By Tom Watson in weeknote — 05 Jun 2025

Weeknote #17

When is a weeknote not a weeknote? When it's a threeweeknote. A thrice note? Organisational Resilience, Open Recommendations, it's how we use information, sharing ideas and hoping someone funds us to do it, tech and data AI framework, neighbourhood maps part 2. Plus a picture of my tent.

When is a weeknote not a weeknote? When it's a threeweeknote. A thrice note?

Yeah, so I missed writing one of these a few weeks ago, business, illness, then it was half term and here we are. So this is a summary of the last 3 weeks as I try to remember what I did (that's why actual weeknotes are handy!) Anyway, I've been up since 5, and spent about 8 hours on trains today, so I'm getting to it a day early for this week.

What I did

Getting my head back into Organisational Resilience thinking. Spent some time reviewing the previous Principles and questions. Some definitely still stand up. Others I don't think were bold enough or tight enough in the language. So I started tweaking/ripping them apart. Put more emphasis on Anticipate, Prepare, Respond, Adapt within the questions. Partly this is prepping for a new programme hopefully happening soon, but I'm also running a session on it for a small charity this week (which week? The last one) so it gives me a chance to test.

Edit - It went well and the charity got loads from it. The principles felt more accessible. The questions stronger and more specifically designed to explore different frames (Anticipate, prepare, respond, adapt)

"We had all these things in our heads and no way to get them out in any way that made sense. The questions really helped us to do this and discuss things together that we wouldn't have otherwise and think about things in different ways, how we prepare, how we adapt."

The term Resilience can be misused in my opinion, so some writing on what I mean by resilience below

Some good news as I'm going to be helping Jo with some technical development on the List soon, hopefully make it easier to manage and more useful for exploring questions around what is happening in trust & foundation funding. I'll let her share the details. I'm looking forward to the work, but I'm also especially looking forward to working with Jo who's done all this off her own back, in the open, with no bullshit...my kind of people.

Made some good progress with Open Recommendations. Agreed and implemented a data structure. Created the manual and AI assisted upload features and have been testing these together, tweaking the AI for accuracy, and I'm pretty much happy with this now. About a minute and we can extract and store in a structured way a whole range of details AND the recommendations the report contains.

Have begun developing the search function which is basically a RAG. After that I'm moving onto the most interesting parts, which are around clustering recommendations to highlight duplication and the crowd sourcing of progress against recommendations.

Sidenote - as AI functionality (RAG, MCP and reasoning & deep research agent connections into existing enterprise systems) rapidly improve the ability to explore and retrieve information, the biggest focus for me is on making it as easy as possible to get data, observations, information IN to systems (as it ever was!) and then on how to rethink about how we make use of that in newer ways. We have opportunities to really change how we interact with information, to gain insight and turn this into action, and this requires people and new ways of thinking about learning, preferably in the open.

Speaking of new thinking about this stuff, well we had some bad news about a funding bid we put in to "Prototype a shared insight ecosystem for South Yorkshire".

Our funding bid was declined with this feedback

"This project is a great opportunity to explore new ways of gathering and using data with local government and stakeholders for the good of the community. It fits well with the theme of collecting and using community data, and I believe it has real potential for funding."

Hmm. So we did what we believe in and just shared the bid we wrote and will try to find a way to make it happen anyway. Here it is.

While I was looking through some older slides I came across this AI & Data framework I put together a couple of years ago. It was designed for helping teams think about areas including Governance, Data Infrastructure, Team capabilities, feedback etc when developing products and/or teams. Probably lots missing, but might be a useful starting point.

T'other Tom shared all the maps from phase 2 of the Neighbourhood mapping work, with new citizen maps, and other data sources layered on top. The important thing for me is how they are categorised not just by what they contain, but also by what type of question they are trying to answer

🟢 Where are the existing assets in neighbourhoods on which we can build?
🟢 What are some of the shared resources that span and connect neighbourhoods?🟢 What are some key things to consider and how are they distributed across neighbourhoods?
🟢 How might we visualise the fluidity of neighbourhoods and communities of place?
🟢 What other maps are available already to support our thinking?

As always, Maps as conversations

Applied for two things. One to be a board member on a National Park. The other to be on the next series of Gladiators. Two things I won't get, but had to have a go.

Met Doug Belshaw in person! He came to see a documentary about me & a friend attempting to run the length of the river tees. Was good to catch up in person.

Other things

Bought a new tent. Alpkit Tarpstar. Such a cool little tent for running adventures, uses a hiking pole as the tent pole.

Did my monthly 'get in some water somewhere new', but only just. Jumped in the River Tees (ok by new I mean new this year). I think I'll map a little map of where I've been and some form of ratings, like jump height, vibes, nearest sandwich etc.