Weeknote 55

What I did

• When I first stood in front of the two cohorts of people who had joined the OR programme I said "im going to ask you to reflect, consistently, regularly, throughout this programme. Out of everything we do, it's probably the most important, more important than any tool, any framework. " I think that took people by surprise, I think some people wondered what the hell this programme was all about and when we were going to get onto the 'learning'. There is a tendancy to talk about 'setting the conditions for...' a lot in systems change and learning work. But I don't often see it funded, not really. To really have the space. And for facilitators to just really prioritise reflection, connection and just holding that space/silence for that little bit longer. To allow that tension and lingering question. We are driven to perform, wrap up, tie a bow, hit our outputs.

With this programme we held, we left lingering questions, and we focused, intentionally on reflection. We did it in every session. We had 3 sessions that were ONLY reflection and connection. "Isn't that wasted time?" - no it's THE time.

And so on our last session, we asked people to share their resilience journey over the last 6 months, in whatever format or way they wanted. It was lovely. It was a bit emotive. It was honest. It was warm. Conditions.

And during the last session, I asked people one last time to reflect, on their wins, what they had done, the struggle through the swamp of progress. And I smiled, because instead of strange looks, before I'd even finished the ask, the whole group were already doing it. They had the muscle, it felt natural. And whatever else they took from the programme, that is to me, the most important.

• On Tuesday me and Doug ran a mini TechFreedom session as part of the TechNExt festival up here in the North East. It was good, despite an initial technical hitch. There were a good range of people and it was actually quite well attended which was a little surprising actually given how hard it has been to get people to pay attention to this stuff. There were people there from a whole range of organisations, charities, businesses, government. The session went down well, I think we have something good, a mix of practical and strategic.

After our talk I stayed around and met up with Ross and watched some of his Digital Trustees talk, watched some of Hannah and the Virgin Money foundation, and caught up with various Sunderland Software city folk including Adam, Jamie, Ben, Nathan.

Me and Doug at TechNExt (thanks to William for the photo)

The not so good, maybe

This week I realised that I'd released Glade to soon, before it was ready probably. I'd worked hard on it early in the year, but had admittedly hit a bit of a motivation block with it, and had made little progress with it recently. One day I decided to release it, and some people were interested. But it wasn't ready, it still had a few too many things I needed to sort. They say you only get one chance to make a good impression. There's a chance I blew that. However it did give me the motivation and real user feedback to make massive strides this week. It's now in a MUCH better place and I'm excited about it again. There is talk of using Ai to support governace, but mostly it's as an add on. Glade is designed to support governance with or without AI...but the AI use it there to support noticing, patterns, onboarding, effectiveness, and the work this week really honed that. So maybe not all bad.

The Good

Was pleased this week to be accepted onto The Ada Lovelace Institutes Community Forum , which acts in an advisory role to the institutes participatory research on AI and society.

Sidenote

The venue for the last OR session was right next to Peterborough Cathedral which was might impressive and for some reason had a massive dinosaur in it, which is alright in my books

Links This Week

• Moody’s flags $662 billion risk at the heart of the data center build-out by just 5 companies | Fortune

• Run 8 GPUs on Power of 6 | Neuralwatt AI Power Efficiency

• medium.com> Introducing System Intelligence. Systemic investing seeks to transform… | by Dr Jess Daggers

• Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5

• AI Economics for Dummies - sharing again because it was so good.

• OpenMaps — Create interactive maps from open data - nice little side project from the founder of GreenPT

• Why we’re moving our website away from Wix: the challenge facing systems change organisations — Opus

• I Challenge Thee Big Tech lobby budgets hit record levels | Corporate Europe Observatory

• How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing | Google Cloud Blog -

• France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well

• Product Now - Discover the freshest digital products daily.

• Proton Docs - > European Digital Sovereignty - Proton Sheets

• Fileverse | Privacy-First & Self-Sovereign Collaboration Suite - End-to-end encrypted & decentralized collaboration tools. Alternative to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Notion, with no surveillance, lock-in, or AI training.