Weeknote #15
A good week! Felt like some things are coming together. Opening Up community Call, open working for the win, rss feeds, viral bluesky, plants, and the usual interesting things
A good week! Felt like some things are coming together. Had confirmations of 2 (edit - 3) bits of really interesting work that will stimulate and invigorate!
What I did?
Went to Opening Up Community Call on Sharing knowledge, resources, and insights in the social sector. As someone with Open By Default principles this is my happy place obviously. Several people I already know, but it was nice to meet others I didn't know before. Lots of ideas and energy to get some practical things done together. Creating a more open sector isn't just a nice to have though, I think it's fundamentally one of the most important things we can do. It's not always easy though, like anything it's a mix of culture and methods, fear and practicality.
John Fitzgerald was there and he put in an awesome line
make failure shareable again
That made me laugh. But also there is massive truth in it. Learning is all about failure really. We rarely learn from success, especially when it's from others, unless we know the failures along the way. It's why 'best practice' has always rubbed me up the wrong way, as mostly this excludes all the things that went wrong. It also means we are less likely to push the boundaries, because we are more likely to 'succeed' if we play it safe. The social purpose sector works in some really really challenging areas and challenging conditions. Things. will. go. wrong. We should embrace this if we want to actually learn.
Speaking of things going wrong.
Spent some time working on a prototype to visualise some data and eventually move to api first design. The first bit was really thinking about how to analyse and visualise the data so i could think about the structures etc. Thankfully t'other Tom came up with some good ideas. For some reason I thought I'd just do a very basic manual prototype and which then spiralled into spending the best part of a day messing around in google sheets doing formulas and trying to make candlestick charts into box charts and not really getting anywhere. Honestly I've no idea why I did that, as I then just scripted up an app that actually functioned in an hour the next day. Ah well.
One of the things on the Opening Up Community call which came up was the fear of sharing openly, and what are the benefits really? It can be hard sometimes to just throw stuff out there. Well this week I had a lovely example of working in the open really working. A while ago I put an idea onto https://www.openideas.uk/ around Open Recommendations. Someone saw this, realised this could help them with something, and so I'm going to build a version 1.0 which helps them and get's the idea off the ground. Wins all around.
Had a good catch up with Liz about Organisational Resilience as we get the chance to dive back into some work we did together 5 years ago. We talked about being bold & brave with it, imaginative and yet practical. Looking forward to working with Liz again as I feel she very much shares my 'no bullshit' principle.
Randomly went semi viral on bluesky (for me anyway) this week when I commented on the national power outage in spain after chatting to a friend there.
A rather innocuous comment that seemed to hit the mood over people there. It got me thinking about a desire for just simple human connection and how maybe we are all in need of this more right now.
I went all mid 2000's and started getting into RSS feeds. I feel the need to be a bit more intentional about curating my online reading as I miss things by people who I think are interesting due to the algo. I think we all might need to pivot back more to this if I'm honest, as relying on social platforms feels nonviable. Roger and Steve shared their lists of RSS feeds which was kind.
Had a nice bit of circularity this week as I got a delivery of plants I purchased from a community business who I had worked with a couple of years ago
Tom Watson
Interesting things
This is a really nice no nonsense post from Rachel at Careful Industries - What we talk about when we talk about AI
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
I could feel Doug slightly bristling in this one! 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
Jo and Catalyst doing some good things here creating an open justice, equity and digital funders database
The Fight for Open Infrastructure Starts Now (Actually, It Started Yesterday)
Note
I know what you're thinking 'Wait what you're using an incremental numbering system for your weeknotes rather than a date now Tom?' Yes. Mainly because I write them on different days of the week and so the dates are a bit all over.
It did make me think about when I first started consulting though. That first invoice #001 - would anyone notice? The nervousness of whether that number would give me away as someone who has no idea what they are doing? Eventually that stops, you hit #100 and you stop worrying about knowing what you are doing, because it's not the knowing, it's the finding out.
Anyway, so it seems this weeknoting is sticking, so it's issue numbers now.