By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote #16

Actually a fortnight note. Getting building Open Recommendations, reusing my own project repository, Open Youth Infrastructure and interesting things.

Weeknote #16
Picture from Halls Fell i'nt lakes. Lovely ridge, one of my favourites. Took this on Wednesday during a lovely run round the lakes.

So I missed writing one of these last week, so this is really a fortnight note.

What I did

  • Met with a few new small charities through LBF work, all going through similar things that I hope I can help with. These initial meetings are important for us to all to get a feel for how we will work together.
  • Attended a workshop/session as part of the Open Youth Infrastructure held by NPC. I've heard various bits they are thinking about but it was the first time I'd joined. It's important work and there were lots of interesting thoughts, ideas and challenges. It was interesting to hear many of the things are similar to what we went through in our Insight Infrastructure work with JRF. I pointed to some things that maybe will be useful.
  • Finished up some work with Farming the Future on their Airtable set up, helping them to move off Mailchip and base their mailing lists within Airtable.
  • Met with The Wildlife Trusts about our work on Prototyping a self assessment tool we did with them last year. They are about to take forward this work and our recommendations into a full tool. It's a new person in charge who wasn't involved in the project last year. It was good, for both of us, to have the repository we had set up to dig back into. A final report is good, a final report and all the things that happened along the way is better.
  • Spent some time building Open Recommendations which was fun! I mainly built out the data structure and the ingestion components. It's nice to be building this alongside someone is manually cataloging a selection of reports and recommendations as I get real world training data. Still some tweaks but I think I'm close to having the ingestion part good enough. Next week I'll be building out the search and UI and get a version 1 ready to go live by the end of the month.
  • Had a good catch with t'other Tom. The past few months we've both been busy with slightly separate projects for the main part. We discussed a few interesting ideas for what we want to intentionally focus on together which was good.

What I thought about

No real writing this past couple of weeks but I thought about a couple of things.
One was about how we need to do hard things and think about failure differently

If you try hard things, chances are something will go wrong. There's a… | Tom Watson
If you try hard things, chances are something will go wrong. There's a decent chance you will fail. We should accept this. And still do the hard things anyway. We should fund things that might not work. We should build things that might fail. We should try to do things differently and accept it might not go how we dreamt it might And we should learn from this. So that next time, maybe it won't be so hard. And then we should try again.
LinkedInTom Watson

The other was inspired by a song i'd not heard in years coming on a shuffle. It has this chorus in it

A vessel to carry you and me
Now sits at the bottom
The bottom of the sea
It has formed a natural reef
Upon which new things have grown
Things so wonderful
That I have never known

I like reefs (both as actual ecosystems and as analogies). It got me thinking about tying together a few older blogs ( Less anchors, more reefs & Endings & Let’s end single use projects) with some newer thinking. Maybe I'll get to it soon.

Called for an intervention on AI waffle (or spraffing as John beautifully put)

I'm calling for an intervention. An amnesty. For one day we just don't… | Tom Watson | 10 comments
I'm calling for an intervention. An amnesty. For one day we just don't mention AI. Yes we can talk about your cool new product or service or training, but you tell me what problem it solves, rather than how it works.. Or we just talk about trees. Or better yet we go outside and sit under some trees. Just for one day. Thanks. | 10 comments on LinkedIn
LinkedInTom Watson

Interesting things


We live in an age of cascading complexity—ecological, technological, institutional, geopolitical. Yet much of our governance infrastructure remains rooted in a legacy of singular authority and concentrated decision-making. We build landscapes that seek clarity, control, and command—when what is often required is the opposite: architectures that can hold divergence, negotiate context, and evolve in relation to uncertainty.