Weeknote 48
A few days trail running meant a very busy start to the week. Delivered the first TechFreedom session, shared a few tools, met with new client, some nice chats.
Or nota semanal
What I did
Another shorter work week as I spent Thursday to Sunday on a trail running catch up with friends. This meant Monday to Wednesday was super packed and I also feel behind on several things after Easter.
I spent much of Monday setting up the whimsical board for the TechFreedom launch. For curiosity I played with the MCP server to see if an AI assistant could create the lovely board layout I wanted. As I suspected, it could not. I feel this is because there are no boundaries within which to work, there is so little structure, and because there probably isn't enough data on what a good board layout looks and feels like.
Tuesday I had a board meeting which is probably the last board meeting for the outgoing CEO, so we had a lot of things to discuss, interims & recruitment, transition, managing relationships.
Met with Harry for a quick chat about AI and products, which was good fun and exhilarating.
Did more work on the Race Report data platform. It's getting there now and even though there is still work to do, the upload features are nearly done and much of the infrastructure provisioning is sorted.
Met a new client who want help thinking about service journeys and whether the tools and platforms they had are the ones they actually need now as both the organisation has changed, and so have the platforms themselves (especially Salesforce) - it was also interesting to hear them question whether the platforms they use aligned with their ethics (and I didn't even talk about TechFreedom...but I obviously will later!)
Talking of TechFreedom, we actually launched the first cohort. It a small group, but really engaged, great conversations, questions and thinking. I feel people enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. As this is a pilot we are going to get feedback to help shape future versions.
Shared Bearing with a few people and updated a couple of models and scoring. Will need to add GPT-5.5 but need to get some usage and data before I do.
I'd love the scoring to be a more community based thing, but just need to get more data by people using it first I think.
Shared Flowlance a bit more widely and got a bunch of new users. Baby steps but people who do use it seem to like it. I was asked about whether it would work for Making Tax Digital - this is something I have explored and technically I've actually built everything to do this, but the overheads both in terms of Open Banking connections and the compliance burden isn't worth it at the moment.
Also shared a bit about my new consultancy offer which I've named...Shipyard. Good old nautical theme, matches with the Good Ship and is actually about supporting teams to, well, ship. No, not sailing, but building things.
Tom Campbell Watson
Trail running
Good few days of trail running near Girona
Links This Week
- Writing tools for the agent that wrote them
- The internet is splitting in two
- Block and Build: Philanthropy’s Fight Club - How a coalition of American grantmakers decided to stop funding the status quo and start funding the barricades and why Europe is still stuck writing polite grant applications while Rome burns.
- - YouTube - Robin Berjon discusses digital sovereignty and infrastructure
- How Did DOGE Cuts Hit Your State?
- Proton Meet Isn't What They Told You It Was
- Launching the findings of our inquiry: Sustaining place-based systems change - Renaisi
- Hidden in plain sight - Governments across Europe are racing to define their place in the global AI economy and work out what AI sovereignty means to them. In doing so, they are in danger of ignoring a key tool of strategic leverage for both concerns - open source.
- Broadside: write once, post many, keep everything - A self-hosted social posting tool, ensuring you own your own content In my ongoing experiments with ai-assisted dev of tools