April 2026: frameworks, friction, and federation

It's Bank Holiday Monday and I've just realised that I didn't write and publish an April roundup on April 30th. So here it is, a few days late.

We Are (no longer) Open which may have something to do with it. I also haven't had my usual three weeks off in April, so I'm tired. As I've written about before, there's something magical about taking three weeks, especially at this time of year. But there's just been too much on.

Laura and I started a new project even with a few weeks left of the co-op, Tom kicked off the TechFreedom pilot went live, I shipped a couple of new tools, and the WAO research with the BBC was finally published. The pace caught up with me a bit by the end of the month, but more on that below.

TechFreedom and the pilot cohort

The big news this month is that TechFreedom launched properly as a cohort-based programme. Tom and I had been planning it for a while, so it was a relief to see it actually run with real participants. We've had interest from people in the US and New Zealand who want to run something similar.

• Want a clearer view of your tech stack? Join the TechFreedom pilot cohort (3 Apr) – the formal call for the pilot cohort, alongside a new “going deeper” weighted risk profile and the Stacktopolis game.
• Choosing partnership over “certainty theatre” (22 Apr) – on the pretence and performance that everyone knows what's going on. The gap between confident-sounding briefs and what's actually true on the ground is where most projects come unstuck.
• How a little “productive friction” protects human agency (24 Apr) – sometimes the more human outcome is the one that introduces a pause long enough to notice, judge, and choose differently.

The second two of these posts came directly out of running the first pilot session, with participants largely focusing as on things we'd said in passing as the planned content.

Tools, federation, and the long shadow of MoodleNet

I shipped a couple of tools this month with which I'm rather pleased:

• Introducing Commonplace (17 Apr) – a federated resource collection manager for the open social web. You log in with your existing Mastodon, Bluesky, or IndieWeb account, curate links and uploads by topic, and share collections via ActivityPub or RSS. The closure announcement for what's left of moodle.net (on 20th April, of all days) gave me the nudge I needed.
• Turning polygonal badges into contours of practice (20 Apr) – an early experiment that takes the polygonal badges idea and runs with it. Contours shows a learner's skills progression as a layered, topographic-style view rather than a single snapshot. Still very much v0.x, but the idea is sound.

Commonplace is obviously the more substantial of the two. Bonfire Bridges was my first attempt at scratching the itch, but I buil Commonplace when I realised I didn't have the Moodle constraints any more and could just base it on the accounts people already have.

AI, literacy, and the tools we choose

The other four non-weeknote posts this month are roughly in the same territory: how we relate to AI tools, what literacy looks like in 2026, and how seriously to take our own arguments about Big Tech.

• Supporting AI Literacies for Young Adults Aged 14-19 (13 Apr) – cross-posted from the WAO blog. The full research report with the BBC's Responsible Innovation Centre, presenting an AI Literacies framework with six key elements grounded in critical evaluation rather than just functional skills. One of the last major pieces of WAO work to see the light of day.
• Literate communities have always looked different to their critics (15 Apr) – a response to a Radical with Amol Rajan episode in which James Marriott made a “books = literacy = intelligence = democracy” argument. The data on falling reading rates points to something real, but when you've closed 800 libraries and gutted the infrastructure through which people build reading communities, blaming screens is a conclusion in search of a cause.
• Claude Code used to be the obvious choice (27 Apr) – I downgraded my Claude plan to Pro and shifted day-to-day coding to OpenCode plus OpenRouter. Once you have language for jurisdiction, continuity, and lock-in risks via TechFreedom, continuing as if your own dependencies are exempt starts to feel a bit potentially-boiled-frog.
• My tech disclaimer (29 Apr) – prompted by an Elena Rossini quote about people who write about technology disclosing the stack they actually use. So I did. A useful exercise even if you don't end up publishing the result.

Weeknotes

Four weeknotes this month:

• Weeknote 14/2026 (5 Apr) – planning the TechFreedom workshops with Tom, a half-day at WAO working through closure logistics, and building nvAge in the spirit of Notational Velocity.
• Weeknote 15/2026 (12 Apr) – off work for a week. Holy Island, Northumberland Zoo, watching Grace play against Sunderland Academy, and shipping Commonplace.
• Weeknote 16/2026 (19 Apr) – back to work, the AI Literacies report going live, and finishing The Castle by Kafka. Tired.
• Weeknote 17/2026 (26 Apr) – the AIUK community platform pilot evaluation presented to senior leadership, the first TechFreedom session run, getting set up on MIT's systems for the DCC work with Kerri, and a solo walk on the Pennine Way to clear my head.

April was the last full month of We Are Open Co-op. May is going to be different, but I'm still the same person, with the same values, doing similar work.