January is the perfect time to look back on everything we have experienced, discovered and achieved over the last 12 months and – especially after such a challenging year - to look forward to what the new year will bring.
How would you sum up 2020 in just three words? Here’s what our clients, partners and employees chose!
Douwe Lycklama
Senior Vice President
Suddenly we were given physical limits, but those limits gave us new frontiers and flexed our adaptation capabilities. We explored the possibilities of the new situation, both professionally, and socially and we adapted ourselves and instituted new habits.
Jaana Sinipuro
Project Director Sitra
The year was shocking, not just due to COVID-19 but also due to the continued mess of the US election. On the other hand, the leap we took with digitalisation was remarkable, allowing us to rethink how we travel and work. I feel proud and privileged to be a Finn and I wish to share little bit of ‘sisu’ with everyone suffering during the crisis. The crisis will pass, and I think that working from home, which allowed our colleagues to see our home environment including kids, dogs and cats, made us all a bit more human. I hope that we will not lose that in the future. You can maintain a great business relationship, but you can reveal a little bit of your personality as well. It makes our community feel closer together. We are a group of people whose values, experiences and thinking intertwine.
Mariane ter Veen
Director l Lead Data Sharing
Suddenly our world shrunk last year. We were forced to work from home, and the kitchen table became the collective centre of our lives. But this also created a shared global experience in which we could collaborate online without ever having met each other. In DataSovereigntyNow, we found a like-minded community of organisations that share our hunger for change in people’s digital lives and we are looking forward to achieving great things this year. Lastly, in 2020 the notion dawned upon me that ‘mildness’ should be practised as an art form.
Steve Goossens
Chief Digital & Data Officer P&V / Vivium
Change is the only constant and every sector will have to find ways of transitioning from the old to the new normal. Now more than ever before, we are involved in a humanitarian crisis in which technology is helping us to safeguard what makes us human (need for contact using new media, but also basic needs such as food/drink… delivered to our homes). And I think many people can identify with Zoom fatigue ?
Lex Franken
In a year in which traditional ways of working were suddenly no longer possible, digital transactions became more important than ever. Collaboration shifted to the digital domain, where the world discovered that working together online isn’t the contradiction it always seemed to be. Hopefully, in a post-coronavirus era, we will be able to further optimise by keeping the good aspects of our new ways of working and ditching the bad ones.
Bauke Rietveld
Senior Consultant
This past year has made me realise the value of home, and how much you can get done from within that confined space. The ability and receptiveness to working and socialising online have changed for the better and have allowed us all to make it though these trying times together. Everyone has a better appreciation for each other's individual situation and struggles and the way we have navigated those, both as a team and society, continue to give me hope. I believe this new perspective will continue to grow throughout the coming years and help us all.
Karl Illing
2020 was a year unlike any other before and brought developments we never thought possible, or could even imagine. The global pandemic most of all, but also, for example, the events around the American presidency. While unique, the events in 2020 will affect us, in all aspects of our lives, for a long time to come. Handling the pandemic has been challenging for many of us: adjusting to entirely new modes of working together, juggling private and professional challenges, at the very least. Also, accepting – and making one's own – some tough choices related to temporarily giving up some fundamental freedoms for the greater good. But 2020 also showed that we can adapt to new circumstances at great speed and come up with innovative solutions and still thrive and excel. There are way more inspirational examples of this than the fact that non-cash and contactless payments finally made their breakthrough in German retail – but for me that is nevertheless a big one…
Matthias de Bièvre
Founder of Visions
2020 has seen the more than a decade long persistence of the human-centric data sharing movement come to fruition. In Europe, the data strategy and the Data Governance Act set the tone for an ambitious and historic human-centric data infrastructure: we are proud to be part of the journey and to expand it across oceans. 2020 was the year where forces united to prepare for this ambition with cross-sector, cross-border, cross-continental collaborations to build the future of technology. DataSovereigntyNow & aNewGovernance are the symbol of such ground-breaking collaborations where people and organizations rise to the occasion to create a new paradigm. The pandemic tested our resolve and we passed the test, never failing to reach out to each other and thus collectively strengthening our progress. This laid the foundation and the inspiration for 2021 that will be the year of the concrete and fruitful creation of our vision: technology and data empowering each of us to realize our dreams.
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