Month: August 2020

Weeknote 33/2020

Posted on August 15, 2020August 15, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

For the first time in many months, I can honestly say that was an enjoyable working week. I split my time between work for We Are Open Co-op and Outlandish.

For We Are Open I was working on an introductory email-based course around ‘open’, and then a survey, framework, and toolkit for social mobility organisations moving their programmes online.

With Outlandish, I’m continuing to help with a new push to productise their offerings. This has two strands: a community portal product, and products and services related to Sociocracy. I was pleased that my proposal to create a new top-level ‘Products’ circle with two sub-circles was passed this week!

A quotation shared in an article by Ryan Holiday this week really resonated with me. It’s from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, he of “you cannot step into the same river twice” fame.

Dogs bark at what they cannot understand.
Heraclitus

The reason I paid particular attention to this, I think, is that it’s only recently that I’ve come to realise that I don’t have to live what I’d call a ‘reproducible’ life. That is to say, people don’t have to be easily be able to follow in my footsteps.

I think it’s the educator in me who feels the need to constantly justify and explain myself. However, that’s becoming less of an issue due to a combination of moving away from the world of formal education, therapy sessions, and being very aware of turning 40 at the end of the year.

There are many people who don’t get what I do, or why I do it. Sometimes I don’t really understand either. What I don’t need to spend time doing is wasting my life interacting with random bad faith actors — i.e. the ‘dogs’ barking at things they don’t understand.

This week I continued to be on hiatus from Thought Shrapnel but wrote a few posts here:

Next week, I’ve got more of the same, which is good. I’m on the lookout for a couple of days of extra work at the moment from September onwards, so if you see anything Doug-shaped, please get in touch!

Image: photo of an oak tree that I encountered on a morning run this week, processed using the Roy Lichtenstein filter in Retroboy.

Climate ch-ch-ch-changes

Posted on August 15, 2020August 15, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

I can remember as a child my mother picking blackberries while waiting to pick me up from school. They’d appear just before ‘blackberry week’ which was literally the name people gave to October half-term.

Now, 30 years later, blackberries appear around 10 weeks earlier here, ready to be picked in mid-August. That makes for tasty summer holiday desserts, but leaves me slightly concerned about the pace of climate change.

In the last week, we’ve had scorching hot weather in the UK, followed by intense thunderstorms which led to flooding that derailed a train.

Of course, things are worse on many fronts elsewhere; there are plenty of people, especially refugees, who are desperate to seek asylum in our country. Yet, instead of thinking in a joined-up way about the global climate emergency and the effect it will have on migration over the next 30 years, the inept UK government sends in the Royal Navy.

Within my lifetime, those in charge have missed so many opportunities to steer us of disaster, meaning that now we haven’t got long to avert climate catastrophe. I just hope that elections over the next few years replace the emotional toddlers we’ve got running the show with some grown-ups committed to action.

This post is Day 31 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Moving Mastodon instance

Posted on August 14, 2020August 14, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

This is a short post to say that today I’ve migrated my Mastodon account to Fosstodon. This is an instance of the Fediverse which describes itself in the following way:

Fosstodon is an English speaking Mastodon instance that is open to anyone who is interested in technology; particularly free & open source software.

At the time of writing, there are 11.7k accounts on Fosstodon, compared with 529k on Mastodon.social which I’m migrating away from after a couple of years. Before that I was a member of Social.coop.

The great thing about the Fediverse is that it’s never a binary decision; you can move between the instances that comprise it when either you change or the something changes with the instance. The wonderful thing about moving between Mastodon instances is that there’s an automated account migration procedure, so you don’t lose followers.

I’ve been considering moving for a while, but someone shared a video today which tipped me over the edge. Watch it, even if you have no idea what I’ve been talking about so far. It reminded me of how much I missed having a ‘local timeline’ of like-minded people and feeling part of a community.

I’ll be settling into my new Fediverse account over the coming days and weeks. Thanks to those who I’ve already been interacting with on Fosstodon via the #100DaysToUnload challenge, I already feel at home!

This post is Day 30 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com