Weeknote 35/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Returning home after almost a month away. You can read my write-up of that here.
• Re-connecting with people on Twitter, via email, and on our We Are Open Slack channel.
• Spending time with my children, taking them to watch jesters at Alnwick Castle, helping our youngest learn how to ride a bike and tie  her shoelaces, and finding the best walking route to school for our eldest (who’s beginning Middle School next week!)
• Agreeing a three-month sponsorship of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter from Makers Academy. I’m delighted to have them as a return sponsor!
• Meeting with my fellow We Are Open members John Bevan and Bryan Mathers to discuss our upcoming thinkathon for Creative Commons around their burgeoning CC Certification program. Our other co-operator, Laura Hilliger, is on a road trip at the moment…
• Discussing ways forward with CoderDojo’s use of Open Badges.
• Losing half a stone in weight due to some serious remedial action in terms of nutrition and exercise. I wrote about what I’m putting into my body, and which books I found helpful here. I’ve also been beasting myself up and down sand dunes at Druridge Bay and have started running again (despite the increased migraine risk).
• Setting up meetings for next week and the week after with people and organisations I think can benefit from what I can offer through Dynamic Skillset, and what we can offer through We Are Open.
• Getting back in the swing of using an RSS reader in the guise of Feedly. Since I last used it, they’ve added a great new feature called ‘knowledge boards’ which I’ll be using along with my wiki for curatorial purposes.
• Informing existing email subscribers to this blog that they’re now subscribed to my Thought Shrapnel newsletter instead. I include a roundup of posts I write both here and on other blogs in each issue of my newsletter. If anyone wants to subscribe by email to individual posts from this blog, they can plug the RSS feed into a service like IFTTT or Zapier.
• Writing:
  • Supplementing the breakfast smoothie (1st September)
  • We’re back! (1st September 2016)

Next week I’ve got my calendar full of meetings. I also need to do lots of writing to get down all of the things I thought about while I was away! Bryan and I are doing some work with London CLC, and I’ve got a critical friend meeting with a client.

I’ll be taking Fridays off, as usual, as my ‘Doug day’. I noticed that Amazon are experimenting with 30-hour weeks for new teams (although at 70% pay) but there’s plenty of research that shows that people who work fewer hours are happier and more productive! As this article suggests, a four-day workweek is likely to be a recruitment incentive in 2017 and beyond…