Weeknote 22

I know what you've all been thinking, yes all 3 of you who read these things (thanks I do appreciate you reading my brain dumps) ... where are Tom's weeknotes? What happened?!

I'll tell you what happened...it was summer, and in amongst the trips here and there, and spending time with family, I honestly had no idea what day of the week it was, let alone what I'd done that week. It was nice though.

Things I did over the summer

Spent time in Pembrokshire. My it was lovely. Great coastal running, great beaches, great food. Yes great food. Finally visited Cafe Mor which I've first seen on some social post about 5 years ago and held that memory in my brain until I one day was there, eating a lobster roll and oysters. Did my 'dip in a new place' for August in Pembrokshire (multiple times). Might do a map of all the places and rate them by coldness/awesomeness index

Spent time in the Lakes on several occasions. Lots of hiking, running, swimming. Also did the via ferrata at Honister which was a novel experience. I've done lots of climbing in the lakes, including most of the classics from Classic Rock, and I've done lots of alpine scrambling on chains etc, but I've never done via ferrata. It was good fun, even if I felt more comfortable when I could touch the rock rather than the metal staples.

Had my first ever trip to Lindisfarne which considering I live in the North East is shocking really. It was nice and peaceful.

Finally got my Pizza mojo back after much experimentation from which I learned a lot, but ended with some shitty pizzas at points!

And so this week it's been back to work, well at least for a few days.

What I've done

• Had an interview for a piece of work we pitched for at Data For Action. It was a good chat. We did what we could, I wouldn't change our pitch. Fingers crossed.
• Had a chance to dive properly into the Organisational Resilience work, tweaked a few of the Principles, I think they are coming together now, worked on the communications, which is going to be really important. Excited by this again and feel like it's very timely. Will be sharing some things on this in the coming weeks as we really get cracking.
• Did more work on The List website. Lots of good updates. Mainly working on things like search and filters and auto updates for the various external data sources. Had to also reconcile lots of previous entries with the new format, which was a little challenging...until I used https://openrefine.org/docs/manual/reconciling with the feed from https://findthatcharity.uk/ which saved me so much time! It's now with some people for testing so will see if it lands how we hope it will.
• Looked at moving off of Airtable to Baserow - will get to that when I get more time.
• Moved off Google Suite to Proton, then hit a challenge with calendar bookings that although not insurmountable, and despite some nice suggestions from Doug, it was the straw that broke me. I'm currently halfway between G Suite and Proton...which is not ideal. Principles should cost you something right?
• Had some good, unexpected feedback from a third party, which was nice.
• Set up a few conversations about https://www.openrecommendations.com/ and had some nice feedback about the use of this also!

Interesting things

So apologies for how many things might be here, I've not dumped these for a few weeks.

The ever excellent Pro Cymru shared their AI principles (amongst a couple of other AI bits. It's great. When it comes to advising people about AI (or tech, data or just generally organisationally) i ask what their principles are before we even talk about the technologies. They are so important. So if you don't have any, you should do. And seeing other peoples is a nice way to start, although the main thing to do is actually discuss them and how they relate to you and your organisation. Copy and Paste won't do.

Liz Gadd shared her updated list of sources of information on what climate change and wider environmental issues look like, or might look like, across the UK. Some really great resources, maps, data sources in here. Great stuff.

Mark wrote a piece asking 'What is a Neighbourhood?'. Yes he mentions our work in it, but I think it's a really important question with the current drive for everything is a bloody neighbourhood.

Who owns the River Dart? What a cool piece of investigatory journalism/data map

Interesting project here - a VS Code extension that shows you how green the grid is before you make a big commit or do energy intensive jobs Make your coding greener, one commit at a time!

An excellent resource shared by Alice from Wildlife Trusts - Digital Transformation Maturity Scale

Escaping the Trap of ‘Impact’ Measurement

The illusion of alignment

Using LLMs to write text classification rules

Beyond Human in the loop a framework

Breaking up with Big Tech: A human rights-based argument for tackling Big Tech’s market power - hell to the yeah Amnesty

Meanwhile - Council defends £500k AI deal with Palantir - as I commented on a post about this 'Jesus Christ man, what are we doing?'

AI stuff - feel free to skip if you don't want a splurge of consciousness and links here

I may get round to writing an actual post about this next bit, but in the meantime I present to you - AI is Good/AI is Bad, AI is more efficient/AI is not etc etc.

Inside the relentless race for AI capacity

Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses - hey things are looking better

via GIPHY

but are they...

Google understates its comparative water usage for AI

and is it cool if we just run on gas for our data centres?

via GIPHY

then

Prompt injections as far as the eye can see - eek

Prompt-inject Copilot Studio AI via email, grab a company’s whole Salesforce - double eek

via GIPHY

AI promised efficiency. Instead, it’s making us work harder

I mean honestly, things are not as good as some people say and not as bad as others would say when it comes to AI, specifically GenAI. Like lots of things there is nuance and perspectives. In case I don't get round to the blog, one thing I would say is, if anyone is either one side or the other, see what they are selling you before you take it as written.

I am AI Free - ahh

via GIPHY

Anyway enough of all that let's have some more pictures of the sea