By Tom Watson in weeknote — 09 Mar 2025

Weeknote 07-03-2025

Lot's of planning and organising for next week. Messing about with some new tools.

An image from my run this weekend. It's a view over the fell with a blue sky

March! Spring, sunshine, and end to eternal darkness(meteorological at least)

A view of a trail through a forest from my run today.

What I did

Quieter week this week as it has involved a lot of planning for other things really, and various bits of 'business development'. I think that the amount of time freelancers and small consultancies spend on this is a bit under acknowledged probably.

Planning a couple of sessions I'm running with Ross at Third Sector Labs next week. It's all data related and lots of things I've talked about before, but I like to see if I can add a few new things of interest.

Also planning for a session I'm doing with Liz on Organisational Resilience. It's lovely to work with Liz again and it's great to really step back and think about resilience again. I think our views have matured views somewhat and we are both wanting to be quite bold with it which is fun.

Chatted with Dan from https://aat.cymru/ an awesome community energy charity/coop

Also chatted with Doug Belshaw which was fun. I like Dougs work and it's always good to find more fellow North Easterners! Doug sent me a couple of things which I'm diving into, on Ambiguity and his writing as part of his Systems thinking . Also this site he's making to create, issue, and verify digital badges is really interesting especially for me in terms of recognising open infrastructure maintenance and contribution.

I listened into the launch and read the report by the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods. We submitted some things to it, although I don't think any of it really any difference. I've heard a few people say positive things, but honestly I came away thinking this was pretty standard white paper stuff that didn't really move the needle. One quote from the launch was 'we should allow local people to engage with opportunities'. I think this was probably just badly worded, and just got my back up.

Messing about

Was messing about with Baserow as a self hosted alternative to Airtable. Pretty nice. It's very similar, and also quite different. Will do a deeper dive write up if I get into it. Oh, also it's an EU company if you're into that sort of thing...

Also was messing about with SolidTime an open source timetracking/billing tool. Also pretty nice. The github style visuals appeal, and it's super fast, open source(with a cloud host version) and it's ahem, an EU company...if you're into that sort of thing...

Map of the week

This map from 30x30 was cool

Thought about

Most of my week was thinking so not as much here. But Roger did some good thinking which i suggest you check out as there is lots of good snippets in there.

I did think about European Alternatives to US tech a lot...not sure if you can tell. You should also probably be thinking about that too. Here's something helpful.

Interesting things

I bloody loved this piece and work 'A Garden of Ideas' by Dan Hill

Here's a bit on the 18F mirror site
Excellent piece by Peter Wells on Making the UK’s Geospatial Data Fit for the Future

Making the UK’s Geospatial Data Fit for the Future

Good (long) piece on Digital Sovereignty