At the end of August, I began thinking about a Fediverse instance focused on fitness / exercise. Last month, in September, I created a Code of Conduct, and then opened registrations just over a month ago on September 13th.
It’s gone well so far, with over 30 registered users, three of whom are called Doug! (I absolutely recommend having 10% of your users with this name, as it is the best of names that can be used as both forename and surname) 😉
I ran into issues with the first managed hosting solution we used but, true to their word, they made it easy to transfer to Fedi Monster, who took over the reins last weekend. The transition not only makes things slightly cheaper (for now) but gives admins access to more functionality and features. We’re also now running a version of Pixelfed which is compatible with the (beta) official iOS app and third-party Android app.
I’ve created docs.exercise.cafe which will grow to house all documentation relating to the site — from the Code of Conduct through to onboarding/offboarding information for admins. I hope to add to the moderation team soon, once I’m back from the conference in France that I’m currently travelling to, and next week’s family holiday!
PS I have no design skills at all, so if anyone’s interested in creating a logo for Exercise Cafe, please do go ahead! Once we’ve got donations up-and-running (and we’ve got enough surplus on top of server costs) we may run a logo competition. But that’s probably a while off…
Oh I don’t know, I’ve just been doing the usual stuff, you know? So this weeknote is going to be weeknote-by-exception.
Other than the usual work and stuff, this week I’ve been:
Celebrating my wife’s birthday — Hannah doesn’t work Fridays any more, and I took most of the day off to celebrate her turning… a larger number than previously. We went out for brunch in Whitley Bay and for a walk along the beach in Tynemouth.
Baking a cake — there’s a Netflix series called ‘Nailed It’ which showcases the worst cake fails. The red velvet cake my kids and I made for Hannah’s birthday wouldn’t quite feature, but my icing style isn’t threatening my day job, let’s put it that way…
Buying a car — we happened to do this on Hannah’s birthday, but it wasn’t for her birthday. It just happened to be the only time we could really go and test drive cars. We went out thinking we’d buy a Mini, and ended up going for a VW Up! with a reasonably-high spec. This is because we need to park it around the back of our house, and we’ve got an eye on it eventually being the car in which our son will learn to drive.
Getting back to running — after a couple of hospital visits last month, and then a flu jab and a Covid jab, I managed to run on the treadmill at the gym four times this week. Which is progress!
Hearing back about funding — NLnet didn’t want to fund development of Badge Brainz (a prototype of which is at badge.supply). I may be biased, but this is a great idea and if you’ve got a few tens of thousands of pounds/Euros to throw at something that will have an impact around recognition and credentialing worldwide, then point it at this. Email me!
Moving exercise.cafe — I’ll write more about this once the transfer is completely complete, but I’ve moved exercise.cafe to a new managed service. There are currently a few teething problems, but I’ve already got access to many more admin and customisation options than I did before.
Working on slides — I’m collaborating on a session about Open Recognition next week at ePIC 2022. I spent 30 mins in the car while my daughter was at one of her many football training sessions adding to the slide deck. Ironically, the session itself is only 20 mins long!
Next week I’ll be spending mostly in Lille, France at ePIC. I’m very much looking forward to it and will be getting the Eurostar for the first time! The week after that is half-term for the kids and we’re heading to Scotland on holiday for a few days.
Photo of gate taken in Benton after going for a walk once I’d dropped my daughter at Jump360!It’s part of the Waggonways routes.
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.
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 😂
