Weeknote 22/2022

This week has been half-term for our kids. As I’ve committed to taking three weeks off in April, August, and December this year, I can’t really take each half-term off with them as well. And because my wife’s now working full-time, there’s an element of them having to entertain themselves a bit. Thankfully, my parents had them for a day, and my wife got two days off for the Platinum Jubilee.

I’m not going to say anything here that I haven’t already expressed in 5 reasons I won’t be celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. I took Thursday off as it was the delayed Whit Bank Holiday, but I was back to work on Friday. So on the work front this week, I…

• Met with my WAO colleagues. It was a short weekly meeting as we had a co-op half day last Thursday.
• Worked with Joe and Laura on a proposal for CAST about a potential upcoming project.
• Rectified a financial project-based error I’d made with the help of John.
• Recorded a Tao of WAO podcast episode with Laura and Heather Leson.
• Worked on the KBW project, ran the monthly community call, and published a blog post about Open Recognition.
• Took Wednesday morning off to play football with my kids.
• Created a CV page as it doesn’t look like I’m resurrecting my LinkedIn profile anytime soon.
• Asked for some more time to decide whether to agree to keynote a conference in France in October.
• Met with a few people interested in the intersection between Sociocracy and the Fediverse.
• Collaborated on the client project that cannot be named with Laura.
• Participated in the third and final session of a Sociocracy Facilitators course with Edurne, Mayel, and Ivan and then met for a Q&A session with Ted Rau afterwards. The course has been really useful in terms of digging deeper into what happens when you get ‘stuck’ with sociocratic facilitation!

After a month of experimentation and frustration, I finally managed to successfully combine home VDSL and 4G+ connections in a way that satisfied me and my family. They’ve put up with a lot of disruption!

I’ve also been experimenting with Nextcloud, as I’d like to move away from Google stuff for Dynamic Skillset. This shouldn’t be too difficult, as it’s mainly me (Hannah helps with book-keeping). I’ve been using Hetzner for hosting and Cloudron for deployment.

On Tuesday Hannah and I went out for dinner and cocktails, and then on Thursday we went to Wylam as a family to do a Treasure Trail. We then visited Wheelbirks Parlour for ice cream which we haven’t been to for 12 years (since before our daughter was born!) We took a photo of our son on the same little red tractor he’d sat on as a three year-old!

Other than that it’s been sport and gaming as usual for Team Belshaw. Although we left it a little late, we managed to book the relevant parts of a family summer holiday. It means that in subsequent weeks I’m going to be in Sheffield for the women’s Euro Championships semi-final, then in Colorado for the Badge Summit, then in Devon for a wedding, then in various places in France for our holiday. I’m not sure how relaxing that will be, but it will be fun.

Next week, our eldest has work experience in which he’s going to help out at the PE department at our youngest’s school. Work-wise, we’ve got some new work kicking off with LocalGov Drupal and then other client work to get done.