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Work in progress

Digital gardening

If I had to pick a dominant thread throughout my life, it would be: exploring new ways to organise my notes and knowledge. As a teenager, I typed out paper index cards, to track lemmas in my parents' encyclopedia. Since then, I tried different tools and systems (like Zettelkasten).

Today, I'm starting yet another chapter, and will call it digital gardening: the trend to make more of my notes available on my public website. In my case: I combine Obsidian to take notes, with Material for MkDocs to publish them.

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Over the years, I used a portrait photo and a landscape shot from a kayak trip as my main “brand images”. But, a while ago, I started looking at a “real logo”. Something a little abstract, but (literally?) grounded, related to path-finding, or the idea of long-term growth. And linked to the idea that IT is more like gardening (on-going), than building something (one-off).

Adding my site to the Fediverse

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Thanks to the renewed interest in actual social media, rather than an algorithm-driven advertisement space, I find myself having interesting online conversations again.

I really wanted to use my own website and domain for further engagement.

But… experience with earlier attempts at federating networks made me cautious. Setting up and maintaining my own Jabber/XMPP and Diaspora servers was a lot of effort for little result. An excursion into the current field of microformats and protocols again suggested a lot to choose from, with very little guidance.

So after reading about Ton Zijlstra’s vision on “an operating system for the Open Social Web” (presented at the Dutch WordCamp 2022), we had a good conversation about experiences and the state of things (thanks Ton!).

The new official IATI Validator

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While I was on holidays, my colleagues wrote a little announcement at the Data4Development site to accompany the update by the IATI Secretariat about our work:

[Originally posted by Jesse Burns at the Data4Development website]

The last few months, Data4Development, especially Rolf Kleef, has been working on IATI’s new official Data Validator. In the fall, the new validator will finally launch and help organisations check the quality of their IATI publications more easily!

IATI Traceability in the Health Systems Advocacy Partnership

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By now, most of the have published their first data sets in the IATI Standard. This is the start of mandatory publishing of data to replace written progress reports, and, as the Partnership programmes are also just starting up, allows everyone to first focus on traceability. The provide details and examples on how to create proper links between activities of your organisation and those of others.

Learning Workshop: what’s next in open data & IATI publishing?

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Publishing data in the IATI format can help organisations and their stakeholders get a better grip on the quality of their information and on their impact. Organisations in a Strategic Partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to publish their first data sets before May 1st.

How did the process go, and what insights and learning points did it bring?