Weeknote 37
Breadnotes, Tech Freedom, saying no, starting a couple of new bits of work, learning about Ice Breaker One and Free Ice Cream, resilience in practice, redesigning my website.
I spent Sunday night watching the Superbowl so monday was a right-off. I've watched american football since the 90's when it was on Channel 4, my brother getting me into it. We've continued to travel to watch games every year, and always watch the superbowl. We even played for a few years...until the day(week) after aches got too bad.
What I did
- Tuesday was spent on the Organisational Resilience programme, running a reflection session and a resilience in practice session, focused on data storytelling and spectrum of collaboration. Reflection can feel like something to skip, but in my experience this is where learning really happens.
- Had a couple of kick off sessions with Annie & Ed from T4GSW (also nice to see Nissa on a call, if only briefly). They are running a Digital Inclusion Mapping project and I'm helping with some of the backend data bits, mainly in airtable.
- Met with Sam & Simon from Free Ice Cream. We've crossed paths on the socials for a number of years and finally found time to have a chat. It was great to hear all the things they've worked on, the cross over with Maps as conversations https://www.relationalmapping.co.uk/ & Understory
- Also had a lovely and really interesting chat with Julia from Ice Breaker One. I've seen various bits from IB1 which always looked good and interesting and totally up my street, but I admittedly didn't always know exactly what they did, both the depth and the breadth, so the chat with Julia was really good. Their Perseus project looks brilliant, smart open data for unlocking money and finance for net zero, what's not to like?
Spent some time with Doug exploring maybe bidding for a piece of work...which we ultimately decided not to. And instead spent our time focusing on an idea we've had for a while, around supporting understanding and choices around tech. Avid readers might remember us putting a pitch into the Catalyst fund to run a programme we called 'Reclaim The Stack' which got turned down. We've been kicking this around for a while and decided to spend time not writing a bid to develop the key concepts, programme structure and supporting materials. And then we spun up a website to introduce it!
And so, here you go TechFreedom
We'll be announcing a cohort based programme and the resources soon, but you can drop your email in the website above to be kept up to date!
While I was putting the TechFreedom site together I realised that my own website, The Good Ship had become The Mediocre Shit website. I'd neglected it for so long, spending more effort on The Data For Action one, and other tools and resources, and I needed to do something about it. So I put together a fast and very lightweight site where I can describe what I do and show all the various things I've built and made. I've realised that I have A LOT OF STUFF that I've shared over time, but I've made a start putting them up on the new website. Go check it out obviously
Tom Campbell Watson
Edit...
Clearly lost track this week...as I also published Bridging the Data Gap: A Semantic Translation Layer for UK Poverty Data a post thinking about metadata and natural language (it's more interesting than it sounds 😂)
None work things
In none work news I made some nice sourdough this week, the sun actually appeared and I went to watch Matila the Musical which I love.
The Stage of Matila the Musical, The Forest in the snow and sunshine, a frankly banging sourdough
Interesting things
- TBM 406: Seeing Everything, Understanding Nothing (The Context Trap)
- Searching for Birds - An interactive story about the birds that capture our curiosity, told through data, visuals and illustrations - this was bloody excellent!!
- Building Civic Strength for an AI Era
- AI for Future Cities: Nature - This issue of AI for Future Cities explores how AI can reshape how we design for and understand nature in our cities. The research draws on cutting-edge practice and emerging trends to imagine the future of our cities in world where AI has augmented our approach for designing for and with nature.
- Better to Spend out?
- Data infrastructure as economic power | by Gavin Starks | Feb, 2026 | Medium
- Collective Intelligence Design Playbook (beta) - Tools, tactics and methods to harness the power of people, data and technology to solve global challenges
- mist - Collaborative markdown editor