【Member Profile 10】Community Development Jimmy

Hey everyone!

About me

My name is Jimmy van Duuren, blood type O, 27 years young, 1.96m (6'4) tall and weigh 98kg (216lb). I was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which probably raises the question if I smoke weed or not, to which the answer is no. I have never payed money for sexual intercourse either. My Spotify list consists of everything that's fast, loud and melodic, which most of the time means some type of metal. In my free time I like to go to the gym and spend time with my girlfriend. My go to party trick is doing backflips.

(Me in 2011)

I have a bachelor’s degree in ICT from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where I learned basic programming, design and working together with others to produce games and apps. Somewhere in my final year of that I also started the Japanstudies bachelor at Leiden University, which came down to sociology with Japan as its study subject and Japanese language classes. Here I further developed my academic skills. After completing the Japanstudies bachelor I did the East Asian Studies master at the same university. I have considered going for a doctorate, but decided pretty quickly I wanted to do something more practical.

The Japanstudies bachelor is normally a three year program, but I got a scholarship from the Japanese government to study a year in Japan. I went again the year after for another year. Together with another shorter study abroad to Japan this makes for 2 years and a few months lived in Japan before I started here at ALIS.

What I especially like about Japan is how here modernizing does not per se mean losing tradition, its nature and how people do not play their music on speakers in the train. I also for some reason like the sound of the cicadas in summer, but I just wish summer here wouldn't be as hot and humid.

Personality wise, I am that guy that goes up to the manager on his first day with ideas on how stuff could be done better. The type that cares too much about things he is not payed for to care about. Whereas in most cases this backfires, the ALIS team was happy with someone who constantly spammed them with ideas and thoughts about the project. This eventually led to me becoming one of the ALIS ambassadors first, and with me sitting here as part of the team at a desk in the middle of Tokyo right now. In addition, I am very curious by nature and on a scale from 1 to 10 I would probably be an 8.5 logical thinker, as opposed to an emotional one. Furthermore, I like to think that I am a driven, pro-active and social person.

ALIS and I

I had heard the name Bitcoin before, but my first real encounter with crypto and blockchain was when a friend, who had already been trading for a while, asked me about the potential of this Japanese project called ALIS. ALIS was going to build a platform where people would get payed for producing content. Although I was skeptical at first, I have been active in the community since.

For Japanese practice I decided I would start reading in Japanese what I had been reading in English up until that time. This is when I first noticed the huge difference in quality of online information in Japanese in comparison with English. The more I learned about ALIS, the more I became convinced about how it could solve this problem. My desire to contribute to this process and the trust the team is giving me, together with the opportunity to develop myself further is what made me choose to leave everything behind and move to Japan to work here.

My Role

As for what I will be doing here for ALIS, my main role will be standing in between the community and the team (the Japanese community as well as the English community). In more concrete terms this means that I will be the one responsible for making sure the team is up to date about what the community is saying, and that the community is up to date about what is happening in the office. For example, if someone in the team comes up with an idea for a new function, I will be the one who is most capable to say whether it is worth the time or how much priority it has in comparison to other stuff in the pipeline. In addition, since I am most of the time the first to notice when there is confusion about a certain statement or decision made by the team, I am the one who will suggest to write a new blog article or something to clear up the confusion.

I'll wrap it up by saying I am looking forward to proving myself as a worthy member of the ALIS team, to the rest of the team, but also to the community.

Jimmy van Duuren

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