Weeknote 22/2020
I think everyone finally had enough this week. Look at what’s happening in the UK. Look at what’s happening in the USA. There’s nothing ‘united’ about either country right now. It’s all kicking off.
Even closer to home too, in our working lives, I’ve seen people, including myself, less willing to put up with, for want of a better term, crap, from outdated people and processes. It’s time to do better, and be better.
This week has been busy. Very busy. The kind of busy where you start work at 08:00, stagger out of your home office for a 15-minute lunchbreak, and finish at 16:00, an empty husk of a man who has seemingly been at work for a month instead of a day. Then, with your eyes completely fried, you wonder what to do until bedtime.
It’s amazing to me to think that this was actually a four-day week and that we spent the second Bank Holiday of May on the beach and eating fish & chips.
MoodleNet will reach v1.0 beta next week. We’re running a Content Sprint to get resources into the Moodle HQ-run instance in time for the launch of Moodle LMS 3.9. Why? Well, because it features integration with MoodleNet, and we want to ensure there’s stuff there.
Of course, the digital commons will grow as more people use MoodleNet, on HQ-run, and other federated instances. Once we’ve got the content on a stable version of the HQ production server, we’ll switch out attention to finally starting federation testing.
Although the report is coming in very late, it’s been good to have a preview of the report from the security review we commissioned. That shows that MoodleNet is actually already more secure than many other federated social networks. That’s down to the talented team it’s been my privilege to put together over the past couple of years.
Over an above my Moodle work, there’s been loads of We Are Open co-op work to do. It’s getting to the stage where I could pretty much work through the co-op full-time, which is amazing. Just last year the opposite was true.
There’s been much wrangling over the project initiation documents for two related pieces of work we’re doing with/for Catalyst and the Social Mobility Commission. That should be resolved so that we can start work properly next week with the 10 charities we’ll be supporting through digital transformation.
Over and above that, for the work we’re doing with Greenpeace Planet 4 team, I’ve been reviewing best practice in terms of onboarding new contributors. It’s actually very eye-opening seeing how volunteers start contributing to some open source projects because of the way they’re welcomed, and some, well… despite that.
Due to all of that busyness, I didn’t write anything for Thought Shrapnel this week other than my link roundup, which I entitled Saturday shruggings. There’s been plenty of stuff rattling around my head, especially since deciding to lie on the front lawn re-reading Montaigne’s Essays but nothing has yet coagulated in my brain into something coherent.
I might as well share here five particular sections that have got me thinking, as it could be a while before I get to any form of synthesis:
We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be — even when we ourselves shall be no more.
Michel de Montaigne (‘Our emotions get carried away beyond us’)
Those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop.
Michel de Montaigne (‘On the inconstancy of our actions’)
I have an open manner, readily striking up acquaintance and being trusted from the first encounter. Simpleness and unsullied truth are always opportune and acceptable in any period whatsoever… All I want to gain from doing anything is the fact of having done it.
Michel de Montaigne (‘On the useful and the honourable)
I have my own laws and law-court to pass judgement on me and I appeal to them rather than elsewhere. I restrain my actions according to the standards of others, but I enlarge them according to my own. no one but you knows whether you are base and cruel, or loyal and dedicated. Others never see you: they surmise about you from uncertain conjectures; they do not see your nature so much as your artifice. So do not cling to their sentence: cling to your own.
Michel de Montaigne (‘On repenting’)
But thought I do not have all that great a mind. I do have one which is correspondingly open, one which orders me to dare to publish its weaknesses.
Michel de Montaigne (‘On high rank as a disadvantage’)
I’ve also been reflecting on Acts chapters two and four, which actually form the basis of Christian communism. It’s pretty clear to me that Jesus was anti-capitalist and anti-establishment.
So next week is a big week in many ways. Lots of decisions to make and things to do. When all this is over, I wonder if I qualify (financially, morally, otherwise) for a sabbatical?
Photo taken at Beadnell last Monday. The beach was virtually empty.
