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By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 58

Meeting people old and new, FIELD STATION essays and experiments, questions>data>dashboards, tending to networks.

Weeknote 58

What I did

Caught up with Jo about The List. Neither of us have been able to spend much time on this recently as we both have bills to pay. I've been picking up the occasional bit of maintenance and updates when I can. We talked about how in September it will have been a year since the website version was released. There are now almost 3000 register users. Approaching 1000 changes logged. Are we just normalising that this is all happening? We now have quite a lot of data, that isn't really tracked openly anywhere else. But how can we use it to improve things? What if a few brave funders used open information like this to consider strategy on more than a single organisation level?

Caught up with Liz to talk about all things Organisational Resilience. The programme we ran has come to an end for now, but where does it go next? LBF have a new strategy, does this fit? Much of the talk from LBF is about scaling impact. I don't know whether a programme like this scales in the traditional sense. Some things don't scale, but they can spread. If you want to create impact in 100 places, build on the impact in the places you already are, and spread the good. For me the OR programme should be working with the people who've already done it, for them to spread to other places (if they want to). Anyway, I've been beavering away at a website outside of the programme, taking things we've learned and putting it available in a resilience pathway. Maybe that scales?

Met with Doug about FIELD STATION as we plan out our first two experiments in the field. We put out our first essay which forms the basis for our first experiment. You'll see a lot of this from us - hypothesis, experiment, learning. For our first experiment we're looking at a cooperative AI, asking the question "Can a group of people run AI for each other on hardware they own, with a public record? " - join us

  • Met with Matt this week, someone who I've known OF for years but never actually talked. It was a great chat. I always thought matt did really interesting stuff, but didn't quite know what it actually was. He shared some of his work he's being doing on Futures with NGO's, and one of the scenarios relates a lot to the TechFreedom stuff I've been doing. His futures stuff is great - https://futures.impact-works.co.uk/
  • Caught up with Dulcie about Datakind, data and AI. It's been a while since we chatted, but talked a lot about local AI, more TechFreedom stuff. Quite a lot of crossover from the chat with Matt earlier in the day.
  • Attended my first meeting of the Ada Lovelance Community Forum on AI. Was nice to begin seeing what this might look like and how I might contribute.
  • Had a couple of conversations about potential new interesting work. Yes I am available...

Building

Shared a bit of a teaser of a tool I began working on about 6 months ago, but only really began figuring it out recently. The premise is simple - what if we rethought how we use technology to manage relationships and connections? Or more simply - imagine a CRM wasn't designed around data, but around the messy way humans make relationships. Seemed to get peoples attention. Will be sharing with the first testers later this week.

Screenshot from tending. Write about moments, and tending recognises your connections

Also shared a bit of a random experiment I've been working on, called Soundings. It mixes a question first approach to data, data about place, and just in time dashboards. It's little bit towards Bridging the Data Gap: A Semantic Translation Layer for UK Poverty Data, but basically allows people to ask questions in natural language about a place or two, and get back a just in time insights dashboard from a load of open data sources. You can play with it here - please don't use it for anything serious, it's a bit janky, and will probably break at points. But it's fun to show what is possible, or could be possible.

Soundings

None work

Met some friends in the lakes at the weekend. Had a nice run out and threw myself in the lake after, which was much needed, had some personal news which has thrown me a bit.

A view of derwent water and catbells. You could see for miles. Even skiddaw looks clear.

Not enough work on the van this week. Must do better next.

Less links this week, too busy doing

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