CoTech – Open Thinkering

Weeknote 30/2020

Posted on July 26, 2020July 26, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

I’ve written quite a bit this week as part of my #100DaysToOffload challenge:

Over and above what’s detailed in these posts, I’ve been splitting my time between working on projects for We Are Open and Outlandish this week. For the former, my ‘home’ co-op in the CoTech network, I’ve been mainly focusing on work for Catalyst and the Social Mobility Commission. We’re working with Erica Neve and Pedram Parasmand on three contracts, helping charities who are rapidly undergoing digital transformation. We had a really successful retrospective on Friday with UpRising, who we’ve been helping in more depth.

With Outlandish, I’m helping with some productisation of similar projects they’ve worked on for a range of clients. I find this really interesting as it’s simultaneously about meeting user needs and about organisational development. I’m also advising around ways in which they can develop the workshops they offer.

I’m fortunate to work with organisations which are so emotionally intelligent, and which go out of their way to be so. One of the reasons for working with Outlandish is to give them some short-term help with project management while they’re a bit stretched. But another reason is to learn from their processes and procedures; although they’ve only been a co-op for as long as us (four years), they’ve been together and honing things for a decade.

When I was at Jisc, one thing that always impressed me was their internal knowledgebase. They used PBworks for that, while Outlandish uses a WordPress installation with a theme called KnowAll. I’ve been wanting to experiment with wiki.js and so this week Laura Hilliger and I set up an instance at wiki.weareopen.coop and copied over existing pages from our GitHub wiki. I’ve set user permissions so that only logged-in members can edit the wiki, and indeed see any pages that are ‘internal’ only.

We finally got sign-off from Greenpeace for one of the best things I think I’ve written for a while: HOWTO: Create an Architecture of Participation for your Open Source project. As Stephen Downes mentioned when mentioning it in OLDaily it’s perhaps applicable to wider contexts than just open source projects.

Other than that, I’ve just been reviewing a document Laura put together for some work we’re doing with Red Hat, doing a small amount of work for our ongoing work with Greenpeace, and contributing to a ‘playback’ of some recent work we did for Catalyst.

Next week, I’m tying up work for We Are Open on Monday, and for Outlandish on Tuesday, before turning everything off and going on a family holiday for 10 days. As my therapist said in our meeting on Friday, as I’m a bit of a perfectionist, there’s no guarantee that I will actually relax during my holiday just because I’m away from home. So I’m actively trying to cut myself some slack. I deliberately went for a slow run this morning and I even had an afternoon nap yesterday. Small steps.

Header image is a selfie I took on a family walk in the Northumbrian hills last Sunday. Inspired by Low-tech magazine’s solar powered website, I loosely followed this guide to create the ‘stippled’ effect. This reduced the size of an 8.6MB image to a mere 36.6KB.

Weeknote 50/2019

Posted on December 14, 2019December 14, 2019 by Doug Belshaw

Let’s deal first of all with the huge, blonde-haired elephant in the room. While I expected a Conservative majority in this week’s General Election, I predicted +50 before going to bed on Thursday night, rather than the +66 that resulted.

That the British people are bored of Brexit is manifestly obvious, and has been for a while. Doing anything other than, as the Tories said, “getting Brexit done” would lead to not only dragging out the saga, but deeper divisions between an already-divided nation.

That being said, I voted Labour to prevent the Conservatives getting in where we live. I usually vote for the Greens, but it ended up being quite a close-run thing. For example, the constituency next to us, Blyth Valley, was part of the ‘red wall’ that crumbled this time around.

The reason Blyth Valley is interesting is that it’s a historically-Labour area, a place of mass unemployment, poverty and food banks. It’s incredible the way that the impacts of Tory-imposed austerity have been packaged up and sold as being related to our membership of the European Union. This is the same EU that has invested in infrastructure up here in the North East, including broadband and roads,

I could go on, especially about the way that the left have reacted to the identity politics of the right. But I won’t. Instead I’ll stare into my cup of tea, consider my family’s options, and try not to get into any conversations about politics with my neighbours this Christmas.

On Friday, in the immediate aftermath of the election, I was in Newcastle with representatives of the co-ops that form the CoTech network at the Winter Gathering. I was expecting despondency, but after acknowleding the result, we moved swiftly on to more pressing things such as building the co-operative economy and improving the ways we work together.

As ever, I did a bit of light facilitation, and got stuck into questions around potential membership fees for the network, skill-sharing, and decision-making procedures. CoTech contains a great bunch of people, including an increasing number in the North East, so I look forward to our co-op working more closely with some of them in 2020.

Other than the above, I spent three days working on MoodleNet this week. That included:

Presenting as part of the ALT Online Winter Conference, with a recording of the session posted on the blog.
Attending a Moodle dev training workshop on accessibility.
Catching up with a number of team members either 1:1 or in small groups.
Meeting with Martin Dougiamas and doing a deep dive into the future of MoodleNet. There was also a management meeting this week.
Working on a 3-year plan and roadmap for 2020.

Next week, I’m working on MoodleNet-related activities between Monday and Wednesday, and then heading off to Iceland with my family on Thursday. I’m really looking forward to the holiday, but also just to relaxing for a couple of weeks.

After all, who knows what will be in store for Team Belshaw in 2020?