Weeknotes 39/2022 & 40/2022
It was Tuesday by the time I realised I hadn’t written last week’s weeknote, so I’ve decided to combine them into one this time around. I’m not sure if that was merely an oversight, or whether it provides some kind of deep insight into how the first of these weeks went.
Either way, I’m going for bullet points for this combined weeknote. So, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been:
- Getting jabbed — I’ve had both my flu jab and fourth Covid jab now. The latter was by invitation because I’m ‘at risk’ as I’ve got asthma. As with last time, I got some strange looks from the mostly-retired crowd being invited to have theirs.
- Holding the fort — Laura is on holiday for a couple of weeks, John‘s doing a lot of work with Outlandish, and Bryan is currently a dormant member, so I’ve been working with Anne, our intern-turned-collaborator.
- Facilitating a tricky meeting — one of our clients asked me to facilitate a potentially-sensitive meeting using consent-based decision making. It went really well, and they made the decision they needed to make in a way that felt inclusive. The facilitation sheet on the Sociocracy for All website was a useful reminder to have in front of me.
- Rescoping a project — we got involved with some CAST-funded work with Sport England National Governing Bodies (NGBs) at short notice before the summer. We were then asked last month to take over the project in its entirety, so we took the opportunity to work with CAST on thinking more ambitiously about open working and have defined some badges for NGB staff to work towards.
- Launching a course — we’ve put together some of our experience of helping clients with organisational strategy into a free email-based course entitled How to Unf*ck Your Organisation. The artwork is AI generated in the style of Keith Haring and is pretty awesome. All of the tools and approaches used are available at our Learn with WAO site.
- Responding to questions — we put in a proposal in early August to NLnet for some funding to develop a prototype simple badge issuing platform into something more fully-featured which could be used as a plugin for WordPress, etc. We responded to questions from the funders, which you can read here.
- Planning for ePIC — the week after next I’ll be in Lille, France for the ePIC conference. I’m working with Justin Mason, Julie Keane, and Don Presant on a short presentation to talk about the work of the OSN Open Recognition working group, as well as how Rich Skill Desciptors (RSDs) can help with the creation of both human-readable and machine-readable skills libraries.
- Publishing blog posts — four on the WAO blog, to be precise:
- Steps to Success when Building a Community of Practice is a practical guide for others to replicate the success we’ve had with the KBW community. It uses a maturity model and systems convening approach that’s based on the work of others, but which we’ve synthesised. There’s also a useful link to a case study in there.
- Open Workplace Recognition using Verifiable Credentials reflects on the draft Verifiable Credentials for Education, Employment, and Achievement Use Cases report using the lens of Open Recognition for the workplace.
- Using 2×2 grids for Open Source community development demystifies a favourite technique of consultants everywhere, showing how insights can be gathered simply by plotting two relevant things on an X and Y axis.
- How Open Source communities are evolving uses the work of Nadia Asparouhova (née Eghbal) around a typology of Open Source communities. We’ve made a couple of small changes to the grid she presents in her excellent book.
- Synthesising research — John and I are working with Happy Porch and Common Knowledge on a project for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. We’ve only interviewed staff so far, so looking forward to talking to their community members.
- Working towards a crowdfunder — Ivan and Mayel want to run a crowdfunding campaign for the next phase of Bonfire, the federated community toolkit. I’ve been helping Ivan with UX-related stuff, as well as writing use cases for global non-profits and families.
On the family front, our daughter got into the East Northumberland County football team a year up (they don’t do under-12s for some reason). I’ve ordered our first electric car, a Hyundai IONIQ 5, through my business. It’ll hopefully arrive before Christmas. We’re also considering buying a petrol-engined second car. Weirdly, we need zero cars for three days of the week, and two cars for four days of the week… 🙄
Next week, Laura will still be away so I’ll continue to be holding the fort with Anne. The week after that I’m in Lille for ePIC, and then the week after that we’re heading up to Scotland for half-term. It would be pretty amazing if our new car had arrived by then, as Scotland has some free EV charging points!
Photo of Covid vaccination sticker. I think I was the only person to take one 😂
