Weeknote 65

What I did

A bit of a random week as I went to things that I wasn't meant to and didn't go ones that I was.

• Monday I was due to attend an in person session of the Ada Community Forum in London, but illness at home meant I couldn't make it which is a shame. It did give me a bit of time back to work on a few client things that I needed to crack on with though. As work potentially starts to ramp up I need to be a bit sharper than I have the last month or so.
• Tuesday I went for an in person meeting. Turns out, it was next week. Fail.
• Wednesday was busy catching up with Doug about actual work and potential work. We prepared for a couple of upcoming client interviews later on wednesday and thursday. Both went well I think, but unlikely to get both. Good conversations though.
• Thursday I spent a bit of time putting together a bit more of a plan around the Digital Sovereignty Unconference. The call out I put out last week got lots of attention, which was nice, and a bit unexpected, so I've had to actual put some structure around what we're asking people! Also led to lots of conversation in various groups and spaces around what do WE mean by sovereignty in this sense (we will have a definition we are using!). Form below to stay up to date FYI.
  

Digital Sovereignty Unconference - Keep up to date

Drift

Me and Doug also joked that maybe we should just rename TechFreedom something to do we Sovereignty as this is all the rage at the minute. The top two contenders are

The Peoples TechFreedom Front of Sovereignty and The Peoples Sovereign Front of TechFreedomness.

We've struggled to fill the cohort this time and probably will have to cancel it. This is a shame. Need to figure out why.

• Caught up about supporting a place based collaboration I worked with two years ago. Sadly/unsurprisingly they need to focus on the things that I helped them identify they needed to work on two years: decision making, governance, learning, rhythms. The boring stuff. It's not flashy. There are no lovely diagrams. It's just the necessary things, that too often get skipped. Try again.
• Did a review of the CADO mapping platform approach. I'm doing little bits of advisory work as they build it. Things to look out for, bits around data structures, bits around deployment.
• Illness caught up with me at the end of the week.

If at first you don't succeed.

Twice this week I had moments where things I've done previously, that didn't really land, have landed. One was when I shared Map my Patch and Soundings and it really opened up peoples minds to what is possible with data and maps. The other was around Bearing - the tool which guides people on which AI models to use.

I think what struck me was that both times I kind of mentioned them in passing. None of them are new, but they were new to the people. And I forget sometimes to stick with stuff, as I'm often off on something else. But not everyone is. And so I should keep on keeping on with things. I alluded to it in previous weeknotes that I've probably been TOO productive, made too many things, that no-one has time to actually pay attention to the things I've done and I need to find a balance between scratching the creativity/new ideas itch, and just staying with the things I've already made.

And so this week, spurred by the interest I spent a bit of time back in Bearing, adding a new agentic category, improving the data model slightly, and making sure models are more up to date, including retiring ones gracefully. I also spent time on improving the repo so that others can contribute to it easily.

Also spent some time improving Drift forms - slightly tweaking the interface, and adding a booking process so I can move off cal.com which has become flaky and a bit all over the place. So you can now book me directly through my own forms platform.

Interesting things

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• BFF Risk & Value Sharing_DiscoveryArc#3_08.10.2026 - Discovery Arc #3: Provocation Paper – v.4Risk & Value Sharing in Bioregional Investment Core Question: How should risk and value be shared among the diverse projects and enterprises within a systemic bioregional investment portfolio so that collective resilience...
• The Neighbourhood That Had No Plan - A story in The Living Places
• Welcome to Opt Out October. Let’s Take Control of Our Data and Our Devices -
• Mapping the children’s workforce — Centre for the Children's Workforce