Happy birthday, CommunitySense!

10 years ago to this day, I took the plunge. On April 1, 2007, I walked into the Tilburg Chamber of Commerce, and registered my very own company, CommunitySense. From the application form: “CommunitySense is a research consultancy company in the field of community informatics. It offers a range of consultancy services for developing innovative collaborative systems and services for online communities.” An ambitious mission, and I was only at the very start of finding out what that meant in – literally – practice.

It was both exciting and scary to take off as an independent consultant. I had loved my academic environment. I still felt very much an academic at heart, cherishing the wonderful network of people and ideas I had worked with for over 12 years while at Tilburg University, the Free University of Brussels and going for research visits and attending conferences all over the world. Still, for various reasons I needed to break free from the academic golden cage. Work pressure was one thing, but another very important reason was that I wanted to have more of a direct impact on the world.

Community Informatics really is about how to empower communities with ICTs. I feel very strongly about helping communities unleash that power for the common good. Although academic research is an important part of that quest, it is not enough. Our field is also very much about the practice of making those technologies really work in the daily lives of people working together in communities of all kinds.

Through my research consultancy, I hope to act as a bridge between science and society, using my academic research to distill lessons learnt from projects, while bringing real world cases back into the scientific literature. Over the past 10 years, I really found my niche, both developing a range of consultancy services and soldiering on with my publications. I am particularly excited about my newly discovered passion of community mapping, which is becoming a cornerstone of my work.

It’s not always been easy, transforming myself from being (only) an “abstract academic” to becoming a more “concrete consultant”. Still, the panoramas along my personal development path travelled have often been breathtaking. I haven’t regretted my move one single day. I feel blessed that I can work on the cutting edge of science and practice, every day bringing new challenges and ideas. I am particularly grateful that I am surrounded by a global and ever growing network of dear friends, colleagues, and clients (many of whom have moved to the “friend” category over time :-)). Thank you all so much for sharing and adding to my experiences along the way!

The first 10 years have been exciting and full of surprises. Who knows where I will be 10 years from now. One thing is for sure, my journey with CommunitySense has only just begun…