Weeknote 63
Online/offline maps with Map my Patch, Hive Architects, couple of new bits of work.
What i did
A shorter working week as I handled various life things, with secondary school visits for my daughter (eek), family days in school, doctors, and lifts. But I still managed some good stuff I think.
- Monday I met with The Progressive Farming Trust about some work. It's a small but interesting piece around Open Knowledge. I've said for a while that the general vibe around the sector is one of being less open, so this raised my spirits!
- Tuesday I attended the Ada Lovelace Community Forum as they develop their survey around public attitudes to AI. I gave some feedback on questions, but mainly I listened to other community members thoughts. Then on Wednesday I went to visit a small charity in Sunderland to talk all about systems and information.
- I wrote, and deleted a post all about how the general narrative is that everyone is using and talking about AI but that I don't think this is right in reality. I deleted the post not because I think the overarching point I was making was wrong, but I don't think I was getting my point across in the right way. The conversations this week and for a while now, around the country with people outside of the little tech bubbles is not the same as the narrative suggests. And my frustration is that narratives drive attention away from other things that are important.
- Thursday started with a bang as Doug and I had a conversation about a Spark Grant to run a Digital Sovereignty Unconference in Newcastle. The idea was well received, and the feedback was to go wilder, which is uncommon!
- Also met with Liz on Thursday to discuss what next for the OR programme. We are awaiting the official evaluation, but have been putting together some of the wider resources and plan to take a ready made programme, which we know works, to some funders who might appreciate such a thing.
- Also had a request to go back and do some work with a Local Motion area. Always nice to be asked back, especially when it comes to collaborative/place/governance type things.
Building things
Spent a bit of time this week going back to Map My Patch, a simple survey tool I built back in the Data For Action days. It allows the creation of survey questions and geographic capture in a quick and easy way. Going back to it with fresh eyes, and with better skills probably, was great. Alongside a re fresh of the branding, I've added new ways to draw on the map, no longer just points and shapes, now routes, shaded areas and boundaries.
But more than that, I also made good progress in what I really wanted the tool to be, which is to support mapping both online and offline. Some of the real learning from the Neighbourhood mapping work is that how people interact with things is important. A physical map makes this easier. Allow people to draw on a physical map and they are more likely to do so. But that's not very easy to explore en-mass. So I've been building out Map My Patch to support pulling from paper maps into shape files. Lots of fun!
Sneak peek at the paper map and the digital identification
Wrote
Wrote a piece this morning about our need for Friction, called Finding friction
Watched
Yesterday I went to watch the Banff Mountain Film Festival world tour. I watch it every year. The highlight film in this batch for me was The Hive Architect, a film about a man making places for wild honey bees to make hives. Funny and poignant in equal measure. Well worth 12 minutes of your time
Links This Week
Decision Studio - a Hugging Face Space by llm-semantic-router - Enter a description of a situation and ask any number of decision questions—multiple‑choice, yes/no, or rating‑scale.
tsiconsultancy.com - Doing Great Work Is No Longer Enough: The Incrementalism Paradox and Why We Need To Measure Trajectory #
Megatrends 2026 | Download the Report - CIFS arrived at 11 structurally distinct megatrends that span geopolitics, economics, demographics, climate and sustainability, social life, health, technology, infrastructure, and urbanisation. Together they provide a coherent picture of many of the major transformations shaping our societies over the long term.