I was in Amsterdam from Monday to Friday this week, for MozFest House and a WAO meetup. We ran a session entitled ‘Fostering Transparency and Building a Cooperative Economy’. I also lied about my personal details and preferences to get free iced coffee, hung out on a boat, and melted in the heat.
Our house went on the market while I was away, as things moved more quickly than I envisaged. This is a good thing, as we had five viewings booked in yesterday. I was out with my daughter, who was at a Future Lioness event and then represented East Northumberland in the discus at the area athletics championships. She had to run from that even to take part in the relay, and then pretty much kept on running to do the first leg!
I’m keeping this short as we’re about to go and view a house that would potentially be a backup plan to the one we really want. I published a single blog post this week, other than this one, which I called On the paucity of ‘raising awareness’.
Next week it’s back to work in my home office. I hope it’s not too hot, as the lack of sleep from late nights and being in a really hot room with no openable windows while in Amsterdam really took it out of me.
I’m composing this from Newcastle Airport on Monday morning. It’s been a busy weekend, so let’s get that out of the way first.
Saturday morning, I went for a run and then spent most of the day with my wife and daughter at a football tournament for the latter’s new team. They expected to win it, and almost did, had it not been for a penalty given against them during extra time in the final. Back home, shower and change. Out to Wagamama, a family favourite, before our son’s football presentation evening at St James Park, home of Newcastle United. He won Player of the Season, which was not at all expected, although he is awesome (even if I do say so myself).
We were tired enough after the events of Saturday, but on Sunday we had to get the house ready for the estate agent’s photographer, who is coming today (Monday). As anyone who has sold a house in the age of Rightmove will know, the photos are effectively what sell it. So it was a bit of a mission to get everything ready. I was dripping with sweat after gardening, cleaning, painting, etc. So much so that I was thankful for the torrential rain that started in the evening.
It was Fathers Day in the UK yesterday, so we went over to my parents. I’d taken my dad and two kids to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on Friday evening (amazing!) but also bought him a book I’d heard being recommended on a podcast. When I left the family this morning, with my son now finished his GCSE exams, my daughter still recovering from the tournament (she picked up a slight injury), and my wife preparing for a potentially tricky week of user research interviews at work, everyone looked knackered.
I almost can’t remember what I did before this last weekend. Laura’s been away, so it’s been a weird week at work. I published a couple of blog posts in different places:
Other than that, the majority of my work seemed to revolve around community platforms and setting up user research. For example:
HelpingWEAll (with John) come to a decision not to adopt Hylo but instead trial Discourse. I think they’ll be happy with it, even if it is a bit less shiny.
Meeting with Participate to discuss our ongoing work and their new platform which we’ll be migrating the existing KBW community to over the coming weeks/months.
Finishing up some of the initial workers.coop projects I’ve been leading. Now that we’re self-hosting Cal.com, not only can we run Co-op Conversations (for people interested in setting up worker co-ops) but we can use it to book user research interviews for the Member Learning group. The How to set up a worker co-op email course which I mentioned last week is now live, as well.
I realised this week need to write a post about the difference between social networks, chat apps, and forums. People tend to conflate them, which is unhelpful, as they serve different purposes.
There’s plenty of other things I did this week, including deciding not to respond to an RfP after attending the Q&A, preparing for an interview for some other potential work, and just generally getting ready for my upcoming trip.
This coming week, I’ll be in Amsterdam to meet up with my WAO colleagues and for us to run a session at MozFest House. I’m back on Thursday afternoon and will almost immediately take my daughter to her second trial for Sunderland’s academy. She’s also going to the Newcastle trials, but being a Sunderland fan, and knowing it’s a better setup, I’m rooting for her switching from one to the other.
Photo of new temperature and humidity sensor in my home office. It ended up going up to 28.8 C so I bought an evaporative cooler, which increased the humidity but meant I could work in there! The awesome TRYING patch is bright orange in real life and came via Dan Sinker.
The ‘photo’ above was generated using a new tool from Secta Labs. Yes, I paid money to feed in 25 real photos and get back 300+ images that it generated. Some looked like my weird American cousin, as in they kind of looked like me, but not really. There were 15 I was happy enough with, so I asked friends and family which ones they liked and then… ended up using a different one! 😂
To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m using scare quotes for ‘photo’ given that most people use their smartphones to take photographs these days, and those have ton of AI processing going on. As far as I’m concerned, the image above represents how I think I look better than any photos that have been taken of me recently.
(Pro tip: you can use DALL-E to generate more of the area around your head if you get something that’s too closely-cropped on one side, as I did.)
Anyway, enough of the narcissism! Back to the introspection.
This week has been in which a lot of things have happened. Some of them have been work-related, so let’s get those out of the way first. I’ve been:
Continuing to configure Co-op Conversations which now almost ready. I just need to tweak some workflows.
Recording an episode for Season 7 of The Tao of WAO podcast. I’m not sure if we’re releasing details of upcoming guests, so I’ll not share who we had on, for now. We did release S06 E02 (complete with transcript!) about worker wellbeing, so you might want to listen to that.
HoldingWAO‘s Annual General Meeting which lasted about five minutes, and is literally just a tick-box exercise given that we have three people with voting rights and we talk most days anyway.
Catching up with Ian O’Byrne about an upcoming Call for Proposals around an academic journal. I usually ignore these things, but I thought it was a great opportunity to do something different (multimedia!) and collaborate with him.
Working through some user research session design issues with Ivan Minutillo. The aim is to figure out how to present the ‘Compose’ modal in Bonfire in the most intuitive way possible when users have extremely granular controls at their disposal.
Working on client-related stuff, including for Greenpeace, Participate, and WEAll. We’ll be looking for new clients (or to do more work for previous ones!) from September.
Chatting with Tim Frenneaux about an idea he’s got called DeCAP. He connected with me after seeing our Architecture of Participation work, and what he’s doing sounds pretty cool.
Wrestling with Vrbo, through which we booked our accommodation for our upcoming trip to Amsterdam. If I were in charge of product for them, I would expect to be called into the office for a stern word.
Laura remembered on Thursday lunchtime that she’s not working next week and had booked it off in our calendar towards the beginning of the year. She doesn’t work Fridays, so it was a slightly abrupt “see you in Amsterdam!” 😅
I mentioned last week that my daughter is going to seemingly a million football trials in the month of June. We found out this week that she got into what is the best team in the north east of England for her age group, which she’s delighted about. She also went to an England development pathway event and got a callback, and to a mixed team trial.
About the latter: anyone who’s been a teacher or coach can often tell what’s about to happen next in certain situations. The decision is only whether or not to intervene. And so it was on a unseasonably cool evening that my wife and I, both former teachers, watched someone in charge of 30+ twelve year-olds. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that, despite them offering our daughter a place in their best team, she won’t be going back. I don’t have a lot of time for poor organisational skills.
My son is continuing with his GCSE exams, and will enter his final week of them next week. I think he’s doing alright, but I am a bit concerned about his on again – off again relationship with revision. You can lead 16 year-olds to the waters of study, but you can’t make them drink (as it were).
Just to add more things into the mix, we’re doing a second viewing of a house next week and taking the kids along. Our house isn’t on the market yet, as we said we’d wait until the GCSE exams to be finished.
We’re also thinking of leasing a car to replace our 10 year-old Volvo V60, which has served us really well and I really like. The rear passenger side suspension snapped this week and, although we got it fixed quickly, it just reminded us that we’re in the realms of Serious Things Going Wrong. I took our daughter for a test drive of a Volvo XC40 today, but I’m leaning towards the lovely-looking Cupra Formentor.
Exercise-wise, I’m back to running properly after my ankle injury. I also went swimming for the first time in ages with my son, as he’s doing a lifeguard course next month and needs to get his water fitness back. Both of us used to swim competitively, but that doesn’t mean much as you lose anaerobic stamina super-quickly. Anyway, it was fine, we’ve both got new prescription goggles, and the pool at the new leisure centre is great.
I took my daughter to the gym, ran on the treadmill, did weights, my first 10k outside for a while, and generally started pushing myself a bit more. Weirdly, the thing I found hardest this week was a 20-minute Pilates for Runners routine I did via YouTube. Oh. My. Days.
Next week, as I mentioned, Laura’s away and so I’ve got to prepare for our meetup and MozFest House session in Amsterdam. I’ve also got a list of small things I need to do, writing I need to start / get finished, and things to tidy up. My daughter’s got more trials, my son’s got his last week of exams, so I need to find something that’s acceptable to everyone as a way of celebrating the latter being over.
Busy times, but not overwhelming. I get bored easily, so it’s it’s all good, I guess 🤘
