Interesting Things

Every week I publish a weeknote that includes a short list of interesting things I have stumbled across. This page collects every one of those links in one place, grouped by month. 417 links extracted from 36 weeknotes.

Last updated 30 March 2026.

March 2026

• My Next Chart - Semantic Search for Data Visualization Inspiration
• parigini.streamlit.app
• LGND Discover | Localized Earth Insights Made Easy — Explore the world with satellite imagery, data integrations, and natural-language search. LGND Discover delivers fast, actionable insights—no coding required.
• Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?
• The Near Future of AI Agents - thejaymo.net — What the near future of agentic AI will look like, and why the governance layer is the next big product space.
• Building civic resilience in the age of AI
• Who Will Shape AI in the Public Interest — So good I had to fire up the Linkblog on this one
• How We Measure AI's Carbon Footprint — Every message you send has an environmental cost. For most people, that cost is completely invisible, and that's a problem we need to fix.
• Sovereignty for sale — Tech monopolies and the future of the nation state
• "Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.
• Very Good Components — Looking for inspiration? Browse our curated collection of HTML UI components ready to drop into your next project.
• 13 Principles for Good Technology – Axbom's Playing Cards — A set of criteria to help you reflect on costly requirements and beneficial values when adopting new technology. Inspired by a 1987 essay by Wendell Berry.
• Image Compare Web Component — A tiny, zero-dependency web component for comparing two images using a slider. Built with a focus on accessibility, performance, and progressive enhancement
• Britain and Ireland's Flora
• Elusive no more — A blog about someone seeing otters in Saltaire, lovely
• How to be a better collaborator - Will Callaghan
• Are Albums Obsolete in the Streaming Era? A Statistical Analysis — Do people still listen to albums? And why does this format still exist?
• The Essential Art of Civilization
• 25 medieval manuscripts you can look at online right now
• Funders and small charities, Episode II: Peak Philanthropy
• Strategy in governments — How to cope with turbulent times and avoid the tyrrany of an eternal present
• Your Theory of Change Isn’t a Theory - FabRiders
• The banality of surveillance — Do our dull lives become worth watching? Always read Ben for a mix of humour and insight.
• Cats in Japanese Folklore and Culture — From kawaii (cute) to kaibyo (supernatural)
• Stoat — Stoat is the chat app where you are the main character.
• Open Source in the age of AI — Early 2026 is a very weird time to be an open source maintainer. On the one hand, the burden of codebase maintenance has dropped dramatically. Small teams with long todo lists now have the ability to accomplish more than ever before. On the other hand, the dynamics of the software
• Computer Says Maybe
• "Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought. — I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
• Leadership health metrics — Team health metrics focus on team performance, but leadership’s impact on teams is often overlooked. What if a leadership team’s effectiveness was measured too?
• Poverty Data Gaps — This data explorer has been produced as part of the Royal Statistical Society and Centre for Public Data’s research into poverty data gaps in the UK, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Insight Infrastructure team.
• Trapped in MS Office — Seeking IT independence, Europe wants to escape Microsoft Office. The question is: where to?
• not-knowing - Vaughn Tan — The organisations that we depend on — our governments, central banks, health agencies, multilaterals, major corporations — keep failing precisely
• Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web — Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software.
• It’s a process; not a product – Terence Eden’s Blog
• Dougs weeknote including closing WAO — good composting
• Meet Thaura, your ethical AI companion

February 2026

• Cats in Japanese Folklore and Culture — From kawaii (cute) to kaibyo (supernatural)
• Computer Says Maybe When certainty gives way to judgement
• AI is Coming for Conservation Organizations – and Most Are Not Ready
• AI and everything else - our call to action a digitally confident Scottish voluntary sector - SCVO
• AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainer... — An AI agent is merging PRs into major OSS projects and cold-emailing maintainers to drum up more work - eek
• The future of data centers: how is the industry changing in the AI era? — '
• How I’m dealing with the pressure to adopt AI as a designer — mynameismartin
• Leadership health metrics — Team health metrics focus on team performance, but leadership’s impact on teams is often overlooked. What if a leadership team’s effectiveness was measured too?
• what-is-data-governance-report.pdf
• What is OAuth? — Wherein I [try to] answer a seemingly straightforward question: "WTF is OAuth, anyhow?"
• devlog: Small tools for small orgs
• Challenge Validation
• Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web — Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.
• It’s a process; not a product – Terence Eden’s Blog
• Who Decides the Question Decides the Future — a good read and one I'm obvisouly interested in.
• TBM 406: Seeing Everything, Understanding Nothing (The Context Trap)
• Searching for Birds — An interactive story about the birds that capture our curiosity, told through data, visuals and illustrations - this was bloody excellent!!
• Building Civic Strength for an AI Era
• AI for Future Cities: Nature — This issue of AI for Future Cities explores how AI can reshape how we design for and understand nature in our cities. The research draws on cutting-edge practice and emerging trends to imagine the future of our cities in world where AI has augmented our approach for designing for and with nature.
• Better to Spend out?
• Data infrastructure as economic power | by Gavin Starks | Feb, 2026 | Medium
• Collective Intelligence Design Playbook (beta) — Tools, tactics and methods to harness the power of people, data and technology to solve global challenges
• mist — Collaborative markdown editor
• Claude Code with Anthropic API compatibility · Ollama Blog — Ollama is now compatible with the Anthropic Messages API, making it possible to use tools like Claude Code with open models.
• The Field Guide to Design Futures
• GitHub - projectsbyif/gds-react: An implementation of the GOV.UK Design System in React — An implementation of the GOV.UK Design System in React - projectsbyif/gds-react
• Beyond the waterfall state: why missions need a different decision-making architecture — Why government keeps forcing uncertainty through systems designed for stability – and what an alternative might look like
• Emerging Futures: Vol 40 - On Minds and Mindsets — Questioning: Does a mindset lead to a host of thoughts and actions?
• Data unions: people-powered data control — Is 2026 the year that data collectives - unions, trusts, mutuals and clubs - tilt the balance of power in cyberspace away from mega-platforms and towards the citizen?
• Public GIS Data Directory | ezesri — Browse 3,000+ public ArcGIS Feature Services from government agencies. Find boundaries, demographics, health and crime data and more.
• How to activate citizen agency — if communities have half the answer, what is the other half?
• Walking Backwards into the Future — Deep Time and the Work of Imagining the Future
• This Infrastructure Would Save the Planet, But Cloud Giants Refuse to Build It
• John Fitzgerald — loved john talking about refusing to take the easy route and use a pdf for his digital call to action report and stuck it out to make it work. Not always easy.
• Adam Coulson — so much going on in this, but enjoyed the metadata chat (and the trail running photo obvs)
• QUILI.AI — human (A)I. This was very cool.
• AI Service – open source AI on demand via API, hosted in Europe
• Building a GPT-5 quality classifier at BERT cost: Our first live distilled classifier — very cool
• The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site - Mahad Kalam — (F*ck me - my note when saving this!)
• Quantifying the ROI of AI: Why You're Measuring the Wrong Things | Wallabi
• OpenCode | The open source AI coding agent
• Funding Type categories proposal - 360Giving
• Newsletter #103    | LinkedIn — Nice little mention for Data For Action in this (you'll miss us know we're gone)
• Social Tech Ventures launches the UK’s first impact-focused venture fund built on a revenue-first model
• The Illusion of Scarcity, the Power of Community, and the Future of Open Infrastructure
• The Field Guide to Design Futures
• Beyond the waterfall state: why missions need a different decision-making architecture
• New Field Guide: ‘The Tech We Want | Who Decides? A Quick Guide to Governance’ - Open Knowledge Blog
• Data unions: people-powered data control
• Where the old maps and mandates fail: civic work in the spaces between
• PASS: Installing a new secure front door with the ONS Secure Research Service
• Civic Rewilding: Applying the lessons from Big Local — Kinship Works
• Walking Backwards into the Future
• Digital Waste Spotting Shows Why More Computing Never Solves the Problem — so very good and so very true, articulated in a lovely way.
• Extending Proton Calendar beyond its limits — Nice build from Doug as make's it a bit nicer to move off google to proton (solve your own problems)
• Digital Welfare State edition 007 — ABD Consultancy — The seventh edition of the Digital Welfare State newsletter

January 2026

• Maybe, finally—the end of SQL — Vibe and verify.
• ClimatePolicyRadar/all-document-text-data · Datasets at Hugging Face — We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
• The Done List — AI agents are revolutionizing productivity by transforming traditional to-do lists into 'done lists' of completed work awaiting approval. Learn how the disappearing middle of work changes everything about planning & productivity.
• Why Decentralised Place-Based Approaches Can Fail — Genuine place based decentralised approaches are not merely structural changes; they are assaults on the fundamental logic of the traditional organisation which is designed to minimise variance and…
• Welcome to Rise Against Big Tech — Our campaign is geared towards individuals and organizations that are ready to move to hosting providers more aligned to the values of collaboration, transparency, equity, community control and democracy.
• What is a data democracy, and how can your company build one? | MIT Sloan — Leaders who actively design for the widespread use of data assets generate three times the revenue from data monetization compared with their peers.
• The Watershed Pollution Map - Watershed Investigations — Wondering what's in your water? Now you can find out. The Watershed Pollution Map reveals a huge range of potential pollution sources that can harm rivers, lakes, groundwater, coasts and more. Click to find out what's happening in your back yard.
• Why Cowork can’t work - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack —  - The future isn’t collaborative.
• Is revitalising social clubs in coastal communities part of the answer to “deprivation bingo”? —  
• How to spot the potential for systems change?
• Why do we not do what we say we are going to do?
• Rewilding Software Engineering Chapter 6: Myths we tell ourselves
• everything is a ralph loop
• The Done List —  - AI agents are revolutionizing productivity by transforming traditional to-do lists into 'done lists' of completed work awaiting approval. Learn how the disappearing middle of work changes everything about planning & productivity.
• AGENTS.md —  - AGENTS.md is a simple, open format for guiding coding agents. Think of it as a README for agents.
• Running Gas Town on Easy Mode —  - Probably like a few others I've been looking at Steve Yegge's Gas Town with some trepidation.
• ProMoScribe - AI Audio Transcription Tool - ProMo Cymru —  - A simple, free tool for third sector organisations to transcribe audio files into text. Use it, copy it, adapt it!
• What is a data democracy, and how can your company build one? | MIT Sloan —  - Leaders who actively design for the widespread use of data assets generate three times the revenue from data monetization compared with their peers.
• Third Sector Trends in England and Wales 2025 Income sources, assets and financial wellbeing
• National Lottery Community Fund: repurposing content for a UK-wide redesign —  
• Mappler lite
• Proton-API-Bridge: A third-party, open-source Proton API bridge (mainly focusing on Drive for now) —  
• A Guide to Claude Code 2.0 and getting better at using coding agents — A deep dive into Claude Code 2.0 features, Opus 4.5 workflows, and context engineering. Learn sub-agents, MCP servers, hooks, skills, and practical tips to boost your AI-assisted coding productivity.
• GitHub - steveyegge/beads: Beads - A memory upgrade for your coding agent — Beads - A memory upgrade for your coding agent. Contribute to steveyegge/beads development by creating an account on GitHub.
• In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing — In the face of technologies that sell us escapism at every turn, we need to build up tolerance for “inconvenience.”
• APIs all the way down
• We removed 80% of our agent’s tools
• Why I Am Not Losing My Job to AI Not in 2026, Not in 2035
• The Policy Playbook - Bending the arc of policy towards public good
• AI is changing the physics of collective intelligence—how do we respond?
• There Is No Such Thing as Impact Investing
• The Ground we Travel
• Boring Tiny Tools — this and Simon Willisons The year I built 110 tools are very on point and worth a read.
• Certainty artefacts: why data feels solid, why life isn’t, and why my brain went “ohhhh!” on a train back from Scotland
• What Next? Philanthropy Trends and Predictions for 2026
• The Enshittifinancial Crisis — how long have you got?! A LONG read, but worth it.
• Who knows this source code?
• When services think for themselves
• [IMHO] Okay OKRs and unproblematic prioritisation
• Complex Systems Frameworks Collection

December 2025

• The Connection Project is a national alliance with a mission to ensure everybody in the UK can thrive in a digital society
• Dancing and Tending the Spaces in-Between: On Hospicing and Fugitivity in Transformative Public Sector Innovation
• The Planner’s Assistant - An open-source environment for spatial planning — built to restore coherence, capacity, and trust in how decisions about place are made.
• Great (public) expectations- New polling shows the public expect AI to be governed with far more rigour than current policy delivers
• What is systemic investing?“ by Dominic Hofstetter
• Working in place (and working out what that means)“ by Catherine Howe
• Teach a person how to fish…
• Responsible AI Due Diligence Tool
• When BAD OKRs happen to good people
• The Impact Garden
• We were worried about the wrong dystopia
• Announcing the Data Commons Gemini CLI extension
• An AI Evaluation Framework for the Development Sector
• What if the internet went down?
• On a Map - a free online mapping app
• The Foundation Model Transparency Index
• Where CC Stands on Pay-to-Crawl
• [IMHO] Roles, responsibilities and relationships in digital delivery
• [IMHO] Agile Planning – Roadmaps and Releases

November 2025

• Systemic Risk paper
• The disciplines theory of government Are legacy disciplines dragging the whole operation down? — good read this from James
• Verification, Deliberation, Accountability: A new framework for tackling epistemic collapse and renewing democracy
• TOOLBOXTOOLBOX - A curated list of the best business, design, and organisational change toolboxes built by some of the most influential companies, institutions and thinkers. — thi
• s is good - thanks to Doug for pointing this one out
• What happens when funders invest in collaboration?
• Introducing Semantic Model Sync in Hex - Governed metrics for trusted self-serve analytics
• Referenced publications on systemic investing, measurement and learning - by Alan Hudon
• Euroroute.ai
• tools.simonwillison - Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs.
• AI slop free Google Search
• Schematic Interoperability Lives in the Architecture, Not the Models
• Consequences Practical Tools for Understanding the Impacts of AI by Careful Industries — 🤩🤩👌
• Making sense of emergence: Measuring impact to inform systemic investing (Part 1) — second entry for Alan Hudson this week!
• Introducing a new AI metric to drive sustainability — this is very good. It proposes a metric for understanding the environmental impact of LLMs in the real world - mWh per 100 tokens. As they say in their paper, this is only one part of the puzzle, but it's nice for them to openly 'lift the lid' as they say. Some will tell you AI is destroying the world, some will say it's negligible or less harmful that a human typing. The answer, like most things, is somewhere inbetween, and unless we can open conversations about this, we will never get anywhere. Hmm, maybe I should fire up the linkblog on this one.
• The “Other Things Box” Understanding and Navigating What Really Drives Change
• Dynamic Capabilities for Human Flourishing: Why Cities Need a New Investment Logic for Innovation
• Blended Finance and Catalytic Capital in Bio-regional Financing Facilities
• Relationships, influencing and collaborative working - third sector trends 2025
• Scribe V2 Realtime Speech to Text — will be testing this week
• Data, BI & Analytics Trend Monitor 2026 — “AI initiatives can only succeed if these prerequisites are in place. What we are seeing in 2026 is not resistance to innovation but a disciplined approach to 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮.”
• Transformative Philanthropy - Oak Foundation Case Study
• DESIGN THINKING! Comic (@designthinking.lol)
• 2025-10-20T10:18:49.350Z
• Defining 'Real-Time' A toolkit for assessing data portability under the DMA and digital competition laws — slightly dry but really good. We talk about real time data a lot, but what do we actually mean and what is actually useful when it comes to real time? If you aren't going to take action immediately, do you need 'real time' is always a useful thing to consider.
• My website is a junk drawer
• Organizing Public Support for Open Digital Infrastructure
• New_ Public’s AI framework: Learn in public, keep humans centered
• The Digital Public Infrastructure map
• Bionic and the Wires use bionic arms to enable mushrooms and plants to create music and visual art.
• GreenPT — is a GPT-powered chat platform running on renewable energy and hosted in Europe for strict data protection. - started playing around with this - pretty cool now they have added API access
• The Collective Power Playbook
• Responsible AI Practical Toolkit - Arts Council
• Friends of the Earth - Local Environmental data
• Mapping is thinking
• Resilient Ready is proud to launch Australia’s first framework and mapping tool that puts people, connections, and the places that bring us together at the heart of disaster resilience.
• Surfacing Worldviews of Change
• Innovation Ecosystems: A Toolkit of Principles and Best Practice

October 2025

• Sporesight - Fungi as Your Futurist — weird, pretty cool.
• You Can't Just Flip the Switch on Empowerment — yup
• Putting the Place back in Place-based
• Advancing-University-Living-Labs - Relational Infrastructure for Transformative Impact
• Toolkit for Applied Strategic Foresight
• MSOA codes for Pride In Place Programme neighbourhoods
• The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 — go read it. Take a breath before you to.
• The People + AI Guidebook is a collection of practical guidance for designing human-centered AI products
• Thinking about using AI? Here’s what you can and (probably) can’t change about its environmental impact.
• Cartography of generative AI — who doesn't love excellent cartography
• What if the way we fund change is the very thing holding it back? — (PRINCIPLE #3: Built to Adapt - hell to the yes) - this is really very good.
• The Certainty Conundrum — "All grantmakers need to be humble, willing to consider they might be wrong and others might be right. In hard-to-measure fields the best picture of what is going on mostly emerges in slivers and nuggets and brief flashes of insight that emerge from conversations with people working at the coalface" 👏
• Grantmaking in the Age of AI — "AI is not a silver bullet. While powerful, AI cannot fix systemic inequities in funding" indeed
• No innovation until everything works
• Urban Taxonomy
• Are We Valuing [Open] Data All Wrong?
• What if NGOs (or charities) wrote your ads — a humorous post but honestly the amount of vague stuff I see with buzz words rather than just real plain language is real
• Design As Repair
• The missing bar, why we need X-shaped people in a digital world
• The Data Innovation Toolkit
• LLMs may be more vulnerable to data poisoning than we thought
• Ethics + Sustainability = Responsible AI
• DEAL released an update version of the Doughnut — with some cool new features and longitudinal approaches.
• Wiring the strategic brain for STI policy
• Data Provenance in AI
• A growing map of resources to re-imagine philanthropy and global development
• You can't optimize what you don't have — well worth a read - I also wrote something somewhat inspired by it -
• The best leaders focus on effectiveness
• AI Governance in the Boardroom
• Can analysis ever be automated?
• Why we orchestrate data governance rather than build databases
• Who owns Britain?
• I Love Generative AI and Hate the Companies Building It
• Measuring Innovation: Why Learning is the Real Engine of Innovation Funds

September 2025

• Open Licensing and Data Trust for Personal and Non-Personal Data: A Blueprint to Support the Commons and Privacy
• Positive Tipping Points Toolkit — nice to read this, chimes a lot with the resilience work
• GroundBreak Coalition A Case Study of Systemic Investing
• The substrate of safety
• An ARIA for social issues?
• The Strategist's Shame
• The End of Technically Optimistic — and What I’ve Learned
• Finding the Next Right Moves
• From paradigm blindness to paradigm shift? An integrative review and critical analysis of the regenerative paradigm
• Pro Cymru shared their AI principles — (amongst a couple of other AI bits. It's great. When it comes to advising people about AI (or tech, data or just generally organisationally) i ask what their principles are before we even talk about the technologies. They are so important. So if you don't have any, you should do. And seeing other peoples is a nice way to start, although the main thing to do is actually discuss them and how they relate to you and your organisation. Copy and Paste won't do.
• her updated list of sources of information — on what climate change and wider environmental issues look like, or might look like, across the UK. Some really great resources, maps, data sources in here. Great stuff.
• 'What is a Neighbourhood? — '. Yes he mentions our work in it, but I think it's a really important question with the current drive for everything is a bloody neighbourhood.
• Who owns the River Dart? — What a cool piece of investigatory journalism/data map
• a VS Code extension — that shows you how green the grid is before you make a big commit or do energy intensive jobs Make your coding greener, one commit at a time!
• Digital Transformation Maturity Scale
• Escaping the Trap of ‘Impact’ Measurement
• The illusion of alignment
• Using LLMs to write text classification rules
• Beyond Human in the loop a framework
• Breaking up with Big Tech: A human rights-based argument for tackling Big Tech’s market power — hell to the yeah Amnesty
• Council defends £500k AI deal with Palantir — as I commented on a post about this 'Jesus Christ man, what are we doing?'
• Inside the relentless race for AI capacity
• Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses — hey things are looking better
• via GIPHY
• Google understates its comparative water usage for AI
• cool if we just run on gas for our data centres?
• via GIPHY
• Prompt injections as far as the eye can see — eek
• Prompt-inject Copilot Studio AI via email, grab a company’s whole Salesforce — double eek
• via GIPHY
• AI promised efficiency. Instead, it’s making us work harder
• I am AI Free — ahh
• via GIPHY

July 2025

• https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2025/07/09/ethical-licensing-for-impact-organisations/
• Actions for Environmental Justice from Autonomous and Community Technological Infrastructures
• Data about the Voluntary, Community & Social Enterprise sector — a new dashboard from Datawise London
• The High Line, NYC - Ben Holliday
• ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure
• The problem with problems
• Free Environment & Related Data: Sources, Code, Tools, etc — from Ariel Chamberlain
• How to organise centres of government — Geoff Mulgan
• Scope or Die A Tool for Making Sense of Complex Challenges
• When to start small and do it for real
• Digital Welfare State edition 002
• The Irreversibility Framework | Linktree — A toolkit for lasting change: resources, insights & strategies for impact.
• 100 Factories — 100 Factories is transforming UK homebuilding by creating a distributed network of local manufacturers to produce modular timber building kits.
• Seeing like a place — Place-based work can be smarter and less bureaucratic, but can it rise to the political moment?
• Self-Organization Needs Activators: The 9% Who Turn Networks into Movements — Effective collaboration across networks of groups requires the network catalysts.
• A decentralised, self-hosted trails database — Three years ago I created a Fediverse instance called exercise.cafe for discussion related to fitness and exercise. I handed that over a year later, realising that discussion without data wasn’t really much use in that context. Thanks to the latest update which I discovered thanks to Laurens Hof, there’s a new option: wanderer. It’s a “self-hosted trails database” which the developer says now has the functionality to “follow users, comment, like, share trails, and more across instances.
• Talk at Camp Digital 2025 — This is the the unabridged version of the script for my Camp Digital talk in Manchester on 03/07/2025 – including all the stuff I had to cut to keep to time! The slides are here. The Power, P…
• To all who think capitalism can drive progressive change, it won’t – and here’s the shocking proof — Asset manager Aberdeen’s surprise cut to funding research into inequality has left those that used its grants for good work reeling, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee
• The Neighborhood Is the Unit of Change: Rethinking Scale in Philanthropy — Introduction It was a standing-room-only affair at the foundation’s annual gathering. The evening’s keynote speaker—a nationally recognized philanthropic leader—was unveiling their organization’s bold new initiative: a $25 million citywide program targeting educational outcomes across the entire met
• Ask not what Agentic AI can do for you, ask what it requires OF you. | Tom Watson — Ask not what Agentic AI can do for you, ask what it requires OF you. Control, access, elimination of privacy.

June 2025

• The Inferno Coming for Nonprofits: A Call to Steward the Forest, Not Save Every Tree — The nonprofit sector has a perpetuity problem
• Big Tech alternatives — a nice notion list of big tech alternatives by
• Ariel Chamberlain — (you should follow, lots of good stuff)
• The web as URLs not documents
• Mission X neighbourhoods — by Dan Hill
• Geographic Maps in movements — by
• Natasha Adams
• Fear and Self-Loathing in Silicon Valley
• 80 links to popular GeoData sites
• The three definitions of digital in UK digital government
• The Street Doesn't remember you
• We mapped 18,000 children’s playgrounds and revealed inequality across England — Our maps show some kids have nearer, bigger playgrounds than others.
• Blog TheGovlab — 100 Questions
• Measuring what matters: a chicken-egg problem in evaluation — “What matters” should determine what gets “measured” - not the other way round. But availability of evidence may constrain a practical set of criteria. How can we navigate this?
• If people care deeply for one another and other living beings, why does it feel like everything is going wrong? - CC Foundation — At Common Cause, we often find ourselves grappling with a striking paradox: why, when people report placing high importance on universalism and benevolence values that predict deeper levels of social and environmental concern, isn’t faster progress being made on social and environmental justice? Indeed, why – on so many fronts – is such progress being […]
• Reimagining Research — Pause and Effect — A 5-week, hands-on cohort to help you shape the future of research. Designed to break free from colonial and extractive paradigms, join us to actively decolonize your practice. Our modules cover everything from trauma-responsive design to practicing care, reciprocity, and consent. You will gain pra
• The life and death of Microsoft’s Moonshot — Microsoft finally dropped its ‘climate moonshot’, overwhelmed by the anxiety of generating as much AI slop as it possibly can, no matter how much that helps the fossil fuel industry.
• Trust Issues: An Anthology — The essays in this anthology collectively reframe the question of trust and technology away from whether a particular technology is trustworthy and toward how trust reframes institutions, bodies, and knowledge.
• Five reasons the Government should launch Total Place 2.0 - New Local — John Denham and Jessica Studdert make the case for Total Place 2.0 - to shift public investment for better outcomes.
• Philanthropy Transformation Initiative
• Why it’s time for a new climate movement: Strategic adaptation for emergency resilience — The Climate Majority is already here. It’s you. It’s me. It’s all of us — stepping forward with courage and care, finding joy in connection and standing up for what we believe in and what we love, together.
• We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. — The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.
• How would we govern if we took community agency seriously? — Recently I was asked to write an essay for the 10 year anniversary of Power to Change, an initiative funded by the National Lottery…
• If DeepSeek wants to be a real disruptor, it should go much further on data transparency — Learn more about the transparency of the data behind DeepSeek.
• What works without a centre? A call to re-centre practice and practitioners — The use of evidence should be seen as a type of capacity-building
• Joe Lanman - Making an LLM/AI web app for GOV.UK prototyping — Designer based in London
• Endowing The Future — Endowing The Future is co-authored by CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs as a call to philanthropy to meet the moment, endowing its…

May 2025

• https://www.technollama.co.uk/how-did-openness-fall-out-of-fashion — is a good read and very timely.
• topologies of decision making — . I *think I like a lot of what Indy talks about, but often I'm not sure I'm smart enough to actually know what he's saying half the time, but I did with this piece. I especially like the opening couple of paragraphs
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Why Open Source is a Win for Sustainability
• complex/complicated — talk? Could do worse than look here
• YANSS 312 – An introduction to complexity science, chaos theory, and how life, um, finds a way — note to content people - if you use a Jurassic park reference you always have my attention
• this from The Compton Foundation — as an approach to looking back on the impact a foundation has made and the journey it went on as it completes it's spend down.
• Mapping the Uk climate movement again
• host an Etherpad instance — (an open source collaborative doc tool which is very cool you should check it out, especially if you're a bit pissed off at Miscrosoft at the minute* Ok, more pissed off than usual).
• Neighbourhoods as engines of change
• Bots, barriers and the future of the open web
• What we talk about when we talk about AI
• The Energy at the edges
• Mapping the Participatory Democracy Movement: The Urgent Need for People Power — they mapped 96 organisations working in this space...and then didn't actually share a map...urgh
• Observatory of Examples of How Open Data and Generative AI Intersect
• Oh I’m using more energy. I should really try to reduce it for the sake of the climate — . A number of good points in here and one I've spoken about a lot - yes there are and will be improved energy efficiency in AI models...BUT...if AI is in everything, whether we want it or not, whether it is useful or not, the overall impact will keep increasing.
• Neighbourhoods and 'middle layer super output areas' (MSOAs) — (catchy title eh) - Some thoughts, overlaying and comparisons from Data for Action and Citizen Network's work in Sheffield.
• Internet of Public Service Jobs - the survey
• an open justice, equity and digital funders database
• The Fight for Open Infrastructure Starts Now (Actually, It Started Yesterday)

April 2025

• Electronic Waste Graveyard — Oh yeah, thanks for that Microsoft
• What’s in a name? Calling all charitable asset owners. - Alliance magazine — Trusts and foundations have been on a journey in the wilds of finance. Leaders among them have been the pathfinders, sharing their findings and practices as way-markers for others. But they haven’t merely helped their …
• Survey: Society for Hopeful Technologists — Careful Industries — Are you a UK-based technologist interested in joining a body that acts in solidarity against the excesses of extractive platform capitalism? Complete this survey to help shape the Society for Hopeful Technologists.
• A new invisible hand — The inscrutable ghost in every MCP server.
• Chat UI Energy Score - a Hugging Face Space by jdelavande — ChatUI-energy lets you have conversations with an AI chatbot while tracking the energy used for each request. Users can type or upload images to engage, and get chat responses along with energy est…
• Inquiry as Infrastructure — which is excellent and talks about
• Question Bank — which aims to allow groups of people to come together, ask, prioritise and eventually understand what makes a good question. People ask questions in different ways and the more that are asked the more we can begin understanding which ones are 'good' and lead to action.
• Exit to Open — ' in which Jim talks about enriching the commons and making things open when an organisation closes. I wrote something similar in
• Endings — . Good composting if you will. As a big proponent of this, its good to see this kind of hit the mainstream (relatively). I would quesiton why only do this when an organisation closes though, why not just be Open by Default?If you are interested in a more Open Sector you should
• join these meet ups — as we try to get more of this stuff happening in a practical way
• The story of how we are shifting power to people in different communities across the UK, and a guide to starting similar projects in your community — ' which features some of the work of
• Citizen Network — and
• Data For Action
• Building Collective Capacity For Experimentation — This blog has been cross-posted from Sharique Hasan’s personal Substack blog. Sharique Hasan: This post is a bit more personal than usual. It’s about our journey at CFXS and IGL to build capacity for…
• Public AI – Open Future — Examining AI policies and governance mechanisms that secure the common good, respect open-sharing, account for power imbalances and safeguard digital rights.
• What is relational technology? — ABD Consultancy — What is relational technology? It’s about human needs and human relationships. A blogpost by Anna Dent
• https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/04/18/i-just-think-that-people.html
• notion site — with all the things from the Powering Up Programme was shared. I'll write something more about this next week maybe.
• https://www.fastcompany.com/91317959/if-you-use-ai-to-write-me-that-note-dont-expect-me-to-read-it
• https://developmentgateway.org/blog/the-data-crisis-following-usaids-withdrawal-opportunities-to-reimagine-data-systems/
• first blog from Power to Change about the Powering Up programme — I worked on came out. There is a series of things coming out over the next couple of weeks, sharing not just the evaluation and the lessons, but also the tools and processes we developed and used. This is a great example of composting knowledge.
• a write up from his Opening Up sessions — and an invite to join monthly sessions to take some this forward. If you have an interest in Open Knowledge and Infrastructure and want to do something together, you should join.
• Paddy doing art — , Open Data Manchester writing about community mapping, and another map from a community mapper
• Evaluation Registry — allowing you to finally search for all planned, ongoing and complete government evaluations from all departments and the Scottish Government are registered. This is great. Although it misses some bits for me as mostly findings are not provided, and actual recommendations are not really logged. Anyway, a good step!
• https://medium.com/@lpiachaud/building-from-the-inside-out-organisational-care-power-and-possibility-f51dd15afc7f — was really good. The parts about infrastructure and open sourcing definitely resonate.
• https://www.pcnacademy.org.uk/blogs/int-insights-1 — though I did ponder at the quote "“Integration is different to collaboration. We know and do a lot of collaboration, but do we really know about integration? Do we know what it means?” - I mean yeah, but much of the things that are in the report and from lots of other observations lead me to very much doubt that health services do know and do a lot of actual collaboration.
• https://www.projectchange.scot/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/The-Report-Final-final-5.pdf — a satirical take on a report which has more truth than many actual reports I've read. The lines that stand out are partly why I'm building the signals app to stop this type of thing.
• https://www.opendatamanchester.org.uk/data-for-communities-empowering-citizens-through-participatory-approaches-part-2/
• https://theimpactproject.org/the-impact-map/
• https://theodi.org/news-and-events/news/solid-advisory-committee/

March 2025

• Definition: Use Case – Icebreaker One
• Good looks like this — A thought: Could language be the new architecture?
• Bubble Trouble — An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.
• Designing New Institutions and Renewing Existing Ones - A Playbook - Istanbul Innovation Days — This brochure synthesizes experiences from practitioners around the world who will convene at the Istanbul Innovation Days 2025 into a resource that can help teams have a conversation about strategy and tactics for renewing existing or designing new institutions. It integrates those experiences with the ongoing work of UNDP, TIAL, and Demos Helsinki. It is […]
• Climate Activism Archives - Climate Barometer — Finding Signal in the Noise
• report about the state of open humanitarian data in 2025
• Well this is a directory of NatureTech — . Enjoy!
• plainer language
• Announcing the Data.gov Archive | Library Innovation Lab — data.gov archive
• Free Online Elevation Contour Generator - March 22, 2025 — Welcome to our Free Elevation Contour Generator – the most powerful online tool for creating accurate topographic maps, contour plans, and elevation visualizations. Whether you’re a landscape architect, civil engineer, hiker, surveyor, or educator, our contour map maker provides the precision and flexibility you need for any project.
• Home - NICH: GPT Anonymizer
• The Firetail Guide to Time Travel: Part One — Firetail — The ability to travel into the future isn’t just for daydreamers or science fiction. It’s a critical skill for strategy and planning, particularly when so much feels uncertain, volatile, and fast moving. Being a time traveller is not about predicting the future, it’s about being better prepared for
• The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem — Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.
• RISING RESILIENCE: LEARNING DESIGN — Building resilience in Melbourne’s high-rise communities through social imagination
• Docs — Docs: Your new companion to collaborate on documents efficiently, intuitively, and securely.
• Etherpad
• Randomised Coffee Trial — Data Orchard — The Nonprofit Datafolk Club is a friendly group of like-minded data folk working in or with nonprofits. ​In this free interactive networking session, we’ll be giving you the opportunity to meet and connect with others in our Randomised Coffee Trial.
• Resilience Fund | Berkeley Foundation
• puntofisso
• Learnbook — '
• Building Websites With LLMS (by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).)
• website — , it's nice you should take a look
• Chapter 4: Flexing those thinking muscles
• this
• this
• A Garden of Ideas — ' by Dan Hill
• 18F mirror site
• Making the UK’s Geospatial Data Fit for the Future - UK Day One — Making the UK’s Geospatial Data Fit for the Future
• Digital Sovereignty — Digital sovereignty has a bad reputation. In internet governance circles, sovereignty is considered awkward enough to be referred to by as the “s-word.” It is often associated with misguided attempts at returning to the era of national champions, like building a French search engine or a European Google, or worse with the eternal boogeyman that is the “splinternet.” It doesn’t have to be this way!

February 2025

• https://www.faircollective.co.uk/breaking-point-report
• https://substack.com/inbox/post/157441455?triedRedirect=true
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/16avPgcfNKxA8hb7RIelclneqD96ffKCy/view
• https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/european-commission-digital-innovation-framework/solution/digital-innovation-lab-ilab/data-innovation-repository
• https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/european-commission-digital-innovation-framework/solution/digital-innovation-lab-ilab/data-innovation-toolkit
• https://www.computerweekly.com/microscope/news/366619290/Calls-continue-for-public-sector-procurement-to-open-wider-to-SMEs
• https://www.climateworks.org/report/funding-trends-2024/?utm_medium=LinkedInPost
• https://automaticknowledge.co.uk/resources/#GBBuildings
• What public datasets will have high impact on AI in the UK?
• this
• Charity Investment Principles
• Life expectancy growth stalls across Europe as England sees sharpest decline, say researchers — "
• Extracting historical data from planning documents — 💓
• AI Use Case Framework
• Digital Disruption and the Future of Conservation Resource Library
• Stories of Place 2024 Composting #2 | Principles as a compost bed
• https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/615584/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-archive
• https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2025/02/16/weeknote-07-2025/
• Companies House data in a South Yorkshire CH dashboard
• Social Capital 2025: A protective shield for children, families and communities
• Social Capital 2025: What is Social Capital?
• EARLY CHILDHOOD - What works (and how) to impact early childhood outcomes: A targeted review — (note - if you do a report of any kind, please make your data and sources extremely accessible and visible like this!) 👍
• Structured Generation Starter Pack - A curated list of structured generation resources
• Open-source DeepResearch – Freeing our search agents
• Building a prototype registry of Public Domain and open-licensed works — 👏
• Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video — 👀👀
• A lovely collection of climate related data from Liz Gadd here — 👌
• Rewilding software engineering — Chapter 1: Introduction
• Rewilding software engineering — Chapter 2: How we make decisions
• Rewilding software engineering — Chapter 3: Questions and answers
• Positioning on Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Icebreaker One
• The Digital Playbook: A Crucial Counterpart To Your Design System — Smashing Magazine — Design systems play a crucial role in today’s digital landscape, providing a blueprint for consistent and user-friendly interfaces. But there’s another tool that deserves equal attention: the digital playbook.
• A Constructive Approach to AI Literacies — Introducing AILiteracy.fyi
• AI for What? Public value creation versus extractive rents — AI is not a sector - it’s a general purpose technology that will continue to shape all sectors. The real question isn’t whether or not to regulate AI, but how to actively steer its development toward public value creation over extraction.
• AI Commons - One Project — What if we could redefine AI? What if we could shift its production from a capitalist model to a more disruptive, inclusive, and decentralized one?
• When is it OK to be boring? — Boring is the one thing we all strive not to be. And yet. When everyone’s overstimulated, when everything’s overhyped. Sometimes boring stands out. Some say it’s what people actually want. What if boring is creative after all?