👋 Hello!
I'm Doug, based in Northumberland, the English county of castles and coastlines. I work through my consultancy, Dynamic Skillset, and through FIELD STATION, a company I run with Tom Watson focused on the future of work, AI and digital sovereignty. My CV has the long version, my projects page shows what I'm working on now, and you can find out how to work with me.
I'd describe myself as a generalist. I studied Philosophy at Sheffield and Modern History at Durham, then taught History and went on to senior leadership in schools. That time in the classroom still shapes how I think about learning, technology and the organisations that bring them together.
I'm probably best known for my work on digital literacies. I completed a doctorate on the topic at Durham, worked on digital practice at Jisc, and then wrote The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies while I was Web Literacy Lead at the Mozilla Foundation.
I'm also known for my evangelism of Open Badges, a form of web-native digital credentialing. I've travelled the world speaking and facilitating on this and many other topics at hundreds of events.
One of those topics is decentralisation, which I explored on a very practical basis as Product Manager of MoodleNet. That meant building a talented and diverse team to deliver the world's first federated, resource-centric social network for educators. For a decade, from 2016 to 2026, I worked mainly through We Are Open Co-op, a worker-owned cooperative I helped set up.
More recently I've been studying Systems Thinking in Practice with the Open University, and it now sits at the centre of how I help organisations understand what's happening to them and why. I write at Substrate, and you'll find nearly two decades of earlier writing from Open Thinkering and Thought Shrapnel in my archive.
I'm trying to make the world a better place than I found it. If you're doing something similar get in touch!
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