Recovering from last week‘s Webmaker workweek in a Toronto. The jetlag seems to have been particularly bad going forwards this time around.
Finding somewhere to live. Our proposed move to Gozo fell through, but we decided to exchange contracts on our house regardless. Thankfully, we’ve found somewhere to rent and are moving this weekend!
Finishing (with Karen Smith) the draft of a new Mozilla white paper for Webmaker and Web Literacy. It’s being reviewed but should be available next month sometime.
Getting to grips with Bugzilla to open and close tickets relating to interactions the #TeachTheWeb team needs to have with other teams at Mozilla.
Responding to comments from reviewers on a book proposal to (hopefully) get it through an editorial board.
Writing an article to be published in a new location (more details when it’s been launched).
Packing up all my worldly possessions (including my home office) while continuing an attempt to work productively.
Moderating/curating this week’s Webmaker Community team call.
Taking Friday off to pack things up and move things around.
Next week I’ll be unpacking, spending some of half-term with my children, and figuring out which conferences to attend. Note that I’m still going to try and curtail my speaking engagements until September: I need to write and think of new things to say! 😉
For the last few months I’ve shared with others our plans (and excitement) of moving to Gozo. It’s a place we love and visit on holiday every year. The idea was to sell our house, move there for six months and then decide where to go after that.
Although we were all set to leave at half-term, it looks like it’s not going to be possible in the short-term. We’re still going to move house next week, but we’ll be staying and renting in the UK. To cut a long story short, various laws and audit practices meant I wouldn’t have been able to remain in my current role at Mozilla.
Many thanks to those who wished us well. It’s certainly taught me a thing or two about counting one’s chickens before they’re hatched.
Last week I was in Toronto for a Webmaker workweek. It was a little different so I’m going to eschew the usual bullet points for a more image-based review.
Sunday
After assembling on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, the #TeachTheWeb team came together to ensure we could get started as soon as possible. We discussed the semantics and nomenclature around Webmaker resources and Michelle walked us through a potential production cycle:
Next, we put up all the scrum tasks for the workweek:
…and then we played dodgeball on trampolines. Obviously.
Monday
As is often the case when you get people face-to-face, we spent a good chunk of the day ensuring that we were on the same page. This involved some wrangling around semantics, mental models and what’s in and out of scope for the team and #TeachTheWeb in general.
Happily, we moved many scrum tasks from ‘To Make’ to ‘Making’:
Tuesday
We were ready to hit the ground running and started off with a plan for the infrastructure that will support #TeachTheWeb courses. Laura gave the context of conversations she’s had with P2PU (who we may be employing to build this out).
We discussed this plan with Brett and the UX team, and agreed a way forward.
Kat and Karen did a great job of scoping out a teaching kit for remix:
The final part of the day was focused on scoping out the rest of the stuff we need to do this week. Things like assessment, badges and metrics/evaluation.
Wednesday
There was a bit of finishing off to do in the morning before the first demos at lunchtime. I did some preliminary thinking about badging, Kat and Karen continued their work on the teaching kit for ‘Remixing’, while Michelle and Laura interacted with other teams to make sure we’re all on the same page.
We got questions and feedback from everyone who took their turn to have explained to them the production cycle and ideas for teach.webmaker.org. Laura and Michelle made the necessary changes and then started planning out what the rest of 2014 will look like.
For a while we’ve been talking about some kind of bookmarklet that allows people to tag resources they find around the web. Just as you might bookmark something with Delicious or pin something to a Pinterest board, so webmakers could use the MakeAPI to surface resources related to specific parts of the Web Literacy Map. I was delighted when Atul stepped up to have a go at it, and so I created a ‘canonical’ list of tags to help with that.
In the evening we went tobogganing, courtesy of Geoffrey MacDougall. Which was epic.
Thursday
Some people couldn’t stay for the entire week, so Chris brought forward the demo sessions from Friday morning to last thing on Thursday. It was great to see how much progress had been made on things that were just ideas earlier in the week. In particular, the UX team had some really interesting ideas about how a new ‘Explore’ tab could work. You can read more about that on Cassie McDaniels’ blog.
Bobby Richter and the rest of the AppMaker team have been doing some amazing work with making mobile webapp development a reality. Karen and I worked on getting towards finishing a first draft of a new Webmaker whitepaper.
Afterwards, Jon Buckley had suggested we all go to the Backyard Axe-Throwing League. I wasn’t great at it, but it turns out some of my colleagues (including JP and Luke) are alarmingly good:
Friday
Not everyone could stay until Friday because of other commitments, so the opening circle was noticeably smaller. We took the opportunity to have the kind of meetings face-to-face that are more difficult even over a video connection.
I headed to the airport around 3pm with Laura and Paula then managed to sleep for some of the overnight flight home. 🙂
