Weeknote 30/2015
This week I’ve been:
- Away for most of the week – down in London from Monday to Wednesday and then in Brighton on Thursday. I stayed in a City Marque Clerkenwell serviced apartment and Hotel Du Vin, respectively. The former was noisy and the latter was wonderful.
- Working with London CLC staff around a new manifesto and some digital strategy. We used Chris Messina’s recent, popular blog post about the full-stack employee as a provocation.
- Going out for meals with lots of people: Oliver Quinlan (dinner, Monday), John Bevan (dinner, Tuesday), Dan Sutch, Kieron Kirkland, and Bryan Mathers (lunch, Wednesday), and Craig Taylor (dinner, Wednesday). All great company!
- Recording and releasing Episode 19 of the podcast I record with Dai Barnes entitled Today In Digital Education (TIDE).
- Negotiating (or at least beginning to negotiate) my City & Guilds contract from September onwards. I’ll be working either two or three days a week for them from that point, with my overall aim to do four days a week for clients and one as an (unpaid) ‘Doug day’.
- Chairing my first Open Badges Strategy Group meeting for City & Guilds. I’ve halved the meeting time, ensured we have a decisions workflow that doesn’t depend on email/face-to-face meetings, and used Hackpad as an agenda/backchannel.
- Having email conversations about some potential work for some new clients.
- Enjoying the seamless experience Google Photos provides (more than I thought I would given my usual privacy concerns, etc.) I use the ‘full image’ option that counts against my 180+GB Google Drive rather than the tempting, but ultimately sub-optimal ‘high resolution’ option.
- Working on some digital strategy stuff for City & Guilds.
- Leading (with Bryan Mathers) a session on Open Badges for City & Guilds Kineo from their office in Brighton. People joined us both in the room and from their offices worldwide.
- Creating a screencast on how to add Open Badges to your LinkedIn profile (after being asked for the eleventy-billionth time).
- Writing:
Next week I’m down in London on Wednesday and Thursday and working from home for the rest of the week. We’re going camping as a family next (long) weekend and then I’m going incommunicado on the personal digital front during the first part of my Black Ops.
Photo looking down from C&G Kineo office, Brighton
