Tag: pandemic

Weeknote 41/2020

Posted on October 10, 2020October 10, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

This week has been much like last week — busy, somewhat fraught, and involving lots of thinking about the future. It’s been typical autumn weather, with bright sunshine one moment and a torrential downpour the next!

I applied for a role at the Wikimedia Foundation entitled Director of Product, Anti-Disinformation after a few people I know and respect said that they thought I’d be a good fit:

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Director of Product Management to design and implement our anti-disinformation program. This unique position will have a global impact on preventing Disinformation through Wikipedia and our other Wikimedia projects. You will gain a deep understanding of the ways in which our communities have fought disinformation for the last two decades and how this content is used globally. You will work cross-functionality with Legal, Security, Research and other teams at the Foundation and imagine and design solutions that enable our communities to achieve our Vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

As a result, I ended up writing about my issues with Twitter’s attempts at anti-disinformation in the run-up to the US Presidential election.

On Friday evening, a recruiter for a different global product director role got in touch seemingly slightly baffled that I’d applied for it, given my career history and credentials. I suppose it’s easy to undervalue yourself when various people chip away at your self worth over a period of months during a pandemic.

I’m very much enjoying working with Outlandish at the moment. It’s particularly nice to work alongside people who not only work openly and co-operatively, but are genuinely interested in improving communication, trust, and empathy within their organisation.

During October, due to my commitment to a four week Catalyst-funded discovery programme with nine charities, I’m only working with Outlandish the equivalent of one day per week. However, from November to January, I’ll be spending half of my week (2.5 days) divided between two things:

Helping them productise existing projects, and training/supporting new ‘product managers’ (although that role will look slightly different initially)
Working on helping them expand their ‘Building OUT’ programme which stands for Openness, Understanding, and Trust.

One of Outlandish’s values is that they are ‘doers’, meaning that the space between verbally proposing something, gaining the consent of colleagues, and getting on with it is really short. It’s so refreshing, and meant that on Friday I was able to publish the MVP of a playbook using existing Building OUT-related resources.

On Thought Shrapnel this week I published:

Here, I published:

Other than the above, I’ve been making final preparations for a milestone birthday for my wife, Hannah, next week. I’ll reach the same age as her in a couple of months’ time, so at the start of 2020 we’d begun to draw up plans to celebrate both birthdays. Those plans went out of the window due to COVID-19, so I’m trying to make the day as nice as possible, with an eye on a belated celebration later.

Image of traffic cones in large puddle at Morpeth, UK.

Weeknote 37/2020

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

I saw this illustration somewhere this week, but just as the days and weeks are indistinguishable at the moment, likewise my digital channels bleed into one. Every day, it seems, is: get up, spend most of the working day at the computer, switch screens for ‘leisure’ time, and then go to bed.

As Mark Frauenfelder reports for BoingBoing, perhaps it’s not just me — everyone’s in the same boat:

The issue with 2020, particularly with everyone in lockdown, is that we’re all stuck in the same four walls. And even though there are stressful things that occupy our minds, the fact is we’re not laying down very distinct memories, largely because we’re not moving around to different locations. Everything blurs together because every day looks essentially just like the last one. So when you look back, you think, We’ve been in lockdown for… how long? What day is this?
David Eagleman, via BoingBoing

I’ve been reflecting on Oliver Burkeman’s last column for The Guardian, which I shared via Thought Shrapnel last week. There’s so much condensed wisdom in there, but, like Austin Kleon, I found the framing around ‘enlargement’ when making life choices extremely useful:

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)
Oliver Burkeman, The eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

I haven’t talked much publicly about what went down when I left Moodle, nor will I, but it’s fair to say that I well and truly burned my bridges there. But the great thing about it is that I feel enlarged by doing so; I stuck to my principles, was supported by the team I’d put together (who also quit) and have moved onto things which make me happier.

For various reasons, I’ve started tracking the amount of paid work I do, and how much it earns me. Different clients, contracts, and types of work earn me different day rates. Sometimes this varies quite a bit.

Most days I spend from 08:00 to 16:00 in my office doing some form of work, with about 30 minutes for lunch. This adds up to a standard working week of 37.5 hours. However, over the last month I’ve been paid for the following:

Week beginning 17th August: 27.9 hours
Week beginning 24th August: 26.2 hours
Week beginning 31st August: 28.16 hours
Week beginning 7th September: 25.25 hours

That means, on average, I’m spending over 10 hours per week on things I’m not paid for. This week that included some pro-bono work for an Open Source project (which I’ll say more about when it’s got a proper web presence), replying to emails, research, blogging, admin, having a chat with a client about upcoming work, and a one-hour therapy session.

The latter was particularly welcome this week given some low-level drama going on in our co-op. For the last few months I’ve been working on my avoidant tendencies, which includes often apologising for situations in an attempt to make them go away. My therapist suggested that, this time, it might do me some good to just allow the dust to settle rather than trying to hastily fix things.

I’m particularly enjoying the work I’m doing with Outlandish at the moment, as I feel I’m able to apply some of the product skills I’ve developed over the past few years. There’s more wider ‘productisation’ work there, but also specific help I’m helping with related a stream of products and services related to sociocracy. I overhauled the workshop page for the

The initial contracts for those of us on loan from fellow CoTech co-ops were to the end of this month, so I’m not sure if I’ll be working with them after the next couple of weeks, but either way it’s definitely been a positive experience. Working with Aaron has been a highlight, and we overhauled the workshop page for Sociocracy 101: consent-based decision-making this week, among other things.

Other work this week has involved:

Helping Laura with a slide deck as we wrap-up a six-month contract with the Greenpeace Planet 4 team. We may remain engaged with them in some way over the next few months, but also have two contracts with other Greenpeace teams starting soon!
Updating learnwith.weareopen.coop to make more publicly-accessible a course on openness we initially put together for the Planet 4 team. I also ensured the new We are Open branding and logo is featured on that site. Our main site will be updated soon.
Drafting a post for the co-op blog about the Catalyst and Social Mobility Commission-funded work we finished recently. Erica Neve and I will be presenting about this at an upcoming Tech4Good event in a couple of weeks’ time.
Talking with Ken McCarthy about some work I’ll be doing with Waterford Institute of Technology after they were successful in a grant application. Fun fact: Ken has not missed a day in 10 years of writing at 750words.com!
Catching up with Erica to do a bit of planning around our the event session mentioned above.
Deleting my Slideshare account after downloading the 83 presentations I’d uploaded there between 2008 and 2017. I didn’t fancy having my data mined after Microsoft sold the service to Scribd. More details here.

I wrote three posts on this blog as part of the #100DaysToOffload challenge:

…and posted eight times with a variety of links and quotations from things I’ve been reading over at Thought Shrapnel:

Next week, guess what? I’ll be at home. I’ve got some Outlandish, Greenpeace, and internal co-op work to do, but am also available for more work! I’ve updated my hire me page specially. I think ideally I want to spend my time doing more product stuff. It’s enjoyable and I think I’m pretty good at it.

What do we mean by ‘the economy’?

Posted on September 2, 2020September 2, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

Some research I did during the Black Lives Matter protests pointed me towards Seeing White, which is Season 2 of the amazing Scene On Radio. I’ve been catching up with other series of the podcast since then, and the third series about toxic masculinity is also excellent.

However, it’s an episode of the most recent season which I want to focus on here. Season 4 concentrates on the origins of American democracy and, towards the end of March 2020, the hosts recorded a special bonus episode.

I listened to the episode this morning and it put into words something I’ve really been feeling about references to ‘the economy’. Thankfully, Scene On Radio provides audio transcripts.

Here’s the main host, John Biewen, talking to his co-host and collaborator, the academic and activist Chenjerai Kumanyika. They’re discussing the tension between the economy and democracy.

John Biewen: So in those cases from our series, and in others that we’ve looked at, it seems clear that building a healthy economy, as the ownership class understands that, is usually not the same as achieving wellbeing for most people. And here we are today, this argument still seems to be very much with us.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: So, you look at what we’re dealing with right now with this crisis, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that this thing of prioritizing profit has a lot to do with why our disaster preparedness is so far from what we need right now. Most of y’all have probably heard that Trump dismantled a pandemic preparedness team inside his administration that had been created during the Obama administration. But what you really have to look at is how he explains hisreasoning for this. In a press conference where he was describing why he cut thepandemic team and other things, he said, “I’m a business person….”
BONUS EPISODE: Pandemic America, Scene On Radio, Season 4: The Land That Never Has Been Yet

They play a clip from Trump where he says he doesn’t want people ‘standing around’ being unproductive. But of course that only makes sense if you think countries should be run like businesses.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And so there’s all these ideas circulating that everythingin the world should operate like a business and that somehow businesspeople are the best equipped to do everything. But in this case what you see is that business instinct was incredibly shortsighted. When we’ve actually known about these kinds of flus for decades, and people have been warning about just this kind of global pandemic — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s playing such a prominent role right now. He’s the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and you’ve probably seen him talking about this. He’s been warning about flu pandemics at least since the 1990s. But with that government pandemic unit cut from the budget, the decision of whether or not to develop and mass-produce vaccines and tests was an economic decision left in the hands of people figuring out, like, are we gonna profit from this?
BONUS EPISODE: Pandemic America, Scene On Radio, Season 4: The Land That Never Has Been Yet

So there we have it. By ‘the economy’, what politicians and others mean is ‘profits for wealthy people’. This is why, with a straight face, they will talk about the ‘balance’ to be struck between the economy and the number of deaths caused by the pandemic.

Put like that, as profits for wealthy people, I don’t particularly care about getting the economy restarted. I care about human lives. Trickle-down economics has, after all, been debunked as bogus.

This post is Day 42 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com