Category: postcrossing

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postcrossing

meet me at starbucks

some years ago, starbucks was doing a campaign about people or groups that met in their shops regularly, all around the world. somehow, they found about postcrossing meetups sometimes taking place there, and invited us to shoot a mini-movie about it.

we were a bit skeptical (not to mention, camera-shy…), but in the end it was a cool experience — we assembled a group of nice postcrossers from prague and sat around, sipping coffee and talking postcards for the afternoon. like they say, good things happen when we’re together! :)

Categories
postcrossing

gdpr day!

funny enough, i know exactly where i was when i heard about the gdpr for the first time, because i took notes and even filmed one second of it. here’s a frame:

that’s helen dixon, the irish data protection commissioner, warning about the changes coming to europe… on november 8th, 2016 at the websummit.

Categories
just life postcrossing rants

the long run

some time ago, we were talking with a friend who works with kids at risk — many of whom the parents seem to have simply given up on as “too much trouble”… and it got me thinking about the long run.

whether you’re raising kids or doing something else, the long run is always where it hurts. the beginnings feast on our initial enthusiasm, but keeping it up over time requires work and putting the hours in. it’s made of tears and struggle and the sheer boringness of maintenance.

i can get really enthusiastic about new ideas, so inevitably, i end up struggling with the long run, as i believe most of us do. our blogs are filled with links to projects that have disappeared, stuff that stopped being updated, and i’m guilty enough of giving up on stuff too. interests and priorities change, the enthusiasm dries up… and after the initial burst of energy is exhausted, things naturally come to a stop.

and yet, sometimes, they don’t. sometimes, there’s someone who won’t quit, who will put in the effort, day in and day out, because they believe in something strongly enough to pace themselves.

when you think about it, behind every kid that turns out great, or behind every project that turns 10 (or 20!), there are always humans who were relentless and didn’t quit — and that’s remarkable and worth celebrating.

Categories
postcrossing rants

the gdpr

george dantzig’s story goes a bit like this: he got late for class in college one day, saw 2 math problems on the board, assumed they were homework and copied them down (not knowing they were famous unsolved statistical problems). so he got to work, figured out the math and delivered the homework sometime later. easy-peasy.

one of my university teachers used to tell this story and the lesson wasn’t so much that you can accomplish anything with some ingenuity, but more along the lines of “give a student an impossible task and a deadline, and he’ll come up with something — anything”. it was certainly true in my experience of university, where it feels like we were scrambling most of the time, trying to improvise a solution that would somehow answer a question… though not always THE question.

and sometimes it feels a bit like that with the GDPR too, as if everyone is just struggling to grasp the concepts and come up with a solution without much confidence of a good result. in theory, “don’t be a jerk with other people’s private data” should cover it… but the devil is always in the details, isn’t it?

as an european entrepreneur, these past few months have brought some frustration and simultaneously, an interesting learning curve. but as an internet user and EU citizen, i’m definitely looking forward to may 25th, and the rights and freedoms now enforceable. hurray for the GDPR!

Categories
postcards postcrossing rants

“all that red on the map, like a blood stain”

the morning after the US election, i heard someone utter that description of the results and it stuck. stunned and spinning and scrambling for explanations, the world puzzled at the websummit, the theme unavoidable on every panel.

in the weeks since, disbelief gave way to real fear. everything else has felt rather small and meaningless, in comparison to the big elephant in the room.

spinning

and then, slowly but surely, this cold helplessness in the pit of my stomach has transformed into a kind of determination. i’ve realised there is something i can do — which is, after all, exactly what we’ve been doing for the past 11 years through postcrossing: randomly connecting strangers.

if this project has taught me anything, it’s that people everywhere want the same things: to be happy and healthy, to keep their loved ones safe, to be heard and understood. when we randomly match two of these strangers across the world, we disregard their religion, skin colour, political stance or nationality… and yet, whoever they are, they share this brief moment together, teaching and learning and smiling for a few seconds. it’s beautiful.

it’s of little consolation, i’m sure, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s something. the more we know of these “strangers” out there, the more we understand them. and the more we understand, the less we fear.

and this — this i can do.