By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 14-03-25

Principles for data and being human. Organisational resilience. And a long rambling section on approaches for Open working & Infrastructure.

Weeknote 14-03-25

Busy week this one! I delivered 3 'workshops' this week, on 3 consecutive days, one of which was in person. I really enjoy doing things like this, it gets me to really focus on the details, on how to convey ideas as simply as possible. But man it makes me tired!

What I did

I was asked by Ross to join a couple of sessions he was having with a group of leaders and gave two talks/workshops on what I'd call human approaches to strategic data. I do like joining sessions that Ross has set up because he has such a chilled vibe, everyone is relaxed and open to listening and questioning.

The main chunk of the session was focused on Principles and methods for bringing people together around data, using questions. I also linked the use of questions to how some people are beginning to interact with data via LLM's. I don't think there is anything ground breaking in any of this, but people found it useful which is nice



I also like to just throw fun/interesting things at people toward the end of the session as well, so I threw some new tools and resources and gave all the links in the slides I shared after, which for you good people at some, you can see here

Good data
Principles and fundamentals for better data in your organisation
Google Docs

Organisational Resilience

I also ran a session on Organisational Resilience with the People & Communities Team at LBFEW. It was good revisit this and really try to get to the simplest explanation of what it is all about. Really it comes down to an approach, that can help people think and imagine differently, from multiple perspectives.

It's about:

  • People, Money & Purpose all working in harmony
  • Considering how we anticipate, prepare for, respond to and adapt to change, because change will happen
  • Framing questions from both an internal and external point of view

Opening up

I joined the Opening Up session held by Tris this morning which was a nice way to end the week, talking with others about Opening up knowledge in the charity and philanthropy/grant-making sectors. Lots of good and interesting things discussed and talked about including: Robyn sharing these slides on open working; Nick sharing a podcast on open working at a foundation; conversations around "Are there stages of openness? Or levels?"

I shared the things that we do which includes having commitments to openness in contracts and cataloging all the work not just the final output and using that for learning. We also talked about Decision Logs (i sometimes refer to this as a git-hub governance) but even from a none technical point of view, different governance approaches (like sociocracy) do some of this. Then also talked a little bit about badges or credentials (paging Doug) for openness in the sector. By which I mean, what if we could sign up to levels of openness which are actually credentialed?

I also posed a question which i often ponder "what if funders actively emphasised learning over evaluation? " - I realise that not every grant comes with money for anything beyond just trying to do the work, but fairly often money is attached for evaluation of work. I think it would be more effective if organisations were supported to learn, as this is often the first step to openness. I always believe the words funders use are influential to what people pay attention to.

We also talked a little bit about other roles that funders could take, such as sharing the top 5 things they have learned from their grant programmes. Or take an approach like Power to Change to share the things they used to run their grant programmes. Also forgot to mention that it's nice to see Heritage Lottery really emphasise open licencing

Our default licence is Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - we also support public domain materials and open software licences, and provide exceptions to our licensing requirement on ethical grounds.

Interesting things

Less in here this week as I was busy (did i mention that?!)