days I was in London to visit the Big Data LDN event and meet with my friend Paolo and his company’s team at Activate Intelligence. It made for interesting contrasts, and those contrasts made the trip worthwhile where the event on its own would not have. Big Data LDN is a yearly event. […]

During lunch in Holland Park, London this week, the water bottle had the text ‘ethical glass’.

Die deutsprachigen Blogwochen sind wieder gestartet. Eine Initiative von Robert Lender, Benedikt Müller und Dirk Deimeke, deren Blogs sich schon lange in meinem Feedreader befinden. Die Idee ist: Blogger schreiben während 3 Monate über eine kleine Liste von Themen, und werden so gegenseitig sichtbarer. So verknüpfen sich die Blogger, entstehen neue Gespräche, und bereichert man […]

Am 28. Oktober findet in Lausanne in der Schweiz die jährliche Konferenz der Swiss Data Alliance (SDA) statt. Die Swiss Data Alliance ist ein unabhängiger Think-Tank, der den Dialog über Daten und Digitalisierung zwischen Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Verwaltung fördern will. Die Konferenz findet statt unter dem Titel Swiss Data Space Forum 2026: Unlocking Data for […]

Earlier this week I read We Will Rise Again, a selection of short sf hopepunk stories and accompanying essays centered on civil disobedience, resistance, and protest. It was edited by Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, both authors whose work I have very much enjoyed, and Karen Lord, a name I didn’t remember coming across before. Based […]

Walking in the city center of ‘s-Hertogenbosch this afternoon, I saw this person fixing their bike. In the midst of shoppers, tools were spread out and focused but unhurried a little chore was taken care of.

Een literaire memoire van Connie Palmen‘s wording. N.a.v. wat Palmen er in een interview in de Volkskrant over zei had ik heel veel zin in dit boek. Wellicht omdat ik op zoek was naar wat haar werk 30 jaren geleden voor me deed maar geen enkel boek van haar daarna (al kocht en las ik […]

Service announcement: I have updated my NOW page. A 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. (I am announcing the update of my NOW page, […]

This week it’s been a year since my long time friend and business partner Frank died. And it’s been two years and three months since I realised I was very burned out. And it’s been four years since that process of taking on too much and not resting started, only realising much later that it […]

Today school started again, and Y is now going to the final year of primary school, group 8. For each of the school years we took a photo of her leaving for school on the first day. This is thus the final one. Last year she skipped a year mid-way through, so the photo for […]

A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which exists but you don’t have access to. E.g. because it’s in a language you can’t read, or material you don’t know […]

Favorited Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter by Wouter Groeneveld (Brainbaking) This type of thing is always highly fascinating to me. Using artefacts, here 17th century letters that survived to present day by happenstance and thus not having been delivered, to say something about life in those times, habits, language, and rituals. Now try and imagine […]

I today replaced the last handful of embedded Flickr images with self hosted copies, that merely link back to the source at Flickr. This way I am certain that no tracking by Flickr is possible when you visit this site. Five years ago, I stopped embedding Flickr images for new posts. I also started to […]

Gespot in Maastricht afgelopen weekend. Is zoervleisj een soort rendang? Enquiring minds want to know. Wel zoervleisj gegeten vrijdagavond, maar geheel niet aan rendang gedacht tijdens de maaltijd. Misschien vandaag dan maar rendang?

Yesterday we saw the sun set at the beach near Zandvoort. We were there because of the 89% or so solar eclipse that peaked around eight in the evening. Well in time we walked onto the beach to set up our lightweight chairs and through our eclipse ‘glasses’ looked due west where the sun was […]

The past few days I read two titles by Kurt Vonnegut, because they were mentioned in Among Others by Jo Walton that I read last month. The protagonist in Walton’s book, set in 1979/1980, is an avid reader, also of science fiction and fantasy and her reading includes Vonnegut’s work. Based on those mentions I […]

One hand was raised when I asked "Who has read or looked at the actual EU Inc legal proposal itself?" in a session where we discussed the EU Inc proposal and how after adoption it will come to significantly impact the day to day operations of the group of participants. That single hand was already […]

I came across a recommendation by Cory Doctorow of Jo Walton‘s work, on July 1st. I bought a range of her works then, and in the past month read what I bought. Among them the Thessaly trilogy which I read in the last 2 weeks, consisting of three books, The Just City, The Philosopher Kings […]

It’s summer, hot and dry, and we spent the week in London, not quite the right place to cool down. A week of dunking ourselves from the almost too cold air conditioned hotel room near Finsbury Park into the stuffy, iron smell of the underground where the tunnels were hazy with a dark fog of […]

A 19th century warren next to Regent’s Canal. Back in 2018 I walked through here along the canal from King’s Cross to Regent’s Park with friends remembering a friend we lost. This time the three of us explored the archways of the railroad and the alleyways between them, where originally goods were transferred between canal, […]

The past week in London we also visited the British Library for a bit, reading and writing while enjoying coffee. Many people used the publicly accessible parts, I suspect to be able to read or work in a place that had more comfortable temperatures than their homes elsewhere in the stuffy city. People using all […]

A year ago we were in Paris to visit a very large exhibition of the work of David Hockney. It was amazing, and we spent much more time there than anticipated. Hockney had an active role in this exhibition and also created new work for it. It turned out to be his last as well, […]

I think the last time E and I met Ivo Gormley was in 2012, when we had a pleasant dinner together on Great Queen Street talking about what it was like as a Londoner to have the Olympics take place in your own living environment. I knew Ivo from open data work, and his 2009 […]

In reply to The three cornered container by Chris Corrigan What stands out to me reading this, is that I feel I have an intrinsic preference for the emergent area of the triad. And can quickly loose interest towards the design corner, and specifically the built parts. While I see others flock to those other […]

In reply to Learning How to be Idle on Vacation by Peter Rukavina Your post resonates a lot, Peter. In my journey of the last years overcoming burn-out my inability to rest, other than sleep, stands out. There’s always things to do, work, at home. Simultaneously so much time ticks by procrastinating as well, the […]

This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element). Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static […]

A lovely novella and the 2022 debut by francophone Swiss author Fanny Desarzens (1993). I read the German translation, titled Berghütte (mountain cabin), Galel (the name of one of the characters) is the French title. Three men, with few words between them, share a deep friendship which unfolds every summer against the backdrop of the […]

It’s been a while since my last post in the Books category early February, 32 fiction books further by my count. Recently Cory Doctorow pointed to the work of Welsh / Canadian author Jo Walton on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel Everybody’s Perfect, and I read some of her work these […]

Over the past month or two, after our return from Portugal I’ve been slowly improving and overcoming my burn-out. I’m at a point where I am eager to do certain things again, notice E and Y and my love for them much more again, can get energised from facilitating a workshop with a client, started […]

European Data Protection makes it illegal to transfer person identifiable data to outside the EU. Unless there is equivalence in data protection, or an agreement with guarantees and oversight deemed adequate. For the USA this is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF). This framework depends on the existence of the independent oversight body FTC, and […]

In a session today there was some discussion about agentic skills. A skill is mostly a markdown text file often named, yes, skill.md with a natural language text plus some front matter, describing some specific workflow or bit of knowledge or capability. Somebody external opined that such skills were a good way of codifying organisational […]

In a session earlier today the deployment of a tool was discussed in an organisation’s information environment that is otherwise fully dominated by Microsoft products. After a presentation a director asked “if we add this tool to our (Microsoft) mix, aren’t we working in opposition to our wish for more digital autonomy and digital sovereignty”? […]

Bij de Open State Foundation (waar ik voorzitter ben) zoeken we een nieuwe directeur! Herken jij je in het profiel (PDF), en ben je net zo bevlogen als ons team om digitale transparantie bij de overheid te bevorderen en onze democratie te versterken? Dan horen we heel graag van je! Nadrukkelijk ook als je vindt […]

Last week I spent a few days in Switzerland. I went to Zürich on Thursday to meet up with a few people, having a pleasant chat with Beat Döbeli about his 30 year old PKM system Biblionetz, and a nice dinner with long time open data friend André Golliez, who chairs the Swiss Data Alliance. […]

The Open State Foundation has its office on the old naval yard in the heart of Amsterdam. Right next to the national maritime museum, in the 17th century warehouse of the Dutch admirality, and across from the 1960’s former Base Commander’s home our (as I’m a board member there) offices are surrounded by other small […]

Het is DOEI! Dag, de eerste zondag van de maand om mezelf en anderen aan te moedigen weer een stapje te zetten weg van BigTech. Stap je mee? Blogpost:

Trains at Atocha station Madrid I spent the week in Ciudad Real in Spain, under an hour by high speed train (~200km) south of Madrid. I was there for a plenary meeting of CEN/CENELEC’s joint technical committee (JTC) 25 that works on European standards for data management, data spaces, and cloud & edge. The need […]

There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming […]

This weekend we took a train to Rotterdam. We decided to spend a day there, as our Canadian friends Peter and Lisa were coming up from Bruges in Belgium, which was the last stop on their cycling holiday. Before meeting them and after coffee the three of us strolled to and through Museumpark and visited […]

We spent a week and a half in Portugal this spring. Traveling together is something we do well with the three of us, and something I find healing. Although I found it hard at times to be in the moment, and to not let myself get irritated over small things. It was Y’s first ever […]

As I mentioned in my previous post The Long Walk, I struggle to get out of the house and away from my laptop to take short walks in the neighbourhood during the day. We live at the northern edge of Amersfoort, and across the small Laak river in easy walking distance there’s a polder at […]