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titsay
Three Goblin Art
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@theartofmadeline
Cosmic Funnies
Jules of Nature
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Xuebing Du
tumblr dot com
styofa doing anything
$LAYYYTER
Show & Tell
if i look back, i am lost
JVL
Mike Driver
d e v o n
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trying on a metaphor
blake kathryn
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from Brazil
seen from Sweden
seen from Slovakia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Denmark
@pernillan
Interesting diagrams on how people negotiate around (the mainly rich part of) the world. Visually, the Swedish one is definitely the most interesting with "the most wide-ranging discussions". :) Otherwise I like how Singaporeans generally take time to build a relationship, including e.g. singing karaoke together. :)
Back at Sida to work with International Aid Transparency!
It's official! Today I started working for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) again, but this time as a consultant through my own company Openhearted AB! I won a public procurement for consultancy services and yesterday was the last day for the other companies who also put in bids to appeal the decision, but it seems like none of them did that, so today I was allowed to work my first day on that contract that will last until end of 2015! It was apparently 433 days since I left my previous position at Sida as their Transparency and Social Media Manager, to go work for the World Bank. A colleague saw in the Intranet that I had been "out-of-office" for 433 days, and this picture is actually from my Instagram feed the day I left! :)
This position at Sida is only part-time though so I will continue to work in the Open Aid Partnership Secretariat, hosted in the World Bank Innovation Labs in Washington DC, although I will work remotely for them and be based here i Stockholm. I am very lucky that my managers at the World Bank and at Sida see this as a good opportunity for both them and me, as we see that there are possible synergy effects between the two positions, as my areas of expertise within both organizations are international aid transparency and open development data.
Below you'll find an attempt of a translation of the assignment I will be working on (some words I found difficult to translate, like "omvärldsbevakning" and "kravställan" that were both words in the title...)
Monitoring, communication and setting requirements for increased transparency in international development cooperation
The consultant will work with monitoring international developments in aid transparency and analyze the work to increase access to data and documentation in international development cooperation. The aim is to provide a basis for Swedish priorities and the Swedish work in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Secretariat and to support other countries and international aid organizations work to increase transparency. The work will contribute to the Swedish commitments to transparency in aid. It will be done in close cooperation with other countries and organizations involved in the consortium that constitute the Secretariat, as well as the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Sida transparency manager. The work includes to on behalf of Sida and Sweden provide support and participate in communication activities for other donor countries to pursue and enhance their implementation of the international transparency agenda. In addition, to participate in efforts to spread awareness of IATI and the international transparency work to donors who have not yet implemented transparency efforts according to the IATI standard.
I am very glad to be back at Sida and it was amazing to come to the office today and be welcomed by old colleagues with hugs and smiling faces telling me they are happy to have me back!! <3
Webbdagarna Stockholm 20 March 2014
Below you'll find the summary of the second day of Webbdagarna (Web Days) I created on Storify.
Webbdagarna Stockholm 19 March 2014
Last week I attended the 2-day conference Webbdagarna (Web Days) here in Stockholm. Instead of writing "normal" blog posts I created stories on Storify to summarize those days. In order to document my #blogg100 quest of writing 100 blog post in 100 days correctly I thought I'd also post those stories here. This is the first one:
Happy #HappyDay with #HappyPlay!
Today is International Day of Happiness. Something that makes me really happy is music so my first thought when I heard about the day this morning was to create a playlist with songs that makes me happy. I created one on Spotify, called it a #HappyPlay-list and made it collaborative. So far, only two people have contributed to it so it didn't exactly become viral, but apparently I wasn't the only one who had the same idea because a couple of hours ago Mashable also published one. They had of course also added the hit song "Happy" by Pharrell Williams as the first one on their list. I was also happy to find out that Pharrell had joined up with the UN Foundation to create a campaign. Read more about How You Can Join Pharrell & the UN Foundation in Sharing Happiness while you listen to my HappyPlay-list below! I would be very happy if you would add songs to it that makes you happy!
Speaking at Nordic APIs Conference in Stockholm March 31st
On March 31st I will be one of the speakers at the Nordic APIs conference in Stockholm. API stands for Application Programming Interface and it is a specification on how some software components should interact with each other. The title of my talk will be Open Standards and APIs for a Better World and this is part of the description of my session:
How can open standards and APIs be used to improve public service delivery in the developing world? What are the challenges and lessons learned from developing and implementing a common open data standard globally? What is the role of the tech community and API specialists in such a process? (Read the full session description)
I hope it sounds interesting to people planning to come to the conference! If you haven't planned on coming already, here is some more information about it, copied from the conference website:
APIs are the glue that keeps modern internet technologies together – be it Mobile Apps, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Social Media, Quantified Self or Open Data. The theme for this half-day Nordic APIs conference is “from Private to Public“ and we will talk about how to maximize the value from private internal APIs as well as open public APIs. With great speakers and an full schedule we deliver a lot of valuable information in a short time.
The aim of Nordic APIs is to build a open community that spans the entire region. For this reason, we are offering a handful of free tickets for women. We also also offering subsidize travel to Stockholm because we know that not everyone in this community lives in the capital.
Get your tickets now and join us for our 9th Nordic APIs conference and our 5th event in Sweden.
I hope to see some of you there!
In the #blogg100 post I wrote yesterday (but published today...) I am describing the moment that opened my eyes to the world...
Good Songs for Learning Swedish
In my blog post yesterday titled Learning Languages Through Song Lyrics I referred to list of good songs for learning Swedish that my dear friend Terese Raymond had selected using these criteria:
Nice and pretty slow melody
Lyrics with a casual language and many words
Extra plus for melancholic references of the type pickled herring, pollen allergy, darkness and autumn slush!
As I wrote then, her list inspired me to create a longer one, so I have now started a Spotify playlist with Songs in Swedish that I think could be good for learning both the language and about different artists singing in Swedish. I'd love for you to contribute to this list so it would be great if you could make suggestions, either in the comments or by adding them directly to the list! It is collaborative so anyone with a Spotify account can add songs to it.
Yesterday I wrote a blogpost on Medium on how a list of songs in Swedish got me thinking about how music can be used for discovering new languages and cultures.
Very short blog post today to say that I am as HAPPY as these Chinese people are in the smog. :) Got a postive email that I have been waiting for for quite some time. Will let you know more when it is official... Now I am going to go out and meet some friends to celebrate!
The majority of Wikipedia editors are white, male and middle-class. Correspondingly, Wikipedia reflects the worldview of this social demographic, which is economically and socially privileged, as well as US/Eurocentric. Tonight I was invited to a meeting at Wikimedia Sweden to discuss how we could change that. That's the topic of my #blogg100 post today.
25 years ago today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee filed the proposal for what was to become the World Wide Web. The #Web25 Anniversary has been celebrated all over the World (Wide Web) today in different ways. I have personally celebrated it by digging up old memories of my first experiences of the web, and traces of my own first websites using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. This #blogg100 post also includes some important messages from Sir Tim and a picture of me that is older than WWW! Enjoy it! I have :)
Today the Swedish Radio correspondent Nils Horner was killed, shot in the back of his head, in broad daylight on a Kabul street. It was difficult to write a #blogg100 post today, but I wrote some brief words in his honor.
My key takeaway from Edward Snowden’s SXSW talk, in my #blogg100 post from yesterday, that I forgot to post here then...
Today I decided to write my #blogg100 post in Swedish. Sorry about that any non-Swedish readers... But the super-short summary is that Lent is a time to evaluate and revalue life, and where it is possible to find new life patterns.
Blessing of the Day: Meeting both old and new friends and my mother in church
6 pm this evening I ended a period of 24 hours of being unplugged, during the National Day Of Unplugging, a project that is an outgrowth of the Sabbath Manifesto, "an adaption of our ancestors’ ritual of carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and connect with loved ones".
Yesterday, I started listening to a book by the Swedish author Tomas Sjödin about rest (Swedish title: Det händer när du vilar). In the book he talks about the Sabbath and mentions a TED Talk by the journalist A.J. Jacobs who did an experiment where he spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the Bible, "The Year of Living Biblically". I just watched that talk now and I would recommend you to also watch it, whether you're a Christian, Jew, Agnostic, Atheist or something else! It's both funny and thought provoking. Jacobs says that this was the most profound and life-changing experiment he has done. He ends the talk with some of the take-aways, the bigger lessons he learned from that year. One of them relates to the Sabbath, so I thought I'd quote it here (from the TED Talk transcript):
Third, that thou shall have reverence. This one was unexpected because I started the year as an agnostic, and by the end of the year, I became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic, which I love. And I'm trying to start it as a movement. So, if anyone wants to join, the basic idea is, whether or not there is a God, there's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness, and that our rituals can be sacred. The Sabbath can be sacred. This was one of the great things about my year, doing the Sabbath, because I am a workaholic, so having this one day where you cannot work, it really, that changed my life. So, this idea of sacredness, whether or not there is a God.
What if it is as simple as that to change you're life? Having this one day where you cannot work.
Blessing of the Day: Spending the day unplugged together with my dad.
The sun was shining and I even got to join him for a visit to our lovely summer cabin!
Today I will write a very short blog post as the sun is setting as I am writing this post here in Sweden and it is time for me to Unplug for (at least) 24 hours for the National Day Of Unplugging. It is running from sundown to sundown and starts on the first Friday in March. It's the third year in a row now I am doing this, and this year I actually also gave a New Year's resolution to unplug more often so it's definitely time for me to work on that habit...
I will Unplug to spend time with my dad! <3