Chris Hartgerink

Startup Therapy series     As write more on this blog, I have come to the realization I thoroughly enjoy coming up with themes to coalesce my writing around. Themes create a certain mass for my activities, reflections, and thoughts to gather around. As a result, things collect in a way they would not without the theme being present. Themes help me write.

New series: "Startup Therapy"

For me, the end of the year is a time for reflecting on the past; summer is a time for reflecting on the future. This summer, I have been thinking about how I spend my labor energy in a rapidly changing world. What is meaningful and a good utilization of my skillset?

Applying as a parliamentary candidate

Leaving Twitter     Today marks the thirty day period of my Twitter deactivation, which means my account is now slated for deletion. Taking this step is reminiscent of when I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago. It again feels like a bigger thing than it practically is - I haven’t missed my account over the past thirty days, at all. Maybe some of you are thinking about keeping or deleting your Twitter account.

Finally leaving Twitter

Over the past decade, the increased attention for questionable research practices (QRPs) and their origins led to the (Dutch) narrative on Recognition &amp; Rewards (R&amp;R). Very bluntly put: Incentives pressure researchers to do things that don't benefit research, so we need to change the academic incentive system.

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It is a good thing the incentive system is changing.

Undoing questionable academic practices

I am a member of the Society for Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) – have been since 2017. I joined their yearly conferences every other year starting in 2017, but I will not be joining the 2025 conference in Budapest, Hungary. For me, the big selling point of SIPS are the people – the location choice for 2025 (unintentionally) signals that some people are less important.

Why I'm not going to SIPS 2025

If you are not familiar with why calling your organization a family is problematic, here is a very brief recap. While plenty of people have fantastic family environments, family is not a positive experience for everyone.

"Community" is the new "family"

This week I am a bit at a loss what to write about - I had drafts on the weaponization of meta-research, how to write an R package in 2022 (but the year's almost out), the consequences of owning your digital infrastructure. But none of it really fell into place enough yet.

Dipping my toes into 3D

💡  This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. Reading my emails from when I started my PhD, I see that I was full of a different kind of energy. Naive energy, sure, but also unencumbered by how things “were supposed to happen” or the ‘just’ in the “just the way things are.”  I recently discovered an email that I received only two months into my PhD.

When the implicit becomes explicit

At university, I was trained to have ideas — to see gaps in between the individual pieces of knowledge, and to seize them as opportunities to move the needle forward. Ideas are a currency, yet executing on those ideas feels undervalued. I am grateful for the years I spent training that kind of creativity. It still brings me joy to have or learn about ideas that make me shift my perspective.

Ideas come cheap

💡  This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. I have been to a few dozen dissertation defenses over the past decade. As a result of attending PhD defenses on a fairly regular basis with the same folk, their procedures got discussed. A lot. This story is about a situation where a university's own arbitrary regulations are arbitrarily not applied.

Arbitrary application of arbitrary rules

💡  These are prepared remarks for the Choice Hackathon on March 18th, 2023. Find the recording on YouTube. When we think of gender gaps in academia or society more broadly, we may think of very specific issues. But gender gaps are mere symptoms, with a common cause: The patriarchy. This is a system where maleness ultimately dominates, at the cost of everyone.

Gender gaps as symptoms of patriarchy

Starting a small company means the buck stops with me on everything, every time. Since founding Liberate Science three years ago, that means I’ve had to pick up a lot of skills.

The joy of compounding skillsets

In July, I got notified one of my passwords was available in a dark web data dump, alongside my email. I was able to pinpoint the breached service because I use unique passwords for each account. That service is Pensoft.

Disclosing a Data Breach to Pensoft

In the run up to the European elections, I received a moderation report for a post that contained misleading polling information on the Mastodon server I am responsible for. As a result, AkademieNL now has a new server rule, as formulated above. This blog post dives a bit into the need for this rule and how I came to it.  The reported post contained misleading election information.

New AkademieNL rule: No disinformation

The most common definition of anti-semitism is the racist treatment of Jewish people.

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Even though when we talk about racism we often talk about white supremacist racism towards Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), racism can be directed to any group.

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But that also means that if you have been learning about racism since Black Lives Matter, we can use that knowledge to understand anti-semitism better.

Am I an anti-semite?

I want to recommit to writing, to recommit to actively and publicly think about what is happening. I want to recommit to the idea that thoughts are dynamic and never settled — that thinking in public helps move away from sharing only finalized arguments. Thoughts are produced and reproduced through the conversations we have, be it directly on the phone or indirectly through writing and reading.

The courage to discuss

The social media landscape is so different today from when I started participating around 2011. Things change, and that is okay — when the old dies, it becomes the compost for something new. For me, something new sprouted from Twitter's compost beyond just joining Mastodon: I am taking over as the admin for the Mastodon server akademienl.social.

AkademieNL's new admin

I read a lot of news, but I do not like being consumed by it. The balance between what's happening now (news), the short or long past (history), and potential futures (foresight or analysis) is a rough one to keep. This post is about making sure that sources are readily accessible where possible, straight from the news. Part of not becoming consumed by the news and its biases is doing source research and verifying information.

Open sourcing the news

In October, I shared I started to look for a regular job --- last week, I started as a senior software engineer for data.org until end of 2025. In this role, I will be contributing to digital public goods using data for social impact.

Starting at data.org

Inching towards the Dutch elections, increasing amounts of claims are being made about the (micro)targeting of different campaigns. Here are some: New Social Contract does not do any online ads. The Greens-Labour Party spent €323,000 - more than twice as much as the Democrats 66 (D66), who spent €153,000. The Think (Denk) Party is profiling for Turkish ethnicity. The senior 50PLUS party microtargeted on people who listen to Angerfist.

Political microtargeting

I have been a bit stuck in my head over the past few months. The world's changing so rapidly, it is increasingly hard to come to grips with things big and small. This even though there is a desire to jump to quick conclusions (a typical sign of overconfidence!). As a result of being stuck in my head, I have been absent on here. I am getting back in a habit of writing, although this simple post took me almost a week to write.

Some professional updates

💡  This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. As a researcher you are bound to uphold certain standards of conduct. When I defended my PhD, I was reminded of that rather explicitly with the following statement before being awarded my degree:  This statement was only introduced in the past decade, but I think a reminder like this is a simple and effective idea.

Committing to an Ethics Code

💡  This is an idea I've toyed around with for a few years, but never wrote down. I would love to hear your feedback! Competitive research processes lead to many perverse incentives - incentives that put the researcher and the research process at odds. For example, because of selective publication pressures researchers primarily end up publishing those research processes that end up in significant or novel results.

The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating

In my decade working on the openness of research I touched upon content accessibility only a few times, in part because it was and is a less discussed topic in my circles. But that does not make it less important.

Open Inaccessibility

Recently, I left the Upstream editorial team as a result of changing priorities.  I figured it would be a good idea to reflect before I forget.

Upstream reflections

In my own attempt to be a productive part of the change towards European digital autonomy, I upskilled myself to manage and deploy services on European cloud infrastructure. As far as European cloud infrastructure goes, I did some research and there are several major players – OVHCloud, StackIt, and Open Telekom Cloud.

Upskilling for a European cloud

💡  These are my remarks for the junior researcher panel at the APE2023 conference. This blog is slightly edited for clarity and expands the quote selection from Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz died a decade ago today - to commemorate him I’ll start by reading selected quotes from the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto here today. I would argue to reframe publishing as a question of power — as Aaron talked about it: Information is power.

Remarks for the Berlin Publishing Conference 2023

💡  This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. In 2017, I received a Mozilla Open Science Fellowship, which ended up becoming a career defining opportunity. I was able to expand my horizons beyond the academic statistics work I was doing, and started germinating ideas that, after cultivation, resulted in ResearchEquals. This fellowship, however, almost did not happen.

The story behind the Mozilla Fellowship

Over time, I gathered a bunch of helpful mental models to manage my work and motivate myself. These mental models can be applied in professional work, but also in private life at times. I often forget these are things I learned at some point, so I am writing them up for my Startup Therapy series as they come to me. Just in case they may prove helpful for someone at some point 😊  Today's mental model: Input tasks and output tasks.

Input and output tasks

In February 2024, I announced I took over as the administrator of the Mastodon server AkademieNL.social. It has been a pretty smooth ride since – there are a few signups, but not too many. Spam posts are what gets reported most often. It does not take up too much of my time – an hour every week or so. The monthly active users on the server sits around ~120 people. As an admin, the main and most regular thing I notice are the costs.

AkademieNL update

I used to think I was a man’s man and heterosexual — but why? Where I grew up there was little public exposure beyond the traditional gender roles and heteronormative behaviors.

My ongoing gender journey

Yesterday was the first of four listening sessions by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. These are specifically geared towards Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), which I guess I technically would still be had I stayed in academia. I had the opportunity to briefly participate and share some prepared remarks. Sharing those here to document my own thoughts and make them more accessible.

Remarks on barriers to Open Science for ECRs

I admittedly love it when pet peeves show themselves. That's when I know something is tickling my brain repeatedly and it wants to come out.

(Not-)for-profit in research

I used to introduce myself as a recovering academic in the years 2018-2022. Only now in 2023, am I comfortable saying I am a recovered academic. Having recovered, I am in a comfortable place to start sharing some personal stories that have not seen the light of day before in written form.

Chris Hartgerink

"Stories from my PhD" series

Remarks for the Berlin Publishing Conference 2023

Open Inaccessibility

Dipping my toes into 3D