By Tom Watson in weeknote — 07 Feb 2025

Weeknote 07-02-2025

Bit's on maps, knowledge infrastructure, pictures from my run and a bit of a full list of interesting things

A picture of the fells from my run this morning.

Ok, 3 in a row, it's no longer surprising it's just who I am now 🤷‍♂️

What I did

Couple of chunkier bits this week so slightly more focused.

Wrote up a guide and plan for Local Motion local coordination group. Seems to have landed initially. It can seem hard to plan for system change work, but I'm a big believer in providing structure to enable free experimentation... a bit liberating structures. So the plan is focused on learning and decision making at it's heart, with the aim to provide enough safety to take risks. While writing I decided I need diagrams obliviously. Here's one which is all about something we are keen on, and have used successfully at Data For Action, observations. I think I'll be writing a full post on this work at some point soon.

An image of a process involving observations of Activity, Context and Process, linking to signals and then 3 questions, Are we doing things right, are we doing the right things and How are we deciding what's right

Spent some time with Lloyds Bank Foundation and the excellent Liz Pepler talking about Organisational Resilience. More on that soon hopefully.
Met with Jo who maintains 'The List' which documents changes to Trust and Foundations in the UK, who is closing, pausing, strategising etc. Like most good things, Jo saw a need that nobody was filling and just got on with doing something about it. I'm going to help her hopefully take the list to the next level or at the very least make it easy to manage, as like lots of knowledge infrastructure in the sector, Jo does this will no resource apart from her own hard work. I spent a bit of time exploring how to help, and have got some (good?) ideas already.
Also met with Sarah Hughes who is also creating and maintaining more knowledge infrastructure, again un-resourced, this time around giving circles. Much the same, I'm going to help with some of the technical aspects of making this more available and usable. I learned some interesting things about giving circles also!

Maps as conversations

Tom, of the French variety (he's not actually French, but definitely French Quarter New Orleans) has been doing some awesome mapping recently. One of the things I love about our approach to mapping is that we are trying to use maps as ongoing conversations rather than as administrative definitions. We are also taking the approach of providing the infrastructure for the maps, but not owning them, decentralised mapping almost. It's easier to not do it this way, i'm glad we are sticking with it.

What I thought about

I thought about maintaining knowledge infrastructure a lot this week. One of the things I was pondering was how we recognise or perhaps incentivise people who contribute to the maintenance of this infrastructure. I thought about GitHub, not the technical bit, but the contribution activity display as below. It's a nice visual way of representing contribution, but also in some cases serves as a demonstration to potential employers. What if we had something like* that for the knowledge infrastructure of the sector. Then i went down wondering about open badges, and other thoughts.

Picture of the contribution image from github, which shows the days you have done something with green squares.

*money would also be nice...

I've heard a few freelancers recently tell me that it's tough out there, not enough work, lots of competition. I feel relieved and also a bit guilty that this hasn't noticeably hit me yet. Although if I think about it, although I'm busy, I'm not super busy and having to decline lots of things at the moment. It got me thinking about how there seem to be a few big agencies that have cornered markets, and how it certainly feels like since 2022 there have been more and more people going freelance. Mix this in with lots of trusts stopping funds (see the list!) and maybe this is the result. Much of this is based on my own anecdotal evidence, which got me thinking about how I'm pretty sure the freelance workforce does not appear in any sectoral data, and neither really does the value of freelance consultancy contracts and where they go...

Interesting things

A 3 part long but good read from Simon Wardley (he of the maps)

Lots of tech and AI stuff this week. No hype though

And now for something completely different. I LOVED this

Most important bit of the week

Yes it's the click bait photo I used for the post. It's also the photo from my run this morning. I don't think I'll ever tire of this view. Could I relate this to some kind of work or something I learned this week? Yes. But I won't, because some things just need to be and that's all

It's a picture of the fell tops, from Dale Head to Cat Bells near Derwent Water. There is a little bit of snow, with the stones and green grasses and brown. The newlands valley stretches off, with a stream.

Here's a bonus pic for getting to the bottom