Sign in Subscribe
By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 51

Lots of great work, conversations and ideas really filled my cup this week. Plus I had some nice food, which always helps. Lots of interesting links this week.

Weeknote 51

The last few weeks have been quite tough, I've been travelling a lot, ill, and just feeling very discombobulated. I'd began doubting myself, and getting a bit frustrated with 'hand waving' things. And that's how I started this week, but, this week has filled my cup so they say, and at weeks end I'm feeling much better.

What I did

  • I got a lovely email at the start of the week from someone who is worked with the week prior, and that really kicked of my upward wave.
  • Tuesday I pretty much took off, went running in the forest, made myelf some Shakshouka for lunch. Very nice
Shakshouka in a pan
  • I did have one chat on Tuesday with Bhavyatta who is looking at some very cool and knotty data things, which was a really interesting first chat with lots to think about.
  • Wednesday I spent the day with Refugee Futures, in person, going through their approach to impact/learning/strategy. A lovely team. In the morning I'd joked on socials about instructing AI agents to get me pastries...as soon as I walked into the room someone handed me a pastry...maybe this does work 😂
  • Thursday was a busy day, but a good one. Co ran a session with Liz for the Fore. We've got to a really nice stage me and Liz where we just trust each other, so when the other is doing something we can really listen and learn from each other which is lovely.
  • Speaking of Liz - she and Flora are running what sounds like the most lovely session called "Hedgerows and Pollinators"
Hedgerows and Pollinators. A Resilience Workshop For Small Charities.
Navigating organisational uncertainties and financial realities with collective wisdom and practical tools.
Eventbrite
  • Caught up with Stu on a bunch of things
  • Met with a new client who are really struggling with their database, so much so that they've resorted to using SharePoint 'because it's easier'...you know things are bad when that is the case.
  • Friday met with Doug in Newcastle where we fully planned the final TechFreedom session for next week, scoped out a talk proposal for Mozfest (Wilding is the theme - right up my street) and went off on wild and exciting tangents about some form of entity we might do.
  • Had a pastry from Pink Lane obviously
A danish. It was not small

Also met Dan from Food Ethics Council which was really nice.

Had a lot of DMs and connections this week about lots of things. Some potential work, some who knows, but sometimes it can feel like you're shouting into the void at times, but probably people are seeing and noticing and just keep at it.

Writing & Other things

  • Sent out the second TechFreedom newsletter
  • Published a post called The Constant Gardeners (technically last weekend but was after last week's weeknote so including here)
  • Published a "Strategy in 10 mins - ish" guide. Of course it's not 10 mins, but it's meant to simplify Strategy, and obviously includes both a garden metaphor and a sailing metaphor. People seemed to like it. Still a work in progress.
strategy-in-10-mins
strategy-in-10-mins.pdf
345 KB
download-circle
  • Did some more work on a local version of Open Recommendations, using localised models for extraction and embedding. Slower, but local and private. The OCR is still the trickiest part to do locally. Sidenote - I showed Open Recommendations to a few funders, one of them the Lottery, they seemed impressed. Suggested maybe they could make all their reports and evaluations actually searchable, explorable, useful. Never heard from them again.
  • Did some work on a follow up to my piece The Grant Application Is Dead. What Comes Next? - both a concept piece and an actual working demonstration. Hope to get something live in the next few weeks.
  • Did some updates to Drift forms app based on feedback, improving prompt capability. Began building an internal agent for it, which could be quite exciting...well as exiting as Forms get anyway.

Thought about

Perception Vs reality

Perception Vs reality when it comes to change, or to most things really. For every situation, the people within it will all have different perceptions of what the change means. Two people on a hill describing what they see. Both different. Are any of them wrong? Try guiding them off that hill.

Gaps in information will often be filled by individuals with their own perception. That's why communication, transparency, maps(!) are really important. But even then, we often miss an opportunity to understand people's perception, to really listen, because that is reality. Ask. Spend time. Listen for what people don't say.

So you want to be agentic? Your foundations don't impress me much.

Agents are cool, everyone's into it. But, aside from the large 'oh shit' moments where agents run wild and delete whole codebases or databases, foundations are magnified when you move into the agent space. Rules, structure, direction, governance. Partly the draw of agents is that they can make 'sense' of messy situations, why bother structuring information if we can just send an agent in there. Aside from the token burn, and the amplification of bias, the risks and the wasted opportunity are massive. Knowing where to have rules, structure and guardrails, so that you can leave space for wildness is important. If you don't have them before agents, you surely aren't agent ready.

Interesting things

Subscribe to Tomcw.xyz

Don’t miss out on the latest issues. Sign up now to get access to the library of members-only issues.
[email protected]
Subscribe