By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 20

A busy week of getting stuff done. Sharing a new tool called Map my Patch, random thoughts on the civil society covenant (and how it's about whether any of it actually turns to action), a call for testers of Open Recommendations, pictures of mountains (obviously) and interesting things

Weeknote 20
A rainbow peaking out from the clouds in the mountains. A view from my alpine hut last week.

Schools out for summer

Ah the end of the school term. A mix of joy and slight terror. For the past few years I've been lucky enough to really plan for the 6 weeks holidays, taking most of them off, heading off in the campervan. I feel lucky to have been able to do this, although it's not always easy, there's always a trade off between time and money and the gnawing sense that people won't wait for you. It wasn't always this way. So yes I'll be sort of winding down client work for the next few weeks soon. Which means I am frantically trying to finish loads of stuff off!

What i've done.

So I didn't write a weeknote last week because I was off running and hiking in Austria (do you ever actually work Tom?). I traveled there by train and so was my first trip in the tunnel. It wasn't all plain sailing though as once I got to Brussels ALL the trains to Germany were off, meaning a long and rather interesting trip in a taxi to Koln. The weather in the Alps was interesting with fresh snowfall above 2200m, so naturally I decided to hit a peak that was 2600m in shorts. Anyway, the week was lovely. Here are some pictures for your mountain pleasure.

Pictures of mountains, waterfalls, lakes, some with snow, some of lovely granite. One picture is me pulling a stupid pose obviously.

I got back on Saturday night and then this week has been full on.

  • Facilitated a reflection/ planning session for a local collaboration looking to improve things for people with No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF). Met some new people, provided structure for conversations, captured insight, helped them find direction forward. It was fun. Wrote the write up in record time.
  • Wrote a requirements document for a charity in Cumbria who I visited just before I went to Austria. Outlined their system requirements and also pointed them to both the Question Canvas and the Question Tool after they requested help with getting everyone in the organisation to really get involved in what data they need and will use.
  • Visited a small charity in Stockton who I'd previously helped choose a CRM. They've been using it for 6 months and it's really working for day to day, but they need help with thinking a bit about more strategic data. Was able to make some suggestions that will really help on the day and then am going to review their outcomes and actually make them mean something datawise.
  • Had a catch up with Tris about all things open. Always a good chat filled with lots of interesting and challenging (in a good way) thoughts. Also I always come away with something new and interesting to look at or read. This was one https://integrityaction.org/devcheck/ - a really interesting community sourced fix index. Thinking about how this relates to community sourcing measures of progress (for Open Recommendations)
  • Caught up with Jo about The List. Hoping to get a V1 finished by next week. Talked a lot about theme clustering, and increasing understanding about how changes to the funding landscape affect the eco-system. Also heard that The List has ruffled a few feathers, which obviously means it's doing some good things and energised me to get the new version out there!
  • Caught up with Liz about the redesign of the Organisational Resilience programme. Talked principles, questions, resources. Kicking this off properly next week

Put our mapping protoype into the open. We've called it Map my Patch.
It was inspired by our work in mapping Neighborhoods. We wanted a simple tool to allow us to create surveys that allowed people to respond to questions and also draw geographic shapes. And so we built one.

We built it to help people who want to build a picture of places or patches in both geographic terms by drawing shapes, and in words and numbers. You can create your own surveys, share them and collect responses all for free. And everything can be exported in CSV or JSON format for further analysis. Give it a go. Let us know what you think.

Map my patch - Survey Tool by Data For Action
Combine the power of questions and maps. Draw shapes, collect responses, and analyse geographic insights all in one platform.
Map my patchData For Action

What I thought about

The new Civil Society Covenant was announced yesterday. The announcement very nearly passed me by. There a time in previous work where I would have most certainly been more tuned into this...and probably would have been somewhat involved. But I now feel very far removed from such things.

I did read it though. My first thoughts were related to language. There were quite a lot of 'Civil Society will...' and lots of 'Government aims to...' which stuck me as a simple way to understand the power dynamic still present despite the terms 'partnership' and 'collaboration'.

Anyway, I got over that. I know how hard it is to do these things, get agreement and sign off.

There's some nice bits around openness and transparency (though this section has the most will and aims to wording). But generally my thoughts were that I can't really argue with most of it, but none of it really matters unless there is actually action in meeting it. And action only comes from a bit of accountability. Many of the things in the new Civil Society Covenant are things that have recommended before. It's the doing where we fall down.

So how do we keep track of the action? Well I've added it to Open Recommendations obviously with a view to keeping track of progress and action.

Speaking of Open Recommendations, it's now up to 150 sources (reports, toolkits and evaluations etc) from across the sector, all with tags and embedding that can be searched, related and used in a chat interface. Do you want access to help us test it? If so, let me know.

Interesting things

The Irreversibility Framework | Linktree
A toolkit for lasting change: resources, insights & strategies for impact.
Linktree