Month: December 2021

Weeknote 50/2021

Posted on December 18, 2021December 18, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Amazing sunset and clouds over Morpeth on Tuesday evening

This is my last weeknote of the year. And it has been A Year, just as 2020 was before it. Almost two years into this pandemic and, I’m not sure about anyone else, but I am rocking discombobulation as if it were a lifestyle choice.

I had intended to finish work for the year at the end of last week but, for various reasons including participant availability for a workshop we ran on Tuesday, that wasn’t possible. When you’re running your own business (or co-running our own business in the case of WAO) there’s always little things that trundle on even after marking a line in the sand. In my case, it was a bit of invoicing and admin.

Other than the workshop, which was focused on a digital strategy and product timeline for Julie’s Bicycle, I’ve just been finishing things off and tidying them up. There was a bit of moderation to do in the Keep Badges Weird community, for example, and Laura and I spent a lot of time in spreadsheets.

Straight after finishing work on Tuesday afternoon, I went to see my daughter play for the County football team. She was magnificent, scoring one, assisting another, and receiving Player of the Match. I’m so proud of her. That evening I made my preparations for the next day while the ceiling in our en-suite dried after being re-plastered.

On Wednesday morning, I got up early having all of my walking gear packed and a present for Bryan ready and wrapped. I got down to Sheffield almost an hour before he arrived on the train from London, so I did a bit of wandering around the city where I went to university 20 years ago, and where I met my wife, Hannah.

Bryan and I had a chat in the car on the way to Castleton, where we were due to start our walk. We had a very pleasant five hours together with conversation ranging over a wide variety of topics. Sadly, we didn’t get time to have a drink at one of my favourite pubs, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I hope we get to do it every year!

Thursday saw me get my Covid booster jab. I was expecting to get Pfizer as my wife had received the previous Saturday, but instead I got Moderna (aka ‘Spikevax’) which I was happy about. I managed to take it easy on Friday while the ceiling of our en-suite was sorted out. We had our WAO online Christmas party. Mid-afternoon, the predictable post-vaccine tiredness overcame me and I slept for five hours before evening.

Today (Saturday) I’ve continued to be a little tired but managed to sort out the new lights in the en-suite, then met my parents at the beach for a walk, and then created an end-of-year collage which I’ll share in my next post…

Photo of the sunset on Tuesday night which I pulled the car over onto the side of the road to take. Glorious!

Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is out of stock

Posted on December 17, 2021December 17, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Banksy artwork saing "Sorry! The future you ordered is currently out of stock"

From where I sit, the day after having my booster jab, I’m more than a little bit concerned about the level of anti-vaxxer disinformation swirling around me. Yes, I wrote my doctoral thesis on ‘digital literacy’ and I think there’s a level of digital illiteracy involved in all of this. However, there’s a confluence of a few things going on here.

The world is complex, so any simple ‘answer’ to what’s driving particular behaviours are likely to be at best incomplete. For example, I’ve noticed in my interactions with vaccine-hesitant or straight-out ‘anti-vaxxer’ middle-aged white men that there are certain metaphors and tropes that tend to be used.

The rabbithole goes deep, and quickly. It’s likely to be different for varying groups in society, but for those middle-aged white guys I’ve mentioned, there’s at least some pent-up economic frustration going on. I think they also may feel an overall decline in power. At the same time, with the Black Lives Matters movement, increasing equality for women, and wars/climate chaos causing migration, there are culprits for them to pin the blame on.

As a former teacher of the subject, I certainly felt that, until recently, history was the battleground. That’s still the case to some degree, but instead of arguing over representations of the past, we now seem to be arguing over the nation of current reality. Conspiracy theories are rife, and not limited to that weird guy in the pub that you sidle away from after he’s had a few.

If we can’t agree on the past and present, then I’m not sure how we’re going to agree on the future and what it can and should look like. There’s a modicum of consensus that we need to do something about the environment and biodiversity, but how that is going to be acted upon in a period of intense political turmoil is yet to be seen.

Looking back at my TEDx Talk from early 2012 with almost a decade of hindsight, it seems obvious that what started out as playful memes could and would be weaponised for division and political factionism. While my focus at that time was on learning and the technology that can enable it, I feel that I may have been naïve not to see what could have been coming next.

Yet, here we are. Digital literacy is low, political engagement is high. That’s a dangerous and explosive combination, as we saw with the attack on the Capitol building in January 2021. My concern is that we will reap what we have sown and that Big Tech, perfecting algorithms that “give us more of what we want”, will essentially tell us that the lifestyle that we ordered is out of stock, and this will fuel catastrophic rifts in society.

In the face of this, what I can do personally is small and seems insignificant. The same is true of the climate emergency. But individual actions can make a difference, when added together, and we shouldn’t avoid taking small steps just because we can’t take large ones. So, in 2022, having IRL rational and respectful conversations with anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists may be just as important as taking climate action.

Weeknote 49/2021

Posted on December 11, 2021December 11, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

This week was my last full week of work of 2021. Laura and I listed out all of the things we had to do before sacking off work for the year and decided that, while there were things we could start work on, they can wait until 2022.

That includes planning Season 3 of the podcast. Our guest for Episode 6 couldn’t make it at short notice but, thankfully, we’d done a two-parter for Episode 5. The Tao of WAO is available wherever you get your podcasts.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve eaten more mince pies than I’ve done sessions of exercise in the past seven days. This is entirely in keeping with my winter philosophy and attitude towards December in particular. The media seem to have an obsession with everyone keeping in amazing shape while also enjoying the usual festive over-indulgence. That’s obviously impossible, so I’m leaning into the carbs.

The Christmas tree went up last weekend, so we’ve had a week to enjoy that as well as the outside Christmas lights, switched on with our neighbours last Sunday. There was a gathering with a buffet and drinks afterwards for the first time, which was lovely.

Talking of the tree, I chose this year’s new ornament for it. In previous years we’ve added a 3D-printed bauble, some icicle-shaped pieces of glass from Iceland, and one featuring pandas that Hannah‘s cousins brought back from China. As we neglected to get one last year, I summed up both 2020 and 2021 with a laser-cut wooden ornament that looks like the COVID-19 spike protein!

Work wise, we rounded off our current contract with Participate for the Keep Badges Weird work and then, after a meeting with Mark and Julie, agree to continue working together for Q1 2022 in the first instance. We’ve built up a good “head of steam” (as Mark called it) with the KBW work, and have around 120 people join the community in less than six weeks. There are a range of badges to be earned, so do check it out!

With Julie’s Bicycle, we delivered v0.9 of the external-facing and internal-facing digital strategy. This comprised two documents and two slide decks laden with Bryan‘s images, with us only being able to get to v1.0 with more input from JB’s staff. We’ve helped them hire a Product Lead for the next iteration of the CG Tools, which is one part of an overall digital platform they’ll be developing — with help from WAO and Outlandish.

All things being equal, our collaboration with JB will continue until at least the end of next year. We’ll phase ourselves out as we build in-house capacity around building and maintaining digital products. There’s plenty to do, but it’s great to see that JB are up for the challenge!

We’ve got the go-ahead for some more Greenpeace work starting in the new year after months of the project getting set up. Laura’s leading it, as with all of the work we do with GP, but I’m hoping to be involved. We’re also hoping to work with a coalition of Agencies for Good organisations (with the support of Catalyst) to develop cohort-based programmes around digital transformation and product development.

So we’re heading into 2022 with a decent amount of work. John is coming back to work with the co-op on at least a part-time basis, and our intern, Anne is really stepping up and helping with client projects. We have capacity for more, but it’s probably the most work we’ve ever gone into a new year with already secured!

Next week, I’m working a few hours on Monday, and then we have a workshop with Julie’s Bicycle and Outlandish on Tuesday afternoon. After that, I’ve finished for the year! I’m meeting Bryan in Sheffield and going walking with him in the Peak District on Wednesday, then getting my booster vaccine on Thursday. Friday is Hannah’s last day at work and the kids’ last day at school, so I’ll be ~~reading philosophy books~~ playing FIFA 22.

Photo of Team Belshaw Christmas tree featuring COVID-19 decoration.