Weeknote 01/2021
Whew. As someone, somewhere pointed out this week, we know doomscrolling is bad for us, but the doom has been top-notch recently, hasn’t it?
Welcome to 2021.
I’m back, well-rested, with plenty of energy and optimism for the new year. Taking three weeks off work at the end of 2020 was magnificent. If I can, I’m going to do it every year. And it would seem that I’m going to need that reservoir of energy and optimism. All of it.
This week, like most people who still have jobs or some form of paid income, I’ve been returning to work. I took things easy on Monday and Tuesday and then, because there’s a million projects and the world is on fire, dialled that up for the rest of the week.
My areas of focus have been:
- Getting set up with a Catalyst-funded project I’ll be project managing. It’s a collaboration between Dynamic Skillset and Bay Digital to help three charities with a ‘sector challenge’ to help remove barriers to remote claiming of Universal Credit.
- Re-establishing convivial relations with my We Are Open colleagues. Thankfully, the members who were the cause of the tension I’ve mentioned in passing over the last few months, resigned.
- Getting back up-to-speed with Outlandish projects and people. I participated in a workshop about the (bright!) future for SPACE4 and helped with a lightning talk about Building OUT.
- Helping with We Are Open and Outlandish bids to Catalyst for some more funding to help with a ‘Definition’ phase for various cohorts of charities.
- Ensuring that my wife and kids have everything they need for successful remote learning.
In terms of the last point, I’m back on Twitter and noticed so many parents struggling with their technical setup. So I created a Twitter thread to help give some tips to alleviate wifi drop-outs and other problems. I hope it proves handy for people, as it was a useful distraction for me after waking up at 05:15 on Saturday morning…
With all of that energy and optimism I’ve written a bunch of things. Here, I published:
…and over at Thought Shrapnel (🔗 = link posts)
- You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century
- You can never get rid of what is part of you, even when you throw it away 🔗
- Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self 🔗
- Seeing through is rarely seeing into
- One can acquire anything in solitude except character 🔗
- There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us
- Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled 🔗
Team Belshaw is fine, thanks for asking. We put our house on the market on 19th December which was only a few days before lockdown here in the UK. So, although we have had a couple of live viewings, we’ve created a video tour to share via our estate agent. It might seem mad to want to move during a pandemic, and our house is lovely, but life goes on.
I’m continuing to exercise, despite not being able to get to the gym and it being very slippy out due to the inconvenience that is winter. I’m running when I can, despite some (suspected) tendonitis. I’d forgotten how useful Twitter is for asking people about stuff like this: it appears I probably tie the laces on my running shoes too tightly! Over and above that I’ve been on the exercise bike and going for walks with the family.
I’m not going to comment here too much on the self-coup / insurrection / whatever you want to call it in the US on Wednesday. Next time, as I mentioned on Mastodon, ‘protesters’ will be well-armed and actually have a plan. This is a mere foreshadowing of future events in the US and elsewhere.
We can (and should) wring out hands about digital literacies, about political education and civics, but the elephant in the room here is the role that social networks have played in enabling fascism. It’s the right thing to do to kick Trump off major social networks, but it’s too little, too late. Deplatforming is important, but we need more than that to stem the rising tide of disinformation and radicalisation.
Anyway, next week, the Catalyst project I mentioned above gets started, and will take ~3 days/week for the next 11 weeks. So I need to prioritise the most impactful work I can do through We Are Open and Outlandish, and use all of that energy and optimism to good effect!
