It’s getting late, back here in DK….. But i thought i owe ‘my readers’ an update.

I’m back in denmark, sitting in front of a computer alternately running through my tax papers and hacking together a website that i promised ages ago. I’m doing a lot better with my taxes and books than I had feared, and just being at it, and having all the papers in front of me, i’m already feeling a good deal more confident that i can weather this bullshit.

Basically it looks like I made a series of mistakes, especially in my 2002 books. On the other hand, the young lady who trawled through my books at the tax office made some equally elementary mistakes. First of all, she has made an assumption about a document that she claims doesn’t exist, however she never asked me for it, and I have it right in front of me now. Secondly, she made assumptions about my turnover for 2002 (which was very low), that were unjustified, and it looks like she made a very basic mistake in that case.

Mostly it’s just good to be on-line, and in reach of my books, so that i can actually do something about the stress and the mess. Even better, I seem to be able to sit in front of a computer for multiple hours without any noticable pain. Something I haven’t really done since mid-January.

But best of all, my last 2 posts have caused a couple of people to leave me comments, write me e-mail or phone me, just to say a few words of support. And just knowing that there are people out there who care (at least a little means a lot to me. Thanks!

I don’t really care about money. And I never really have. I’ve always known that that was mostly true because I always had enough of it to get by.

I grew up lucky. I mean the lucky of a white, male child of 2 well-educated parents in one of the socially well-functioning country. My family is safely in the upper half of middle class. I never lacked for anything important. I am also lucky to be smart enough that I never had a problem finding (and keeping) a decently paying job. So money has never had much sway over my attention, and I’m quite proud of that.

For the past 2-3 years I have gradually moved myself (profesionally) into the non-profit technology field, getting more and more involved in ict’s for development, and having less and less money. And money continued to be of little interest to me. As long as I have had enough. And I mean enough in a social context. Enough that I could, in practice, livge the life that my peers in Copenhagen live. Go out once in a while, go on vacation with my family, and even buy a toy/gadget once in a while. The plan was to make that possible by doing some consulting work in parallel to my work with ICT’s for development. The truth, is rather less sustainable. I have been living of my saving, and some money that I got as an early inheritance from my grandparents. The money is running out, or more precisely the money ran out a while ago. And while I wish I could till say that money is not important to me, I am gradually beginning to see the truth in what I have always known. It is not important, as long as you feel your needs are met. I shamefully admit that the idea of entering a period with very ittle money, even if I will always have enough to pay the bills, is very stressful. There’s a dull tenseness in my stomache when I think about continuing the non-profit work that I am involved in now. We have some funding to continue our project, but it’s not enough to pay me the half-time wage that I feel I would need in order not to worry too much about financial issues. On the other hand I have a commitment to pull off the Wireless Roadshow. A project that has been my dream for the past year, and that now, where e finally have funding, I will push myself to do to the utmost of my ability.

But the bottom line is, I am feeling the extent of my own vulnerability. Feeling the stress of working on something this different. I long to NOT have to care about money. And I long to work in a dedicated team of people who share at least some of my goals and visions, and in which we have a clear idea of where we are headed. In stead, I am working, in practice, only with Sebastian, our vision is unclear except that we are headed in the right general direction, and I have started worrying about money.

I’m half-way through, what seems to be an ever increasingly frustrating half-year period. (I guess I could be about one quarter way through an ever increasingly frustrating year, but i’l choose the optimistic perspective for the sake of argument).

For a bit of background, let’s start back in Decemeber 2003, as we were planning our participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva. Having spent the better part of 18 months trying to establish our little company/organisation/project in the realm of ict’s for the developing world, we had the ultimate good news only days before I left for Geneva. We were to receive a grant from the Open Society Institute to work on a project called the Wireless Roadshow. Our project. Our grant. Our Ideas, our ideals and our idealism. I was reenergizd, ready to throw myself at the project, put whatever energy and hours were necessary into proving that they had made the right decision, backing a couple of inexperienced techies in the complex world of development.

Geneva was an extremely exciting experience. Having gotten our, admittedly, tiny grant, meant I wasn’t begging for money there, but rather telling the world of the exciting project we were about to launch into. The place was full of everyone who is anyone working with wireless in the developing world. I met people who’s work I had read, or whom I knew through on-line correspndence and/or by reputation. From Dr. Onno Purbo from Indonesia, over Mike Best (formerly of MIT), the folks from the Jhai Foundation, and a good number of friends and acquaintances that I had had the pleasure of meeting before. I was fired up and ready to rear.

3 and a half months have passed since then, and instead of having spent at least 3 of them working on this wonderful project, I find myself sitting here in a small apartment in Vienna, having spent, perhaps, the equivalent of 4 full weeks on this project. Hampered by knee-surgery, family tragedies, extended periods of severe lower-back pain, and an ever more frustrating time-waste called a tax audit, I feel like I have gotten precisely nothing one since those exciting days in December. And I’d planned it all so well, with this next week being a week of to spend with my grandfather here in Austria, and with a 3-week vacation coming up where Signe and I are going to Vancouver to visit some of our closest friends. This period of vacation was supposed to come between 3 months of hard work, and an extended period of even more hectic work, and loads of travelling once we got the Roadshow started.

Instead, it arrives just as the work that I have had to postpone on the Roadshow, starts piling up to a degree where it’s no longer even remotely amusing.

The feeling of not having done t least 2 dozen things I promised to do since winter. The frustration and stress from an extended feud with the tax authorities. The running out of the savings that I have been subsisting on for the past 18 months. And the feeling that I am not, even remotely, living up to the responsibilites that come with even a small grant like the one we got or the Wireless Roadshow. And all that while I am starting on the first of 4 weeks of vacation to come in the next 6 weeks. It’s stressful to a degree that I can’t remember feeling since I leftthe dot-com world to go to Ghana in late 2000.

And for the first time i my life I find myself wondering whether I will be able to disconnect and relax while on vacation. The last frontier of a slacker mentality. I am I losing it?

Things are gradually returning to normal here, as my back attempts to regain it usefullness as a body-part. I can stand up and work, and even sit down for 30-45 minutes at a time now, and I’ve been doing 5-6 hour work days this week, mostly trying to catch up on my e-mail and get ready for the amazing AfricaSource Open-Source event to be held next week.

Also on the weekend we had a booth and a presentation at the 2004 Linux Forum. It went really well, and i’ll post a little more about it in a separate entry.

Finally, I am still struggling with the danish tax authorities who have now resorted to making random and quite arbitrary judgements about whether my travels and my hardware purchases are/were for private or business use. Since they have bsolutely no clue what each hardware purchase is all about, these decisions are pathetic, embarassing and hard to believe. When, at the same time, they have decided that my foreign travels for meetings in Armenia, Boston and elsewhere must be private because I cannot relate a specific piece of income to them, it makes me sick in the gut. So the saga of Tomas vs. the danish tax authorities continue, and nothing has yet convinced me that they ARE NOT harassing me only because I make very little money.

Offline and unable to sleep because of a really painful lower back, I spent my laptop battery writing up some notes from my experience at Emerging Tech. The advantage of doing it from that vantage point is probably a bit more reflection than in my previous entries. The disadvantages inclue the failings of my short-term memory, and my knack for ignoring things i don’t like

Since I was offline when I wrote this, there are no links in the text (i may add them later) but to compensate it’s full of what I would call “monkey-class typos”
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O’Reilly Network: O’Reilly Network — 2004 Emerging Technology Conference Coverage [Jan. 16, 2004]

Here’s a few comments from my tke on emerging tech 2004 in san diego.

First of all, Joi Ito roks. Thanks for all the fresh perspectives, the hecklebot and the sense of humour.

Secondly. The most interesting people i met so far are some of the grassroot hanging around, such as the locative.net guys

In general I have noticed 3 main themes at this years conference.

1. Blogging for Democracy.
Mondays digital democracy teach-in and a few sessions since have all been about the revolution in emocracy that was the howard dean campaign and the blogspace thing. Sorry, but it’s sometimes hard to take it seriously. It’s real rich to have americans blog about a revolution in emocray that most of all seems like a bad hack to make a basically deficit democracy function in a half-way useful manner. I would compare the us democracy to a highly monolithic incomprehensible chunck of software, and the current ‘revolution’ as some particularly effective, yet unruly perl code. It’s revolutionary only because it works, and it work only because the original code is so f…. up. No offense.

2. Social Software.
First of all, it seems to me that most of the so-called social software systems that are being talked about, i.e. orkut, friendster, linkedin etc, are very us centric. Perhaps it’s because the US is the last country to discover that daily interaction has moved away from the PC, and onto the mobile phone? Perhaps it’ just that the need to digitize your relationships and make them explicit and visual is a fundamentally american itch?
Secondly i just can’t seemt o bring myself to care about this stuff. sure, i’m on orkut and LinkedIn, and I was on Six Degrees about 5 years ago. i never used any of them for anything ensible, and while it’s ‘cool’ to surf friends of your friends profiles, it’s hard to see where it becomes useful to me, or even how i am ever going to b fascinated by these systems.

3. Mobile (cellphone) software
Sorry guys, but the US was 5 years behind, 5 years ago, and now that those 5 years have passed perhaps you’re only 3 years behind. Bring in the South Korean’s, the japanese, the estonians, even the danes. When I was in charge of mobile development at Icon Medialab in 2000/2001 we made som demo-apps which would probably still fascinate a large part of this crowd. I’m sorry, but there is nothing Emerging about cellphone systems. At least not the ones I have heard about here this week.

I want more tech and less emergence. I want more presentations like Oliver Masciarottes excellent overview of Ultra-WideBand wireless on tuesday. More Locative.net. more hacking. and specifically mor people from those other parts of the world, who bring a perspective that I haven’t already seen on the a-list bloggers sites. Oh, and don’t get me started on this whole a-list thing.

O’Reilly Network: O’Reilly’s Digital Democracy Teach-In [Feb. 10, 2004]

The Teach-In featured nine sessions with a variety of movers and shakers who have been thinking about and using technology to alter the way we elect and communicate with our candidates and political leaders.

Just to do justice on the whole Amercian Centri rant I had. It is fir to say that the Emerging Democracy Teach-in was highly american centric (as is the rest of this conference), but Joi Ito and
Ethan, did a good job of reminding everyone during their talk-show style session that closed the day. And in all fairness, people here realize and joke about the fact that they are slightly navel gazing. And a bit of self-irony never hurts.

Ethan Zuckerman’s Weblog : Ethan’s Weblog – My blog is in Cambridge, but my heart’s in Accra
Tomas certainly has a point – Joi and I tried hard to steer the discussion overseas, especially towards Africa… but there’s a strong feeling within this conference that the interesting stuff in emergent democracy and social software is happening in the United States.

So, today has been the digital democracy workshop here at ETech. In about 20 minutes Ethan and Joi Ito are on, and I hope they’ll change my impression of the day for the better.

So far I have been less than impressed. I realize of course that we are in California, and that in terms of internet innovation the US is still a little ahead of the rest of us. BUT, and it’s a big but, I CANNOT take a Digital Democracy workshop serious that is primarily about the US presedential election, Howard Dean’s campaign and on-line organising here in the US. There is simply too much going on in the rest of the world, and frankly, the US presedential election suffers from so many more fundamental problems than a need to organize on-line.

The US, contrary to popular opinion, is not the democracy to end all democracies, and the demand, or desperation that drives people to on-line campaigns is probably as much a resulot of a pretty fucked up electoral system, as it is a sign of true innovation.

I’m sorry. The truth is, i don’t know much about the us electoral system, or about the recent activities in on-line campaigning and political organising. It just frustrates me when everything is so intro-US-spective. Knowing Ethan, I’m guessing Joi and Him will try and correct that tendency. I hope they succeed, or i’ll have to chalck this day down as a bit of a bore. Oh well, The real Emerging Tech doesn’t start until tomorrow, so no real harm done.

O’Reilly Network: O’Reilly Network — 2004 Emerging Technology Conference Coverage [Jan. 16, 2004]

So I’m here at the lobby bar of the Westin Plaza Hotel in San Diego, it’s sunday night and the Emerging Tech conference starts tomorrow with the Digital Democracy teach-in.

I just registered as a speaker, since I’m going to be talking about wireless in the developing world on wednesday. And man, i’m getting excited. the lobby bar is abuzz with conversations. people are really into this shit, and the few people i’ve had the pleasure of talking to seem to think my perspective, and our project are exciting. that’s always a confidence booster before a big event, and speaking at ETech is pretty big in my world.

There’s a lot of sessions going on, wireless stuff, including at least one speaker on mesh networking, and Social Software, including some pretty cool talks about upcoming stuff.

I’m staying at a friendly and dirt-cheap backpacker hostel a few blocks from the conference hotel, sharing a room with another atendee, and spent the day today walking around San Diego with another danish participant, and abusing a 24h free WiFi offer at the local Starbucks cofee shop. Oh, and enjoying the fat that my new ibm thinkpad is so light i can carry it with me in a small bag at all times.

i’ll be back with more info as this mass conversation gets on the way.