← str.is

// about

Raymond Kristiansen

Photo: Kristian Joraandstad

Raymond Kristiansen
Kongsberg, Norway

str.is is my personal website. It is a collection of tools and experiments. It is a workshop for building things that might be useful — at least to me, possibly to others. It is a place for me to express some of my more or less random things.

I'm a project manager at the Competence Centre of a large organization for engineers and technologists in Norway by profession, a tinkerer by disposition. I've spent 25+ years exploring the intersection of technology, community, and communication. These days I'm particularly interested in what happens when you give AI systems room to iterate and collaborate.

// timeline
1997 — Left Denmark at 19 to study philosophy in Bergen, Norway. It was Sartre and Wittgenstein that pulled me in
2002 — Brussels. Working President of MOSAIC, the student wing of the Coimbra Group of Universities. Full name: Meeting of Students Aiming at the Integration of the Coimbra Group :P Also changed online identity from "Ehich" to "DLTQ" — Don't Lose The Question
2005 — Pioneered videoblogging in Norwegian politics. BBC covered it
2005–09 — Co-organized VlogEurope, a yearly meetup of technologists and artists working within the videoblogging space. Amsterdam '05 / Milan '06 / Heidelberg '07 / Budapest '08 / Amsterdam '09
2006–09 — Copenhagen. Lived near Mjolnerparken, learned about urban segregation firsthand
2009–25 — Oslo. 16.5 years. Stovner/Vestli, then Briskeby. 12 years in IT. Community work. Raised a son (born 2010)
2018–20 — Appointed to national expert committee on urban living conditions and integration (NOU 2020: 16)
2025 — Shifted from DLTQ to str.is. Deleted Meta accounts. Spiraling away from big tech
2026 — Moved to Kongsberg on January 29th. New chapter. 10+ hours weekly on trains — a laboratory for building things. The era hasn't crystallized yet
// community work

I believe in showing up. In doing the unglamorous work that holds communities together.

  • Vestli School Board President (2018–19) — Primary school in Groruddalen, 500+ students. Organized VestliFest with 1,400 attendees
  • Government Committee Member (2018–20) — Appointed by Ministry of Education to write NOU report on integration and preventing parallel societies
  • Mortensrud Fundraiser (2020) — Raised 135,000 NOK + 50,000 in winter clothes for school children in one week. Front page of Dagsavisen
  • #OmdelingsDugnad (2020) — COVID-19 info campaign. 6,000 multilingual posters distributed across Oslo. 40 volunteers. 10 days
// media experiments

I've always been more interested in what a medium can do than in the attention it brings.

  • 2005 — Spearheaded videoblogging in Norwegian political campaigns. BBC story
  • 2011 — Used Google+ in new ways during July 22nd tragedy. PC Mag wrote about it — noting I wasn't interested in fame, just in "experimenting with the medium"
  • 2025–26 — Building AI tools and a consulting practice. swarm.str.is for multi-perspective analysis. sverm.eu for workshops. Running on Anthropic's Opus 4.5
// current work

Building Kristiansen Sverm ENK — an AI consulting practice focused on multi-perspective analysis. Teaching organizations how to use AI swarms for complex problems.

→ sverm.eu

// published writing

Op-eds and essays, mostly in Norwegian, mostly about urban life, segregation, and community:

// str.is & DLTQ

DLTQ — Don't Lose The Question — was my digital identity for 23 years (2002–2025). A reminder that questions matter more than answers.

str.is carries that forward. The .is TLD is Icelandic, privacy-focused, independent. But str_is is also a family of programming functions — str.isalpha(), str.isvalid() — that ask: what are you, really?

Same question, different syntax.

Goal for 2026: build 12 useful things here. Progress: swarm.str.is (AI analysis), /terminology/ (crystallizing language), more brewing.

// online ramblings

I started blogging on LiveJournal in 2000. In 2005, I moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog at dltq.org — which ran continuously until late 2025.

The Wayback Machine has 312 snapshots of dltq.org, captured between May 24, 2005 and December 10, 2025. Twenty years of digital ramblings, preserved.

// tech stack

str.is is hosted at PRO ISP in Bergen, Norway. Simple, static, fast.

Services that need more muscle — like swarm.str.is — run on a Hetzner CX23 Ubuntu server in Helsinki. 4GB RAM, nginx, PHP 8.3, SQLite. No frameworks, no bloat.

AI features use Anthropic's Claude API. I'm a fan of their Constitutional AI methodology.

raymond@str.is