Weeknote 11-04-25
Some more working on a tool for learning, not monitoring, a charity board meeting and some crappy funding practice, and interesting things as always.
What I did
A couple of sessions helping charities with their systems (technology and human). Mostly it's just being able to quickly diagnose problems that organisations just normalise because either they don't know it's a problem, or they don't know how to fix it, so they just carry on. Then a lot of it is translating between tech providers and non-tech people. As ever, language is important.
A board meeting for a charity I'm a trustee of. The charity is coming up to 30 years old, it's well established, does excellent work with great staff, we have grants, contracts, and we have a good trading income... and yet, we have to look ahead and scenario plan because of well, finances. Oh, if you're wondering about things you should be thinking about in terms of finance, give Liz a follow, who has been dropping some finance gold recently (as always).
Life is tough for charities at the moment, you just have to look at The List to see the amount of funders not present right now and the gap in money that creates. Add in rising costs and rising demand, and blimey it's rough. So when you add in public sector contracts that are clawing back money from charities on work already delivered, well, that's just beyond crappy funding practices. This is a situation we are in. Resilience is both internal and external.
Some progress with my signals app - you can view a bit of a video wizz through here. It's a tool designed for learning rather than monitoring. There are many tools for monitoring, but very few for learning. It aligns very much with parts of The Learnbook I shared previously and uses lots of the language of observations and signals that I've previously written about
It is designed to capture observations in the moment and make sense of them later. You can upload observations via text, image, audio on a simple interface. In the background we handle the image or audio translation, create embeddings, and store in a database. You can even add a geo-location to an observation for mapping.
The tool also allows automatic extraction of observations from docs, pdfs, or spreadsheets, allowing different types of data to be stored. Sidenote - pdfs are a pain in the arse.
From there we can look for signals in all the observations and then discuss and take action on them. I think the combination of observations in the moment and analysing signals later is where the magic is.
It's still very much at a prototype stage, but I think it's showing progress. Next will be to link it up with our question bank so that we can link questions to observations and signals. Anyway, here's a very quick video of the app in action.
Yes, I went running obviously. Ran round the Ullswater way and then had a dip in after. Lovely
Interesting things
- The 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.
- Tris shared 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.
- Maps, maps and more maps. Some lovely things this week on maps. Paddy doing art, Open Data Manchester writing about community mapping, and another map from a community mapper
- The cabinet office launches the 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!