By Tom Watson in weeknote — 21 Feb 2025

Weeknote 21-02-25

Writing about Retros, sharing the Question Bank, lots of thinking about closure and endings. Some really interesting things I saw this week.

Weird week this one. Started off flying on Monday, lots of just ticking off tasks and getting stuff done. Got some good hard running and training in. Wednesday were rubbish. I was physically tired and mentally, with the world, just a bit lost/angry. Pulled it back round Thursday and Friday and just started to firing some stuff out there again.

What I did

Lots of arranging and scheduling stuff for future weeks. Have closed out a couple of projects and moving onto closing out another couple.
Did some prototyping for a referral/connection app - bit of Airtable and Frontend stuff
Wrote a couple of requirement docs for CRM's. If anyone is a Microsoft Dynamics specialist, please get in touch!
Main thing I did this week was write up the learning from a retro post I'd started last week. Felt like it landed fairly well. You can read that post in a couple of places

Also put out another post about our Question Bank version 2. We've put it live as a next stage prototype. Here's a bit of blurb

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Last year Data For Action did some work on developing Insight Infrastructure for the sector. As part of this work we experimented with using tools to gather questions people wanted to be able to answer following our Question Based approach to data and insight. We think taking a question based approach can be helpful and that it can be even more helpful if we can do this out in the open and collectively determine which questions we should focus our efforts on. Our process intentionally asks users to consider what answering their question could mean and what they could do if they had an answer. We think this is a vital part of taking action.

You can see and play with the Question Bank here

Impact Questions - The Question Bank

The Question Bank

Lots more stuff starting to happening with the Neighborhood mapping. t'other Tom shared the original messiness which I think is a reminder that doing something new, different or just good is often messy, and thats ok

Good chat with t'other Tom about a piece of work we are actually going to bid for. Keeping to our No Bullshit principle we are going with 'what do we actually think is the best thing' not what would hit the tender the most accurately. We'll see what comes of it.

Things I thought about

Inspired by Tris post I thought a lot about Governance. I know, governance can feel boring, but it's not and it's vital. I thought about a few different examples and I'm interested in having Nature or a part of nature on your board. Patagonia was a famous example of having Planet Earth as stakeholder. Not that that isn't cool, but I'm a bit more interested in how things like https://betternotstop.com/nature-on-the-board/ and this play out. Interested to learn more, hopefully learn lots from chatting to Kyle.

Thought about closures and closed/propriety products a lot. I was sad to hear about the closing of YMCA George Williams College/Centre for Youth Impact. I've worked with them previously, and know there is a lot of good people and good work. It had me thinking about closures and the loss of things in general. I know that the https://decelerator.org.uk/ is around to support better endings, and that's a good thing. But I always think about where insight, learning and knowledge goes. It's a big reason why I'm a fan of Open by Default, Open Data, Creative Commons, etc, as I think it offers at least some insulation.

I thought about the removal/destruction/alteration of data over in the USA. The fact something like this is happening before our eyes is not got. Things like this are suddenly so vital.
I thought about who gets to choose what can be accesses and used and how too often this choice is in the hands of people who's sole goal is money. Proprietary software has failed: a community-driven open source security proposal - good read.

Interesting things

What public datasets will have high impact on AI in the UK?
Amazing quote in this

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No one cares what you do unless you think about it. No one cares what you think unless you do it.

Week off next week. You might get a picture of the sea.