Our wishes for 2026: more fairness less presents

The people of ICT Institute are grateful for all the many opportunities we had this year. We had the freedom to pursue our interest and were given opportunities to work for some of the best companies. We want to thank our clients for their trust by donating some of our profits to good causes.

Our donations this year

Our clients have made 2025 an excellent year and they deserve a gift. Many of our clients however cannot accept gifts or already get many standard gifts. Therefore we decided to try to pay our gratitude forward by donating to charities, hoping that it will ultimately everyone on earth including our clients.

We do this by donating one percent of our revenue to good causes. We base it on revenue since this is more easy to compute than percentages of profit. The money is donated to well known and recognized institutions who work aligns with our values. The following institutions have received donations this year:

• Doctors without Borders (Artsen zonder Grenzen / Médecins Sans Frontières). There are many people in the world who have no other access to medicine, for instance because they live in a war zone or a refugee camp. We hope Doctors withour Borders can reach and help them.
• Amnesty International. We care about research, and research florishes in free environments where people are not worried about arrests. We need journalists, opposition leaders, religious leaders to be free and able to speak their mind. Unfortunately this freedom is under threat in many parts of the world and we hope Amnesty International can help.
• The World Wildlife Fund (WNF) tries to protect nature worldwide and make sure the planet remains habitable for people and animals.
• Oxfam Novib (The Dutch arm of Oxfam International) tries to end poverty and related injustices such as gender inequality and climate injustice by working with local communities and organisations.
• The Guardian. Journalism and specifically investigative journalism is important for democracy and a fair society, but also for our work: we use news articles in our training and advice. We have chosen to donate to the Guardian to support their international investigative journalism and their international news reporting.
• Wikipedia. Even in the age of AI, Wikipedia is still one of be the best resources for basic knowledge and we often use it as a neutral source. Wikipedia does not have advertisements but works on a ‘pay as you can’ model and we decided to pay for our use and perhaps also yours.

We make similar donations every year. Our donations and social activities from last year are described in a Dutch article about our “maatschappelijk beleid“.

Other contributions

We also try to contribute to society by sharing knowledge freely. This year we had the following more than profit initiatives:

• We believe in open standards, so our GDPR and ISO 27001 templates are free. Anyone can freely use the templates under an open source license. This year we also provided Dutch healthcare specific templates under the Keurmerk 7510 initiative. We also have an open certification option called Security Verified
• We contribute to education through our work for the Hogeschool Utrecht, where we for instance published guidelines for explainable AI in the financial sector. We also published an article in our own journal on fairness definitions and have helped more that 20 students write their Bachelor thesis through the Vrije Universiteit Business Track.
• We organized an international summerschool on AI and Machine Learning at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences and contributed to the Master Human Centered AI.
• We often speak at events in The Netherlands, for instance on AI and AI Act, auditing, privacy and information security.
• We support Motopp (MOTivation and OPPortunity), an organisation that trains former refugees and helps them find IT jobs in The Netherlands. This year we helped Motopp obtain EXIN accreditation so that Motopp trainees can obtain the EXIN Cloud Foundation certification.

How to get involved

If you are reading this article you are already making us happy. Please keep reading our website, share the article and use anything you find useful. If you would like to be further involved, there are many options:

• We organize half-day and full day training sessions on GDPR and ISO 27001. See our training agenda for dates or contact us for an in-house training.
• We are looking for companies that have interesting research problems for computer science students. Please read about our business track and contact us so we can create a project plan.
• When you think we should do things differently or would like to suggest different causes for our donations, you could apply for a job. We are always hiring people, mostly in consultant roles who share our values and interests, such as IT, information security, privacy and AI. If you work here, you decide on team events, research direction and donations.

Whatever you choose to do in 2026, we hope you will enjoy doing it, are appreciated and keep on learning.

Img src: Tim Gouw via Unsplash. We would like to also thank everyone who has donated resources via creative commons or similar licenses.