Weeknote 30/2023

I’ve spent most of this week in Boulder, Colorado at The Badge Summit. It was great. Not only was the event full of interesting people and sessions, but we had a couple of (well-behaved) house parties at our Airbnb. I shared the house with Julie, Kerri, and Laura.

This was my fourth time in Colorado, and I love how sporty the place is compared to other places I’ve been in the US. It took me a while for my body to acclimatise to the timezone, heat (mid-thirties degrees C), and elevation (over a mile above sea level); so long, in fact, that by the time that my watch was telling me I was no longer ‘stressed’ it was time to go home! I did manage to sneak in a quick hike and a couple of short runs, though.

I was involved in four sessions at the summit, all related to Open Recognition:

• Pre-event unconference where we helped people unused to the format to get into three groups to discuss things of interest to them.
• Badgesplaining session (slides) with Laura right before the keynote. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that happen: a 10 minute talk right before a longer presentation.
• Conversation with Sheryl Grant about the history and theoretical underpinnings of Open Badges.
• Post-event unconference where Laura and I helped Justin and Krystal figure out how to set up a 501(c) nonprofit to help further the Open Recognition in the US.

Despite my best preparations and precautions, I always find coming back to the UK hard when flying forward through timezones. I went to the gym this morning (Saturday) and was weak.

Today, I’ve been packing as we leave for Center Parcs in The Netherlands tomorrow. We’re then in Devon the following week, and then my son and I are walking the second half of The Pennine Way. I did the first part from north to south, but my wife and daughter are dropping us off so we’ll be doing the second part from south to north. I’m thankful that my sister can look after our rucksacks as she doesn’t live too far away from Edale.

My daughter’s toe is slowly improving, although it still looks pretty bad. We’re hopefully picking up some crutches tomorrow so she can move about, but she’ll be unable to do a lot of the holiday activities we had planned. My son successfully completed his lifeguard training after doing a course from Monday to Friday. So that’s two trained lifeguards in the family — although I never was actually employed as one after doing a course at uni 22 years ago!

I’m not planning to take my laptop away with me, so the chances are that I’ll do a compilation weeknote on my return from walking with my son. I’ll take plenty of photos!