Data Mesh Belgium

Join us for the next edition of the Data Mesh Belgium Meetup!

This time, we're welcoming the community to the ACA Group office in Hasselt for an evening of knowledge sharing, practical insights and networking with fellow data professionals.

Whether you're already implementing Data Mesh principles or you're exploring how data products, this meetup is the perfect opportunity to learn from real-world experiences and connect with others.

SCHEDULE

• 18h 00 - 18h 40: Food & Drinks
• 18h 40 - 18h 45: Welcome by Tom De Wolf
• 18h 45 - 19h 30: Beyond “Human in the Loop” by Corné Potgieter
• 19h 30 - 19h 45: Short break
• 19h 45 - 20h 30: From Federated Governance to Computational Governance by Gaëlle Seret & Axel Mercier
• 20h 30 - 21h 00: Networking

TALK ABSTRACTS
► Beyond “Human in the Loop”: Data Products and Data Contracts as AI Guardrails by Corné Potgieter
“Human in the loop” is often presented as the main guardrail for AI-powered data use cases. But as these systems scale, meaningful oversight becomes difficult and human review can quickly degrade into superficial approval.

Through practical examples and anecdotes involving data products and AI-driven decision-making, this talk explores why control cannot rely on a human simply approving the final output.
Instead, AI needs a strong data foundation: clearly bounded Data Products, explicit ownership, reliable context, and enforceable Data Contracts that define quality, meaning, constraints, and acceptable use.

AI can then structure the handoff to humans by highlighting uncertainty, explaining the relevant context, and clarifying the decision they actually own. Data Products and Data Contracts are therefore not only governance mechanisms; they are essential foundations for scalable, accountable AI.

► From Federated Governance to Computational Governance by Gaëlle Seret & Axel Mercier
Most organisations have embraced the idea of federated governance. They redesign their operating model, define domain ownership, create governance ceremonies and document policies. Yet governance often remains slow, siloed in practice and heavily reliant on manual processes.
It is because federation is an organisational principle but not an execution model.

Federated governance only delivers on its promise when governance becomes computational: when metadata collection becomes part of the team's daily operations, when policies and self-service guardrails are embedded into platform capabilities.
This shift is not only technical. It requires treating governance as a product rather than a control function. Governance must be designed for adoption, integrated into teams workflows and continuously improved based on user needs.

In this session, we'll show how product thinking, platform engineering and organisational design work together to transform governance from meetings, documentation and approvals into executable capabilities. Through concrete examples, we'll illustrate how computational governance makes federation operational, scalable and sustainable.

SPEAKER BIOS
► Corné Potgieter - Data Architect at Sparkle
I’m a data generalist and a bit of a purist at heart, but always guided by the principle that practicality is king. As a consultant and Data Architect, I specialize in template-driven data warehouse design and decentralized architectures such as Data Mesh, helping organizations strike the right balance between governance and agility.

Over the years, I’ve worked across the spectrum of data architecture, analytics, modeling, and BI engineering. My toolkit includes a wide range of modeling approaches, from Kimball to Data Vault, and I enjoy tailoring solutions to both organizational context and long-term sustainability.

► Gaëlle Seret - Author @ Clean Data Architecture
Gaëlle is a freelance consultant, author of Clean Data Architecture, and former Head of Data Product & Enabling at Decathlon. Among her latest customers : Leboncoin and Pernod Ricard. She is leading large-scale data and product transformations with a strong user-centric approach. Active in the French data community, she is passionate about product craftsmanship and strives to make data management accessible and meaningful.

► Axel Mercier - Head of Kering Data Platform & Services
Axel leads Kering’s Data, AI and BI Platform, spanning both operational and analytical use cases. Over the past decade he’s helped large organizations rethink who owns data and how it scales, championing Data as a Product, domain-driven ownership, and platform thinking. He’s built autonomous data domains and pushed modern product and engineering practices into teams that had never worked that way. His focus: making complex systems understandable enough that teams stop depending on a central data team to get things done.