My Network

This page provides a list of groups and people I have professionally worked close with in the past, for at least several weeks, months or years. This list doesn't gives a picture of my recent professional network. It is more of an experiment to get historical and active collaborations in one perspective. In this respect this page is very different from all the networking sides, you can always connect to me on facebook or linkedin or any other networking site.

How to understand this page

Groups or projects can stop, but my contacts fade. I may still have regular contact with them and there may be future opportunities to collaborate. Faded simply means that we currently aren't working together. Most people in this list will be friends for ever.

The order may need some explanation. The list is first ordered "stopped/faded" in descending order to give an indication of my current activities first. The second order is "contact" in in ascending order to add a weight to contact I've bee involved with the longest. This table should therefore give a historical perspective onto my contacts.

* Groups

ECCO: Evolution, Complexity & Cognition Group
ECCO is an interdisciplinary research group on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition. It's members@Brussels are in a constant flux. The group we had in 2004-2005 was very different from the group in 2007-2008. Several of the people I've been working with on a personal base.
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Drupal
I've been developing Drupal modules in 2006 for the KNOSOS project, but not in collaboration with the Drupal community. The most collaboration however is related to DrupalCon. On the 16th November 2005 our KNOSOS team had a very nice meeting with Dries Buytaert. This would be the start of our focus on Drupal.

At FOSDEM 2006 I learned more Drupal people like Boris Mann, Ivan Labra and Steven Wittens, people I had a splendid talk with and would meet again. It was at BarCamp that Dries Buytaert, Peter Forret, Bart Van Herreweghe and I had the idea to organize a conference. It turned out to be a interesting concept of three ad hoc conferences: GovCamp-DrupalCon-BarCamp. With Bart Van Herreweghe and Roel De Meester the first Belgian Drupal events where created.

In 2007 and 2008 I created a course on web development where drupal stands central. Also in my research I'm integrating Drupal. At FOSDEM 2008 I first explained about the course and its purpose. With Dries state-of-the-art focus on the future of Drupal I'm planning to push the relation with Drupal, Research and academic teaching. It was thanks to Kristof Van Tomme that I'm trying to get this more involved in the community again.
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MOSI: Mathematics, Operational research, Statistics and Information systems
MOSI is a department with many people. So let me look at my direct environment in MOSI. I'm the assistant for Databases for professor Eddy Vandijck. I'm the assistant for programming for professors Frank Plastria and I'm the assistant for Web Service Development for Business for professor Eddy Torfs. It is also this three professors who are involved with my topic of research. I've got a lot of colleagues, for my research I'm mostly talking to Eiblin, Steven, Céline and Lieselot. Only Eiblin and Steven are in the same room as me, which we share with four more people more or less. There are two other desk close, that adds another eighth assistants, most of them work for professor Marc Despontin. There are also the three technical staff-members and the secretary. This is of-course the people of MOSI I see most, to get a full view check the mosi site.
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KNOSOS Project: Knowledge Sharing over Social Software
KNOSSOS was a collaboration between MOSI and MEMORI. In December 2004, Tanguy Coenen introduced me to Dirk Kenis. In 2005 I got to know Dirk Kenis better when he and Tanguy Coenen were writing the KNOSOS project. The KNOSSOS team are: Dirk Kenis (head), Tanguy Coenen, Wouter Van den Bossche, Veerle Van der Sluys and me. Dirk's motto "Working on exalting thinks with people I like", brought a positive vibe to the team. When I was installed as a phd student and assistant at MOSI I lost contact with Veerle Van der Sluys and Dirk. I still have latent contact with Dirk at MOSI.
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CRAB Project: Cartography of Research Actors in Brussles
CRAB was a collaboration between the two Free Universities of Brussels. It was based in the beautiful Flagey building. I was however the only researcher in the group and had little professional interaction with the rest of the group. It was the environment where I start making my first professional contact, like Maya Van leemput, Tanguy Coenen and the ECCO group.

* People

Francis Heylighen
Francis Heylighen is professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is the co-director of CLEA and the editor of Principia Cybernetica Project. In 2002 I went to most of the CLEA seminaries, which I realy enjoyed. After the EELC meeting in May 2004 we had some nice discussions and he invited me to become member of ECCO. From that day on Francis would become my advisor for my PhD thesis. We have frequent talks on my research.
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Tanguy Coenen
In December 2004 I first encountered Tanguy when he created with Pascal Francq a workshop on Knowledge Management and IT. Since the end of 2005, we worked on the KNOSOS project. Still today I'm intensive collaborating with Tanguy on a day to day basis. In October 2006, I 'replaced' Tanguy as assistant at MOSI. We share interests in creativity, social software, agents technology and innovation.
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Eddy Vandijck
The first time I met professor Eddy Vandijck was at a party given by Tanguy and Jettje. This was the summer before I became assistant and Eddy became my official PhD supervisor. I also gave exercises on databases for the professor.
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Eddy Torfs
Professor Eddy Vandijck is also my advisor for my Phd, even now when he is retired. The first time I met him was during my solicitation for assistant position. I'm much in depth to Eddy for making the concept of Enterprising Innovation Planning concrete. Especially during 2008-2009 he took a lot of time to advise me on the matter.
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Frank Plastria
As assistant I was giving the courses on programming for professor Frank Plastria. It is Frank who gave me the space for experimenting with the programming course to make it fit more with the requirements. The course became later known as Web Service Development for Business. I'm in gratitude to Frank for the trust and the reflection that made this course real.
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Wim Vanhaverbeke
I contacted professor Win Vanhaverbeke via the internet while searching for open innovation. He was so kind to let me come and discuss my research. He has been an important adviser related to innovation, f.e. he gave me the refence of disruptive innovation. I have visited Wim a few times and he was both presenting on ISPIM and EIASM.
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Bruce Vojak
I've met Bruce Vojak during the wine tasting event of ISPIM 2009. He was on the parallel conference of R&D management. It was a surprise to both of use that we where so much on the same philosophy of innovation. After the conference we have been mailing and phoning each other frequently to discuss the research, references and cases. It is all hapening now, so there is not much more to tell yet.
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Jeff Butler
Jeff astonished me during the EIASM summer school of 2009. He gave a talk about the R&D journal, but afterwards he came to talk to me about Drupal. Apparently he found out about my site. Ever since I have frequently mailed and met Jeff. Particularly the idea to build a pre-publishing site kept us going on, but we had good discussion about evolutionary methods and how to apply it for management. With the R&D conference 2010 I even dined with his family and consider Jeff as both colleague and friend by now. I’m pretty sure we will be collaborating on exiting research projects in the very near future too.
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Dirk Kennis
I've learned to know Dirk Kennis via Tanguy. He was the project leader of KNOSOS. Dirk was a great project leader. Once I took the assiting position of course there was little time to keep track of each other, just as with the other KNOSOS team members.
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Wouter Van den Bosch
Wouter became part of the KNOSOS team in March 2006 and on going. Wouter is a good programmer and is interested in social studies. He is a transhumanist and social (!) web-geek.
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Walter De Brouwer
There are three periods I had contact with my cousin. The first time I was very young and he was professor in some high school in Antwerp. After his divorce we didn't hear anything of him until 1997. At that time he had a company called riverland (with CM-magazin). In 1998 I did a summer job at Starlab nv was starting up, in 1999 he gave me a summer job in Starlab. Still I wouldn't have a lot of contacts with him until the tragically accident in the summer of 2004. His son got serious injuries of a fall and they spend al lot of moths in the hospital. I would go visiting the hospital quit often. During the time Walter was writing his PhD, we start talking a lot about several topics. Walter finished his PhD in September 2005 and you could say this is the start of Walter becoming my mentor, giving me books to read an project to think of/ work on. After trying to collaborate on project it became clear our motivations are very different. With the Pajamanation project I had to big issues related to development, its sustainability and leverage to innovate (on development level). So our collaboration broke off.
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Maya Van Leemput
I encountered Maya after a crosstalk seminary in February 2005; she is working on project about future studies. We have always some plans to work together, but lack the time to actually start working on it. As our attention has been taken up by all kind of other projects it simply stayed with preparation.
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Beatrice de Gelder
I have been working with Beatrice on getting insides in Neurofeedback. I have met with Bea 26th of May but the first time I have seen heir was at Walter's PhD where she was part of the jury. We have been traveling to Tilburg University and some therapist using Neurofeedback, as we have both other projects our investigation was going slow. As such no real progress could be made, with other projects pushing for attention this one simply got
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Rosette Vandenbroucke
Rosette is well know for Grid-computing, but I worked together with Rosette for the BeSTin project where there was a small sub-project called CRAB. The first time I had a meeting with Rosette and the team on 20th October 2004 Now the whole DISC story and CRAB has been a bad example of project development, I belief without Rosette it would have been a fiasco. I respect Rosette and do value the trust she has given me, we actually where working on a CRAB2 project, but got cut up in our other projects, we lost contact in 2006.
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Marko Rodriguez
Marko Rodriguez comes from the university of California at Santa Cruz; He came to ECCO in October 2004. We directly found ourselves on the same track, he from a social software point of view I from awareness-IT. We came to interesting conclusions on how our two research interests could come together. We started a working papers, but then Marko took a position in Santa Fe and we lost contact on it.
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Walter Van de Velde
There is but little information about Walter online so let me give a small summary: Walter was founding professor of ARTI, together with Luc Steels. In 1998 he became head of research in Starlab. In the second half of 2001 and 2002 he gave a course AI.2, containing a summary and vision of the research he did in the last years. This is when I met walter. In the second year he became my advisor for my master thesis. Walter became head of research of DISC in 2003 we tried to get some funding or research position, but without success. In October 2004 he contacted me again to do the CRAB project at DISC, but on November 2004 he became responsible for the FET proactive initiative 'presence' and we lost contact.
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Erik Myin
Erik Myin is a philosopher I have encountered at the end of January 2004. As he showed interests in the vision of my work, we agreed in writing a paper for EELC (rejected). At that time Erik was also organizing ASSC8. He was my guidance to the consciousness field. After ASSC8 he became professor in phylosophy at the univesity of Antwerp, we lost contact.
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Sonja Smets
Sonja Smets was giving a seminar on "logic and computer science" in 2003. This gave me an opportunity to discuss my thesis work. These discussions have been a great contribution to the vision building of my master thesis.
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Jean-Paul van Bendegem
Jean Paul van Bendegem is head of CLWF. During my studies we had some nice discussions that also contributed to my master thesis. He has been part of my Master thesis jury as a consequence.