Weeknote 52

This is the first 'double weeknote' of the year. I'd be on a bit of a heater with weeknote consistency, but the previous week was very busy and then I was trying to get ready for a last minute trip to cornwall for half term, panicing about my van getting fixed, dealing with the gas company ripping up the street, and honestly just didn't have the energy or headspace to write one. So here we are

What I did

• We finished the first cohort of TechFreedom! The third session was about planning, helping cohort plan their approach in their organisations. It was a good session, but what was apparent to all I think, is that the readiness within an organisation, culturally, is one of the most important aspects. No list of alternatives will ever help here. And it's not going to be a quick thing. The cohort are the first, which means they are really at the forefront of this, most people are not there yet. Although there has been a small rise in media coverage of 'sovereignty' and such discussions, it hasn't really hit critical mass yet, so most people will not be thinking along these same lines of our lenses: Jurisdiction, Lock in, Surveillance, Continuity, Price hikes. The 'green' sustainability aspect is a a bit more widely recognised, and perhaps this is a way to start a conversation. Also, the more the AI price squeeze starts to hit, the more people will start paying attention.

Anyway, it was great to do the first cohort, the feedback has been really positive. We've got some things to tweak, but I think we've hit on an approach that can work. I'd really like to do an in-person approach, I think that could be really powerful, for a number of reasons. We've got a mini TechFreedom session at TechNExt in a couple of weeks, so a chance to test out that concept.

I've always maintained that Funders have an important role, not just in funding work like this, but in the way they communicate with their grant holders - the language they use, how they support with Technology. But I'm not sure most funders have the language themselves at the minute.

• Met with James Martin early in the week for a great chat, prompted by James really liking Bearing. James experience and insight into AI and Tech Sustainability is extensive and as a communicator by background really cuts through how to talk about this stuff. I got some great ideas for further expanding Bearing, firstly by making use of EcoLogits for grounding some of the sustainability scores, and secondly, by improving the open data Bearing is producing, because James was using it and asking questions. I've since done some updates to bearing to do just that, improving the open data model, and bringing in the Ecologits data.

We now have close to 500 task categorisations through Bearing, showing how people 'really' want to use AI models. I think this is more valuable than a survey.

• Met with Edd who has a new job as a social housing provider. Great to catch up and hear about his new role and the things he's wrestling with.
• Had a couple of client meetings about some up coming work.
• Met with Ed about Open Questions and a new Question Bank - you know I love a question bank. Going to rejig some previous code to see if a simplified version can help them out over at Climate Barometer.
• Spent some time working through consolidating all the resources and insights for the OR programme. We've produced a lot over the last year, and as we reach the end of delivery in two places, I want to consolidate into a resource pack and website.

Building stuff

• As mentioned, I've done a decent bit of work updating Bearing to v 0.8.0 and then 0.9.0 as you can see in the changelog
• Added a new feature to DriftForms allowing users to share form responses with none users, allowing password control, email control, and granular field permissions, meaning you can hide specific fields when sharing (allowing anonymisation) - most form apps won't let you do this, creating a better moat for them, I'm against that (which is one of the may reasons I'm not rich). BUT what I do hope is that enough people find value and subscribe to a tool which is better than most form tools, cheaper, and run ethically.
• Shared Glade with the wider world. I've been sitting on this for a while having built it back in January. It's a tool for governance, running meetings, taking notes and actions, keeping a living glade of your decisions. Yes it's AI assisted, but only if you want. The main thing was to try and make governance less boring, and allow the open sharing of governance and decisions. Too much stuff never sees the light of day around decisions, Glade is designed to help with that. And it's meant to do some visual stuff as well, with decisions becoming trees, and the connections between decisions becoming roots that grow
• Did more work on my open-org idea
• Had fun running some Hermes agents with Ollama on my mac mini through telegram. One is a research agent which sends me insights daily and writes a weekly summary. The writing isn't suitable for public sharing, but it informs me. The more I work with the agent the better it gets though. Another agent is a coding agent which can run fairly autonomously on tasks. I've been exploring it's capabilities on some newer projects, and some bug fixes. Nothing that's in production, just ideas and experimental stuff. It's pretty good for rapid development, but requires a good harness and corrections.
• Began playing around with the snappily titled LFM2.5-8B-A1B by Liquid - an edge model built for fast, reliable tool calling on consumer hardware. Early experiments are that this could be pretty cool for some local agent work

The Slow Post

Came up with an idea I called The Slow Post. It's pretty simple. On the 10th June, switch off from the screen, go outside (or somewhere) and write or draw something. If you wish, I connect you with someone else, and you send each other something through the slow post, and we all share photos. That's it. Nothing more, no sales pitch, no other commitments. You don't even need to send anything if you don't want to, you can just send a photo. People seemed to like the idea, so I had to do something about it!

So - page here and form here

The Slow Post — Switch off, go outside, write somethingOn Wednesday 10 June, switch off, go outside with a pen and a card, and write something. Then post it to someone.The Good Ship

Random publishing

Wrote a random experimental exploration of my thoughts on a less open sector via the medium pf the physical laws of the universe. The most niche of posts

soundings_no_01 (2)soundings_no_01 (2).pdf1 MBdownload-circle

Silly cartoons (serious message though)

Cornwall

So I made it to cornwall (despite some last minute van trouble panic). It was lovely. I was born down here, and it still has a bit of a call to me. Obviously it was warm, but the sea helped, and the ice cream. I did lots of running on the SW Coast path, and lots of swimming and paddleboarding. I also visited The Eden Project, which I love. It got me thinking about me wanting some sort of longer term involvement with projects or organisations or movements. I'm not sure what that is at the moment, but if you have an idea of what that could be, do let me know!

For the long term Yesterday's trip to Eden project reminded me of something I feel I'm missing a little. Long term projects or work. Much of what I do is short term in nature. It's the nature of… | Tom WatsonFor the long term Yesterday’s trip to Eden project reminded me of something I feel I’m missing a little. Long term projects or work. Much of what I do is short term in nature. It’s the nature of what I do, I think I’m good at it, sometimes. But I’ve also enjoyed when I get the chance for longer term work, like on The OR programme or work with ClientEarth. So, I’m on the hunt a little, for something a bit longer term, maybe slower, maybe advisory or periods of intense mixed with less intense. Where I can bring everything, tech, AI, data, governance, finance, learning, all at an occasionally not terrible level? I don’t know what that looks like. Could be advisory, could be non exec, trustee, whatever. Do you see a Tom shaped hole anywhere?LinkedInTom Watson

Snaps of cornwall, the coast, an ancient olive tree, some spot on sardines

Links This Week

A bumper list as its two weeks. Personal highlights - the tortoises (ecosystems in action) and the website specification, along with quite a few TechFreedom ones.

Ai

• Jamie Hurst's Blog - Is this sustainable? - Jamie Hurst - Software and System Engineer, Enthusiast of Terrible Cars
• GitHub - 84rt/AI-Risk-Observatory - Contribute to 84rt/AI-Risk-Observatory development by creating an account on GitHub.
• AI-Generated Interfaces and the Delamination of Application UI - thejaymo.net - As AI separates the UI from the application layer, liquid interfaces point towards the next era of software design.
• Yes, China Is Subsidising the World's Access to AI - And Western policy is actively trying to shut it down
• From Harry Potter prose to Elton John lyrics: how a French AI firm has breached copyright rules
• The Open Data Commons and Proprietary AI Platforms
• The Three Harness Layers and How to Audit Your Stack
• Maintaining epistemic integrity in the era of answer engines
• Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us
• Vibe Graveyard - Real tech failures and postmortems from the world of rushed shipping and bad decisions.

Business

• Shared Services Fee - DHIS2 - The Shared Services Fee is a collective financing model that keeps DHIS2 free, open, and sustainable, supporting the global platform for everyone. Funding That Flows: Why Grants Should Behave More Like Rivers Than Calendars

Design

• Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

Development

• The Website Specification - A platform-agnostic, full specification of the technical features a good website should have. Built in the open under an MIT licence.
• Credential Engine Launches Issuer Identity Registry to Strengthen Trust in Credential Ecosystems | Credential Engine
• Learn | Lawyers for Nature - Access educational resources on environmental law and the rights of nature. Lawyers for Nature provides insights into legal frameworks for protecting the environment.

Environment

• They Kept Planting Trees in the Sahara and Kept Failing. Then They Released 500 Tortoises, and the Desert Looked Alive From Space - They released 500 giant reptiles into a barren stretch of the Sahara. Five years later, satellites spotted green where only sand had been.

Innovation

• Stop Building Innovation Labs - Labs were never the point. The conditions surrounding them were.

TechFreedom

• Revealed: Palantir’s NHS tech is ten times slower than current system - NHS leaders privately told that “clunky” £330m platform built by Trump donor Peter Thiel’s firm is “slow” and has “poor user experience”, new documents show
• The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech - France is already moving on from Zoom and Microsoft Teams in favor of homegrown alternatives. Other countries are quickly following suit.
• Sovereignty Score: open transparency for cloud sovereignty claims - An open, evidence-led assessment of cloud and SaaS sovereignty, built on the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework v1.2.1. Score any provider, expose the gap between marketing claims and operational reality.
• Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise
• AI cost crisis hits tech giants as employee 'tokenmaxxing' backfires, sparking corporate pullback at Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon — agentic AI eats up to 1000x more tokens than standard AI - AI is getting too expensive.

Research

• State of the Fossil-Free Internet 2026 – Green Web Foundation - I worked with the Green Web Foundation to launch the first briefing on the State of the Fossil-Free Internet. The dirty data centre edition.

  State of the Fossil-Free Internet 2026 – Green Web Foundation

• Curated Knowledge Repository on Trust-Based and Unrestricted Funding: An Annotated Resource Base for Funders and Practitioners – Center for Grantmaking Research