Jan Ainali

I just published the last quarter follow up of the year, and together with the Q1, Q2 and Q3 it’s time to reflect on the entire year as a whole. When the year started I was really inspired by the idea of writing down my goals like this and perhaps even got a bit carried away in my planning. However, as the year passed it got more and more obvious to me that this felt like a great way to organize work, but not a pleasant way to feel inspired on my spare time.

This should have been obvious to me since I already know myself to be really lust driven in my creative projects. Usually it is more about seizing the opportunity and ride along with the the flow than forcing myself along a path. So this gives my some ideas for how to go about 2026. But before we go there, let’s try to make an overview.

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Sustainability
Wikimedians for sustainable development	🟢	🔴	🔴	🟡
Office of Carbon Omission	🟡	🔴	🟡	🔴
Openness advocacy
Open By Default	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢
Govdirectory	🟢	🟡	🔴	🔴
Wikipediapodden	🟢	🟢	🟡	🟡
Book project	🟡	🟡	🟡	🔴
Learning
German	🔴	🟢	🔴	🟡
Climate change	🟢	🔴	–	–
AI	–	🔴	–	🟢
Health
Running and hiking	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢
Eating	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢

The table shows it more clearly that the first half of the year went slightly better, and that some goals were better suited for me than others. For more details, see each quarterly review, linked above. My two main takeaways are these:

1. I need fewer goals to make it easier for myself, and
2. I need less detailed goals to make it possible to find inspiration within a theme rather than having a huge to-do list hanging over me.

When it comes to what I had in my goals, I am rather pleased with my themes even though I had such variation in my successes. All of the things above are things that I somehow feel are important, even though I must say that the more I learned about AI this year, and especially how it is being deployed, the more I felt it important to learn about from a defensive/advocacy perspective rather than using it as a tool.

So even if I care deeply about them, the sheer number made it more of a burden than something joyful to strive for. I don’t think I will give up on anything of the themes as such, but I will more carefully think about how I approach them. These are my overarching thoughts going into 2026, which is coming up next.

Time to review my progress again, and this has been about as a productive quarter as Q3 (which is much less than Q1 and Q2). This quarter was less travel but higher intensity in work which gave kept spare time fairly low. There were also some fun events happening, like the mini hackathon and WikiConNL but that also didn’t make progress on my goals.

The purpose of this review is to give more room for reflections on the themes I chose for 2025. For ease of reference, I have added this quarter’s goal for each theme. I will make an additional blog post for the entire year and reflect on how the system has worked as a whole there. (EDIT: it’s here.)

Sustainability

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development 🟡

• Goal: Follow up on all other annual goals and nudge them towards completion.

I did do some nudging on the goals, and even some sprinting on the goals I had advocated for, but there was few people joining in and thus they are mostly far from completion. The collaboration with Klimatkollen on getting emissions data onto Wikidata and Wikipedia made the news, although I am only mentioned in the press release.

Office of Carbon Omission 🔴

• Goal: Publish an op-ed on the theme of OCO.

With the misses from last month, not having a clear introduction video nor a social media account, I wasn’t inspired to work on this.

Openness advocacy

Open By Default 🟢

• Goal: Learn about and deploy (locally) an open source AI model.

I did quite some research to find something open source that I could run locally. It wasn’t easy, and I am not 100 % sure I succeeded either. In the end, I installed Ollama as a framework, and so far so good. The more challenging part was to find a model that both complies with the OSI AI definition and could be run on Ollama. From what I can figure out, SmolLM v3 does comply even though the training data seems a bit obscure to me. I would have loved to find a model using the CommonCrawl data sets but I couldn’t find a framework / model combination that I could run.

Govdirectory 🔴

• Goal: Refine funding ask.

While I managed to give Govdirectory a lot of time and attention this quarter, I didn’t manage to direct it to the funding ask. However, on the good side, the community is slowly growing and the community call has almost often had guests popping in, some are even new regulars. On Wikidata there has also been increased activity, with some real spikes on certain focus weeks. To top it all out, Govdirectory was presented with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit by FSF.

Wikipediapodden 🟡

• Goal: 14 episodes published.

This got fairly close with 11 episodes published, considering we had to take a pause while clearing up the trademark with Wikimedia Foundation.

Book project 🔴

• Goal: Book proposal done.

Unfortunately I couldn’t focus anything at all on the book this quarter. I will be giving some talks somewhat related to the general topic next year which at least will keep my research flowing.

Learning

German 🟡

• Goal: Reach B1 level in the CERF scale.

I kept using the Nachrichtenleicht which I find really useful. I feel like can follow along really well and would like to find more similar resources. However, I still think I am weak in my grammar and haven’t looked for an actual test yet.

Climate change

• Goal: –

While I didn’t have any goals, I kept the article 2025 in climate change on Swedish Wikipedia mostly in sync with the English version, which at least kept me up-to-date on current events and science.

Artificial intelligence 🟢

• Goal: Learn about and deploy (locally) an open source AI model.

See Open By Default above.

Health

Running and hiking 🟢

• Goal: 912.5 km (averaging 5 km/day)

This quarter went well overall, but in December I did feel some pain in my left leg. A quick pause and keeping it light I think saved me from getting any serious injury. Overall this has been astonishing, and it is the longest distance I have logged running in a year (but I suspect I have some years in my youth when I didn’t keep track that were surpassing this). (Total: 1,365 km (October: 131 km, November: 147 km, December: 134 km))

Eating 🟢

• Goal: Average 19 in the Daily Dozen app

As I was mostly home this quarter , this was mostly easy and I feel that this is getting into good habits, and the app still helps me stay motivated and reminded. (October: 22.10, November: 22.37, December: 21.71)

Time to review my progress again, and this has been a less productive quarter than Q1 and Q2. While I have been able to update my goals continuously, it hasn’t been weekly, but on the other hand, I am very happy to have migrated them from GitHub to Codeberg! This quarter has also had some travel, and more work than anticipated which reflects in my progress. Something I should have done earlier was to create a paper version to always have just a glance away. I think I have that to thank for the progress I have been making.

The purpose of this review is to give more room for reflections on the themes I chose for 2025. For ease of reference, I have added this quarter’s goal for each theme.

Sustainability

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development 🔴

• Goal: Make podcast about charts and SVG efforts

No podcast has been made yet. I have tried to get in contact with the developers, but no reply so far. On the other hand, my suggestion for a lightning talk about charts at WikiCon NL has been accepted.

Office of Carbon Omission 🟡

• Goal: Marketing: set up social media account(s), podcast, video introduction.

I have only started with a script for the video, but I haven’t figured out how to visualize it yet. For social media, I will setup a new Mastodon instance, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. When I wrote the goals, I had the idea of talking about this on somebody else’s podcast, but I don’t know which yet. Ideas are welcome.

Openness advocacy

Open By Default 🟢

• Goal: Add more details on offered services on the website.

I added one, but perhaps the one that seems most relevant for me: making Standard for Public Code assessments. I plan to add another one for Governance Game sessions too.

Govdirectory 🔴

• Goal: Research what framework we could use for the questions.

No deeper research has been done. The thesis is that another Wikibase would be fine, but more requirements and perhaps some tests needs to be done to see if that holds up.

Wikipediapodden 🟡

• Goal: 13 episodes published.

I must have planned some extra episodes somehow because while we did miss one regular episode, we still only got to 8. This was a mistake in my planning.

Book project 🟡

• Goal: Write one chapter.

While I have most of a chapter done, i think it is too short and need more sources, so I won’t give myself a full pass on it.

Learning

German 🔴

• Goal: Finish the grammar book.

I am far from having finished the grammar book Modern tysk grammatik. On the upside, I have found Nachrichtenleicht which is easy news in German that I am enjoying a lot. Additionally, Easy German, a Youtube channel I have sporadically enjoyed have launched a new platform where one easier can find material on right level, so I am planning a subscription there. I stopped using Duolingo completely after reaching a 1,500 day streak in August.

Climate change

• Goal: –

Artificial intelligence

• Goal: –

Health

Running and hiking 🟢

• Goal: 682.5 km (averaging 5 km/day)

Even though I had a cold and have been traveling some, I am way ahead. In fact, I have already reached the yearly goal, so if I manage to stay healthy, this can be a record year all-time. (Total: 953 km, (July: 118 km, August: 67 km, September: 99))

Eating 🟢

• Goal: Average 19 in the Daily Dozen app

Only in August when I was traveling most, and that is when I usually find it hardest to stay on top of what I eat, I dipped below 19, and otherwise I managed to stay well above it. (July: 21.52, August: 18.55, September: 21.5)

Like the last quarter, I have been updating how it is going with the goals continuously on GitHub. It has not been every week this quarter as the progress have been in a slower pace, but the updates have not been lagging much. Due to some travel with work, it has also been a bit unfocused, but I have made efforts to revisit my goals and keep them in mind.

This review is meant to give more room for reflections on the themes I chose for 2025. For ease of reference, I have added this quarter’s goal for each theme.

Sustainability

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development 🔴

• Goal: Establish decision-making process.

Unfortunately we didn’t manage to meet that much this quarter, and it was hard to build momentum and enthusiasm.

Office of Carbon Omission 🔴

• Goal: Add more ideas to the library (at least burning, fireworks and public transport).

Even though I clarified in the categories a bit, adding marketing as a topic, I didn’t add any new ideas.

Openness advocacy

Open By Default 🟢

• Goal: Establish Fediverse presence.

Not only did I manage to do this, I did it by catching up on last quarter’s goal “Set up a VPS for using open source tools.” by getting a server with Yunohost that I installed Mastodon on. The server is on: social.openbydefau.lt.

Govdirectory 🟡

• Goal: Inventorize question types and classify them.

It’s not a great classification system yet, but I have started to gather a list of kinds of questions/contacts that someone may need guidance in.

Wikipediapodden 🟢

• Goal: 🟢 11 episodes published. 🟡 Get access to and start using an automated editing tool.

Due to some travel, we missed one regular episode but made up for it by a special episode in English and exactly 11 episodes were published.

I did try out Descript, but that was not good enough for episodes in Swedish, and even in the English episode, it didn’t help at all. The technology does not seem to be mature enough for my standards.

Book project 🟡

• Goal: Full outline and key section done.

I think I have the outline done, but not the entire key section yet.

Learning

German 🟢

• Goal: Get a good grammar book.

After a lot of looking I got myself the grammar book Modern tysk grammatik from Liber.

Climate change 🔴

• Goal: Pass the course Design of Circular AI-Based Services.

Here I failed by missing the registration date for the course and couldn’t take it.

Artificial intelligence 🟡

• Goal: 🔴 Pass the course Design of Circular AI-Based Services. 🟡 Pass the course Elements of AI.

Since I missed the registration of the first course, I signed up to another course and have started it. It continues the entire summer.

Health

Running and hiking 🟢

• Goal: 452.5 km (averaging 5 km/day)

Running is still going really well, and I haven’t been sick or had any injuries so far. (Total: 669 km, April: 109 km, May: 110 km, June: 115 km.)

Eating 🟢

• Goal: Average 19 in the Daily Dozen app

Despite some travels, I managed to keep the average high. (April: 19.93, May: 19.87, June: 21.43.)