This will be a personal post. At New Year’s Eve approach, I’m beginning to do the balance of this past year. I can but encourage you to do the same and if you don’t do it at another time, make good use of this traditional calendar date and think about it, as with the daily rhythm of our western culture we usually don’t have time to look at where we are going. It is good to have time to reflect on what we did, and also on what we couldn’t do or did wrong. Reflect on the whys, learn from your mistakes, cheer you up with the good steps, and assemble your courage to begin again next year, in just a few days : – ))
So for me, this holiday period is out of time, peaceful, fairy, and weather helps with that feeling: usually grey and misty, but even if not, surely as dark most of the time, as to make you loose the track of time.
I am happy for what I had accomplished this year. After a political drawback on a project, something from which to learn, I took on a new challenge. Also, I finally took action on some ideas, and as I had always enjoyed teaching, prepared as well a seminar on crowdsourcing. I am a little behind on some subjects, like the development of my prediction tool, but I did a presentation about Crowdsourcing to the ECCO group at the VUB University, another to ICTRA at the SNCB-Holding and also to professional women at PWI. Participants where interested in the subject, so I was invited to prepare a follow-up seminar about it. I also deepened a little my knowledge on Big Data (yes, I know ‘to deepen a little’ seems a contradiction in terms, but let me use it as it expresses my feeling about it, being the field so vast and raw).
But mainly, I am grateful for all the new people I met this year, very interesting persons, with whom to have great conversations and maybe, who knows, do great things together and help creating the best of our possible futures!
I still have to check on my mid- and long-term goals, adjust them if necessary (as you can see on my previous sentence, I’m not short on long-term goals : – ), and plan my next steps. But the year has not ended yet, and I still have some days before daily life takes it again…
So Happy New Year to everybody, do your own introspection, and let’s plan for a great 2012!
