By Tom Watson in weeknote — 14 Jun 2026

Weeknote 54

The Slow Post week. That was the main thing. That should probably be the main thing more. I also wrote a couple of things about Neighbourhoods, Responsible AI, did some building, and some work. But mainly, just go slower.

My forest bouquet I made this week with ferns and bluebells

What I did

A rapid start to the week followed by a slowing, more thoughtful approach.

I started the week catching up with SOS about the Race Report data platform. It's live now, but still some bits to work through like two factor authentication, and some general UX stuff. First submission in. It feels like we've got much of the main platform there, but as always the 20% is where the hard work is
Caught up with Jesse for coaching. It's been a while, as holidays and various other things got in the way. The space was probably useful as I'd done a lot of reflecting and the timing worked. I'm going to stick to a more spread out rhythm as I think that works for me. One thing I talked about is that when we first worked together I was trying to figure out the lulls, my low energy times, as I had a tendency to have periods of massive productivity and then lulls. I worked on that, and figured it out. But now I am facing a different challenge, how to get off the exponential hyper productivity. Since the turn of the year I have been flying. Several products, writing, new projects, whoosh. But I was at risk of burning out.
I think my body and sub-conscious mind noticed before I fully did by creating The Slow Post.
More work on the OR programme materials. Plan to have a version out by the end of the month. All creative commons obvs.
Tuesday I joined a workshop the Food Ethics Council were running to develop a responsible AI policy in the open. I love this. They invited others in their network to discuss it and share ideas for concerns and approaches. I gave an intro and stayed for the rest of the workshop. I turned the talk I gave into a webpage of ideas including links to lots of good stuff, it feels nicer to do that than slides or a pdf. You can view it https://good-ship.co.uk/responsible-ai/
Wednesday was the day I'd set for The Slow Post. It was a simple idea, and one I kind of just threw out there, not really expecting anything more. It seemed to strike a chord with people, and others wanted to join. So I actually had to do some organising! I decided to use workflows on Drift to do this, as it was already pretty much set up for it, sort of. I would randomly match people, each would fill in their address, and only when both had supplied this, would each be shown, and only once, and then that was it. A simple and easy solution. Except of the matches, half the people filled it in, and pretty much the other half didn't! So Tuesday night I had to rejig, and do what I should have done all along, which is just match people as they responded. Anyway, a bit of late night feature building on Drift and it was ready.

And so the day came. I did my Slow Post. Here's what I thought about

I stood letting the wind rush over me, listening to the birds. A chaffinch, a swift, then a kestrel. I stopped for flowers. I'm usually running.

I thought about how I'm the same age now as my dad was when he first handed me a guitar and said I was joining the band. I wondered how that had happened. Was I that old, or was he that young? I hummed some songs anyway. My head is usually drowned in music or podcasts.

I thought about slowing down more. I'm usually running.

So it was a much needed reset for me. But what I hadn't quite expected was to read and see how much people valued it themselves. Several people shared their day on Linkedin, some shared via a form with me, and others just shared with their match. It was lovely to read. I think I'll do it again, probably seasonal, as I love noticing the seasons change, so this gives me an excuse.

Writing

I wrote up two posts this week. One on the Responsible AI workshop.

The other was exploring whether we've lost the meaning of the word neighbourhoods

Tools

Made the enhanced assessment of https://llmstxt.social/ free this week. The initial creation of the file was always free, but I did have a small charge for the enhanced assessment, which is basically like a mini website content audit. This was to pay for the hosting infrastructure, but since moving more things local (and a better internet connection) I can now run this for free.

Have begun getting interest in Glade a tool for governance. Yes it's got some AI features which you can turn on or off (default is off) but is designed to support making decision making and governance more visible, both internally AND if you want, externally.

Improved some of the webhook features of Drift to include payment details handled through stripe. I tested this out by building myself a supporters page on my website with an open ledger of supporters. Yes, you can support me making open resources! Or you can just pay for things like Drift or Glade, or you know, hire me for things.

Links This Week

Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - so look Fable 5 was banned for all non US citizens. This isn't about a model. This is about ownership, sovereignty, censorship, TechFreedom. Don't get caught up in the model. Think what this means. This is what I've been warning you about.
AI Economics for Dummies - this is bloody excellent. "Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit." Bravo sir, bravo
OpenMaps — Create interactive maps from open data
What if data centers aren’t about AI? – Still Water Lab
Human Bottlenecks
CX Corner 55: Your insight is fine. You just don't have a process for action
Proton Docs - European Digital Sovereignty
Fileverse | Privacy-First & Self-Sovereign Collaboration Suite
chris-m-whong.medium.com - NYC Neighborhoods: A Mobile Reference Map for New Yorkers on the Go

What I did

Writing

Tools

Links This Week

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