Weeknote 32
First weeknote of the new year. A bit on my epic christmas trip to scandinavia, closing down Data for Action, open for new projects and collaborations, building an llms.txt generator and prototyping the context passport idea.
So yes it's 2026, i'm back working and it's time to fire up the weeknotes again! I found a lot of value in writing these last year, helping to clear my thoughts, create a rhythm and they were useful to look back on.
What I did
So before I get into the work side of things I want to still remember the time between Weeknote 31 and now. I spent an absolutely epic time in Norway and then Copenhagen over christmas. I saw pods of orcas, I saw a humpback whale, I may have cried, I went sledding with dogs, we fed reindeers, I swam in the sea in the arctic circle for my december dip, I ate pastries and drank Glögg, and I finally properly saw the Northern Lights. I took some rubbish photos The world felt good, and rather insignificant for a while.
Ok, back to work mode.
We announced that Data For Action would be closing and I wrote a post about the things I've learned and what I hope can be learned from it in The end of Data For Action. I've known for a while this was coming as t'other Tom is going to take up a very cool role at South Yorkshire Combined Authority as Head of Innovation as part of the Bloomberg funded programme (which is running at multiple mayoral authorities). I'm sad we won't be working together, but I'm genuinely pleased for him.
People said some nice things about the work we've done which was nice. Interestingly quite a number of people got in touch with me about potential work and collaborations following the announcement. I don't know whether people thought I was just too busy for that before, or I felt was happening at the back end of last year there was just more things happening I don't know. But for the avoidance of doubt, I'm still around, still working, and very much up for interesting work and collaborations. I have things on, but I'm exploring new opportunities and have a gap in more strategic things at the moment with Data For Action closing, so please do get in touch if you want to!
Also this week
We kicked off the Organisational Resilience programme with a welcome session online, just a chance to meet each other ahead of really getting into it. It was nice, lots of positivity. Took a trip down to peterborough to work through some of the Collective Resilience ideas we have the programme, which is the bit I'm really leading. The concepts and ideas seemed to land well with everyone.
Had catch ups with a couple of clients about kicking off some work. Always good to check in after Christmas and see if anyone can remember what we were going to do!
Caught up with Tom about final bits for winding down DFA
Also spent a bit of time on Friday afternoon with Doug "faffing about" as he describes it well!
Building
Also spent quite a bit of time this week building. I've got a couple of very busy weeks where I'm going to be out of the house delivering work, so I took the chance this week to explore some ideas.
First up, I decided to explore a prototype of the idea I sketched out in My Memory - A startup idea for 2026. I built a fairly simple web app to create contexts, share them and extract them from chat based conversations and documents. Sometimes building something helps to figure out which bits are useful and which aren't. If you are interested feel free to check it out here.
The other thing I spent time on was building a tool which creates an llms.txt file for organisations, particularly focused on the areas I work in. There are several of these tools about, but they aren't very good, especially for the types of sectors I work in. So I built a tool that can
- generate a file from a url
- assess it against some criteria and
- make recommendations for improvements.
- It has templates for charities, funders, public sector bodies.
- It can get enhanced data for those in the charity sector.
'I' built it as an open source tool which you can get below if you wish. It can run locally, but only as Command Line Interface (CLI). I say I built it, but actually I also used this as a chance to fully explore Claude Code, and actually Claude Code wrote a lot of the code - I'd say it was about an 85/15 split on code writing, with an inverse split of 15/85 in 'thinking' about what to do. This feels right. Anyway I plan to add a web interface for this at some point.
dataforaction-tomInteresting things - (too many so i now have a backlog)
- APIs all the way down
- We removed 80% of our agent’s tools
- Why I Am Not Losing My Job to AI Not in 2026, Not in 2035
- The Policy Playbook - Bending the arc of policy towards public good
- AI is changing the physics of collective intelligence—how do we respond?
- There Is No Such Thing as Impact Investing
- The Ground we Travel
- Boring Tiny Tools - this and Simon Willisons The year I built 110 tools are very on point and worth a read.
- Certainty artefacts: why data feels solid, why life isn’t, and why my brain went “ohhhh!” on a train back from Scotland
- What Next? Philanthropy Trends and Predictions for 2026
- The Enshittifinancial Crisis - how long have you got?! A LONG read, but worth it.
- Who knows this source code?
- When services think for themselves
- [IMHO] Okay OKRs and unproblematic prioritisation
- Complex Systems Frameworks Collection