Weeknote 66

What I did

So in my last weeknote (which I wrote but only just got round to publishing!) I mentioned that illness caught up with me. And so this week has mainly been a battle of illness at home, and trying to do enough work, while also getting enough rest. A good patient I am not.

• Had a conversation with Place Matters about Soundings. They had an interest in the approach and whether it could work in more granular detail IN a place. Short answer yes it could, all the underlying infrastructure is there, as it's been built at various layers of geography. What it would need would be just a bit of focusing in on what other granular data would be useful there. I'd like to do that, but time/money. I did spend a little bit of time adding some Scotland and Wales specific geography and data as it was heavily England focuses initially
• Met with a client to map out their Salesforce usage and why it doesn't really work for them.
• Met with The Relationship Project as I help them consider data and CRM's. Made some progress. I often know fairly quickly what CRM's are probably useful to most organisations. The RP are very different, so it's been a bit more of an exploration, which has been fun actually.
• Met with someone from the North East Mayors office about the Digital Sovereignty Unconference.
• A follow up meeting along with Doug about some potential work. We didn't get it in the end. Probably dodged a bullet on that one.
• Had a kick off meeting with The Wildlife Trusts as we get started on a three year project to support data culture across the network. There's always so many unknowns at this stage of a project, but that's ok. I'm looking forward to it.

Building

Spent a little bit of time on RELAY which is an extension of our Shared AI experiment. I've now got to the stage where there is network redundancy, meaning someone can drop out of the shared network, and the rest of the network can continue. This is pretty important. In the live shared AI experiment, someone closed a browser and the whole thing went down. Not very useful, so providing that we can have a model shared across a network AND have some redundancy is a big step.

Emily got in touch to say the Open Recommendations was playing up, well the chat function was. There had been an underlying model change I had clocked and so it had broken things. Fixed it and then did a few other updates. Always nice to have a kick up the backside to do some bits you've been meaning to do for ages. I actually have a version of Open Recs which can run locally with local models which i really should get out there.

Writing

I had a writing splurge on Saturday morning, writing not 1, not 2, but 3 posts. Sometimes you have things in your head you need to get out.

One was a post called Hello, I'm an agent

One was a post about what do we mean by sovereignty called Sovereignty isn't a place

One was about Trust, specifically about how trust comes from being Trustworthy and that we should remember that when it comes to AI - The only way to build trust is to be trustworthy

Interesting things

• Will this local model fit on my machine? - Choose a local AI model for the memory you have left, understand the settings, and spot when your computer is struggling.
• AI-Driven Development (AIDD) - I haven’t written code by hand in months, and I’ve never felt busier (heard this a lot recently)
• Evaluating Systems change
• UK Research Grants: UK research funding in one place - Search UK research funding in one place: awards from UKRI, NIHR, UK charities and European Commission programmes with UK organisations.
• Landler Pathfinder - See where your operations depend on nature, which nature frameworks reach you, and which programs pay for stewardship, all from one map of your footprint.
• Healthy friction - Disagreement, metacognition and the seven steps to good argument in a democratic society