By Tom Watson in weeknote — 26 Jun 2025

Weeknote 18

Another thricenote. Lots of building (digital) things. Pictures of my garden, bread and the forest. A free tool and some interesting things

A bee enjoying some borage

Another Thricenote. The weeks have gone in a blur recently and my rhythm for the weekly noting has gotten all out of sorts. But it's ok, do them when you can and when feels right.

What i've done

I've been very head down building things the last few weeks. No not actual physical things, but digital things, which are sort of real right?

I've made lots of progress with Open Recommendations which is pressing because one of the reasons to build it is to maintain as much of the reports and recommendations from YMCA George Williams College/Centre For Youth Impact as they unfortunately close down. They are adding as many of their vast number of reports to Open Recommendations so they will still have a home and be searchable. Circa 100 pdfs is a lot to get through, but with the tool we've built it's pretty quick now! This week I added the community progress mechanism and the similarity features, so now we have the ability to source progress against recommendations and see when we are getting the same recommendations over and over and over again. And I think these are where the real magic could happen. Should be soft launching the site new week I hope!

Released a free tool this past week over on Questions For Action. It's a simple tool to help individuals and teams define and prioritise their questions using Data For Actions approach. This is an approach we've used (successfully) many times with teams. You don't need to use the tool to do it. You can use whatever you want, from post-its, to forms, to airtable bases...we know because that's what we've done. But we thought why not create a free simple tool that allows others to do it. And so we did. It's nothing earth shattering, there's no fancy gadgets, and that's kind of the point. Focus on the questions, focus on the conversations, focus on the action.

I've also been working on version 2.0 of The List with Jo which has been fun. Fundraising is not my thing, and that's part of the fun, just leaning on Jo with her knowledge, but also coming in with stuff like "what do you mean there isn't just an open list of all the Trusts & Foundations in the UK?" and "there's how many?!" (somewhere between 9,381 & 15,412 by my quick research) and "why can't we just make a full list available?". It's been nice to just get back into some Charity Commission, Scottish Charity Register and 360Giving API's and begin connecting this data with the richness and timeliness of the community sourced insight from Jo and the fundraising community.

We scheduled a session to talk about neighbourhood mapping - if you have seen this work and want to know more you can sign up here and join 50 other people who are digging the whole citizen designed boundaries and maps as conversations

Other random things

Wrote a post about playing with YOLO AI Agents and what fun (type 2 or maybe type 3 fun)
Wrote a post about How to do open stuff
Wrote an actual post about The Cheese Toastie

Several pictures of my garden. It's in full messy swing right now with marigolds, ferns, borage, daisies, poppies and more. Garlic is being harvested and dried, courgettes are on the way, lavender is going crazy, buzzing things everywhere.