Resolutions for 2025

With some irregularities, I have had some New Year’s resolutions. Since 2021, these have been inspired by Daniel Mietchen, not only publishing them publicly, but also doing continuous follow-up. This year, I had the basics done on the Eve, but at the last minute, decided to go into more details, with quarterly goals, and that took some more time. But now I am done, and have even done my weekly documentation twice. Perhaps it is not really resolutions in the traditional sense, but more of themes and projects fitting in them.

My themes for the year will be Sustainability, Openness Advocacy, Learning and Health. Each of them has several and more specific sub-themes, and each of those are broken down with quarterly goals. Find the full breakdown and dashboard on GitHub.

The documentation will be different from last year. Instead of monthly updates here, I will try to update the dashboard weekly (and as much as I can, with details in the code commits) and for each quarter write one summary blog post here with reflections and possibly even course corrections.

Kapitalets moment 22

en kommentar
som väcker hat
de brister ut
i raseri

hur kan du ta
ifrån mig allt
som jag vill ha
som det har var’t

men det som sas
var inget ont
det var en fras
om vetenskap

tempen bara
ökar stiger
blir en fara
ödesdiger

att bejaka
det som händer
inte blunda
för det som sker

men förändring
är ej enkel
utan smärtar
i ovisshet

och den oron
är det värsta
den är gnistan
bakom ilskan

nu behövs det
vackra sagor
men tråkiga
och lyckliga

berättelser
som ej säljer
för att till slut
det ordnar sig

kapitalets
moment tjutvå
ett ekorrhjul
att ta sig ur

vi sitter fast
i vanans makt
en omställning
blir mycket svår

kan vi nudga
tillräckligt snabbt
eller behövs
revolution

Först publicerad på poeter.se.

Review of 2024 resolutions

2024 is over and just like last year, it is time to reflect on the resolutions that I made. I must admit I totally forgot to use the resolutions page as a dashboard like I was planning. But I did do quite well with monthly reports (August and September were lumped together, but otherwise great). So with those meta questions covered, how did I do on my themes?

🔴 Sustainability

make efforts so that the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development becomes a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group

I want to give myself a pass on the efforts made. However, it is clearly not a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group yet. Some more activity has been seen, and a few more people have shown interest in the user group, but I think it is fair to say that it isn’t vibrant. Related to the health, the Wikimedia Affiliates Committee announced that they are considering some “health criteria” which we have started talking about in the group and included in the annual plan for 2025. More on that in my 2025 blog post.

All 2024 monthly reports on sustainability.

🟢 Fediverse

promote the Fediverse by being an active and curious community member and role model

Even though my activity some months was low, I am giving myself a weak pass, as I think I have been quite vigilante in promoting the Fediverse in various ways. This includes exploring different parts of it and not only quitting X, but also being vocal about it. Now, I am pretty sure I haven’t moved the needle on any topline numbers, but at least I am fairly certain that people who followed me in other places and peeked into the Fediverse have been finding a lively and positive part of the internet.

All 2024 monthly reports on the Fediverse.

🟢 Running

on average, run 5 km every second day

This year was tough. I was sick a bit and had trouble with my calves. But thanks to a good start, and new shoes enabling a strong finish, I made my goal. The running in itself was just a few kilometers from reaching the average, and with the added hiking (where I only count a third of the distance) I was averaging 5.14 km every second day (or 5 km every 1.94 day).

Running.
Walking.

Course in Sustainable Knowledge Dissemination through OER and Open Science

This summer I took a short course in Sustainable Knowledge Dissemination through OER and Open Science 2.0 ECTS credits, remotely at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The course was fully self-paced through an LMS. I have to admit, I mostly took the course to formalize the knowledge I had already acquired by being active in the open movement for a long while and through my work at Open By Default. The grades have now been reported to the central system, LADOK, and I passed!

While I perhaps didn’t learn so much for myself, I still recommend the course for anyone wanting to get the basics of Open Educational Resources and Open Science. Clear and concise information, and a plus for the self-pacing.

Course in Climate Leadership in Politics and Public Administration

This spring I took a short course in Climate Leadership in Politics and Public Administrations (archived), 3.0 ECTS credits, remotely at Uppsala University. The course was inspiring, and some of the professors were excellent. The grades have now been reported to the central system, LADOK, and I passed!

It feels good to know a bit about possible regulatory instruments, and even if this may not be directly applicable in any of my current assignments in Open By Default, I would love to help on issues in this topic space in the future.

Re-launching Open By Default

In 2016, I started a sole proprietorship in Sweden that I called Open By Default. It was a lot of fun, but when I got full-time employment in the European Parliament and moved to Brussels, I closed it down.

But recently, on 15 May, I started it up again, now as an “eenmanszaak” in the Netherlands. So if you need any help with anything related to openness, you can hire me.

We Should All Be Vegans

This essay was an assignment I wrote last year at the course English: Writing Texts about Facts and Opinions.

Veganism is the philosophy of not exploiting animals in any way. It entails excluding all animal products and by-products from the consumption and all parts of the production. Or, put another way, a product is vegan if no animals were exploited during its production. By only using vegan products, many advantages can be achieved. You might ask yourself: Since veganism is still a fringe lifestyle, can these advantages really make a difference? If you value good public health, justice and equality and want to do something about global warming, yes they can. In fact, these advantages are so beneficial for society, we should all be vegans.

Eating vegan has a number of positive effects on health, which, of course, is good on a personal level, but it also has positive effects on the public health. Heart diseases, type-2 diabetes and cancer are common and a strain on the healthcare system. As a vegan diet has been shown to decrease all these diseases through various studies, there is an opportunity to free up resources. Those resources could instead be used to improve the situation for healthcare workers in general, resulting in better care for patients, or to treat diseases that today are somewhat neglected. Of course, increasing the quality of life for many people by allowing them to live longer and healthier lives should not be neglected either.

Another aspect that cannot be neglected is the ethical argument. Exploiting animals and causing them severe suffering for our gain is hard to justify. It is a kind of slavery and represents an idea that we, since long should have abandoned in our modern society. Especially recent progress in consciousness in animals, their capacity for suffering and having emotional lives, makes it easy to draw parallels to how society previously treated different human races. This speciesism is a remnant of an ungrounded belief in human moral superiority, which is not fitting for a civilized and enlightened society. In essence, keeping this practice preserves the thinking of some races and species being worth more than others and is fertile ground for similar thinking being applied to humans, i.e. that some people are worth less. Discarding this practice would therefore not only be morally just to the animals, but also make it easier to fully transition into a humane and kind civilization where all humans are equal.

Furthermore, if we want to keep our civilization as habitable as we have become used to, we quickly need to solve many environmental issues, and in particular address the rising levels of greenhouse gases causing climate change. Production of meat causes enormous emissions, mostly of methane from animals. While cattle are the largest emitters, pigs and poultry also compare unfavorably to vegetable protein sources. The way land is treated, both for keeping the animals, and also for the production of animal feed, is having a devastating effect on biodiversity. Declining biodiversity is a factor that causes ecosystems to perish, which in turn can speed up climate change through loss of carbon in the biomass. By using the land directly for human food, less area would be needed to produce the same amount of nutritional value and more could be saved in nature preserves.

The lack of nutritional value is a common counterargument to veganism, meaning that it would be hard to obtain enough minerals and vitamins through a strictly vegan diet. This is mostly an old myth, augmented through stories in popular culture of vegans being pale and weak. In reality, with a varied and planned diet, it is straightforward to keep a fully adequate diet and obtain all the nutrients needed for healthy bodily functions. Even without a properly planned diet, supplements can make up for the lack of the nutrients that are hard to include in a vegan diet, such as vitamin B12.

To summarize, there is much to be won for society if everyone switched to a vegan diet. Public health would greatly benefit, as well as the health level of many individuals. We would live morally sound lives while also removing fertile ground for racism and other injustices. Finally, we would make huge steps towards mitigating the worst effects of climate change. These advantages have such a potential that, anyone should agree that we all should be vegans.

New CV page

I used to have a page on this blog with my curriculum vitae. It was a plugin that extracted certain data from my LinkedIn page. Unfortunately, it stopped working, and I removed the page a few years ago.

Recently, I had reason to update my CV/LinkedIn page and I felt inspired to create a new page. As a small coincidence, I also had just come across a one-page theme that I thought looked good. So I got started and working on a new page, obviously incorporating what was on LinkedIn, but also with greater control, added a few custom sections and embedded media and linked generously.

For a bit more than a week, the site is up on aina.li/cv, and it is also linked from the menu here. Feedback is appreciated, either here or on GitHub.

2024 podcast listening update

In 2022, I wrote a blog post about my podcast listening. Since I recently switched podcast player, and with that did a big cleanse, I thought it was time for an update.

I used to use the Podcast addict app for listening to podcasts. And it was actually quite good and had all the features I wanted. But it was one thing itching, it wasn’t open source. So last year I finally did some research and installed AntennaPod, an open source solution that I saw was getting good reviews.

The migration was as easy as one could hope for, and one neat feature was that it asked which of my subscriptions I wanted to keep. This made me contemplate the ones I were enjoying, and now I have updated my listening page (archiving my previous feed). Most of the changes, though, are for podcasts that stopped producing new episodes and where I gave up hope of them returning.

One small thing that I have not figured out yet, is how to add episodes without subscribing to the podcast. But I guess I will figure that out, or make a feature request. Their contributing page looks inviting, and I have requested access to help translate the app.

On the positive note, I am already glad to not be bothered by the animated ads that pestered me in the Podcast addict app.

Resolutions for 2024

A few years back, I got inspired by Daniel Mietchen for New Year’s resolutions. While inspiring and important, the way I did it was not really what I imagined, and I did not continue in 2022. Basically, I hadn’t thought through how I wanted to document it, and it all became a bit too ad hoc to feel like I was doing it with purpose.

Themes

Now I have given it quite some thought and have two new themes that I am inspired about. The themes are Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Fediverse. To read about my ambitions in detail and see the progress overview, check this dashboard for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.

Documentation

I have also figured out that the way I want to document my progress is by monthly blog posts here, one for each theme. I’ll create a tag for each of them so that they all can be found easily later (fediverse 2024 and sustainability 2024).

Running

While not really a resolution as such this year, with the results from the last two years, I will keep my ambition of running 5 km every second day.

EDIT (2024-01-19): As I am also planning to do a lot more hiking this year, and that usually “eats up” running days even though it is also beneficial for general health, I will allow for those to be counted as a third of the distance. For example, a hike of 15 km would be counted as a 5 km run.