Weeknote 41/2024

Daylight Saving Time, which (of course!) is known in the UK under the more patriotic name BRITISH SUMMER TIME (BST), is an absolute joke. It annoys me that William Willett, the guy who proposed it did so because he didn’t like his golf game being cut short due to poor light, and didn’t even live long enough to see his idea implemented. He is also the great-great-grandfather of Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay. So some might argue that it would have been better for the world had he not existed 😉

Anyway, I’m pleased that BST ended last night, because for the last month of it I usually feel mildly jet-lagged. It’s nice to get up at 06:30 and for it to be light outside so that I can go out for a run. Not that I’m doing so this morning, but after having done a bit of Pilates for hips and hamstrings, I’ll probably go after watching my son’s football match, scheduled for an early kick-off. There are no other games for either of our two this weekend, so my daughter’s at a sleepover.

My son passed his driving test on the second attempt this week! I’m delighted for him. I was bracing myself for the cost of insurance, and wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the possibility of having a black box installed in one of our cars. However, it turns out our current provider didn’t require one, and was a lot cheaper than I was expecting. So he’s been motoring about over the last few days, picking up friends, going places, and generally exploring the freedom that comes with unfettered access to four wheels.

I’m now off work for a week, so Friday involved getting things finished so that WAO work could continue without me being around. This is one of the benefits of working openly: colleagues can seamlessly pick up where you left off with full context.

The only hurdle in this case was that an N-TUTORR horizon scanning report kicked off later than expected, meaning a flurry of activity at the end of the week. However, we held an internal kick-off meeting and as a result asked some questions of Catherine Cronin, who I’m delighted to say is the editor of the report series. Wayne Gibbons was kind enough to lend an hour of his time to give me some context on the Irish Technological University sector. I recorded our call, used Sonix.ai to transcribe it, and sent that as well as an AI summary of the transcript to Laura and John.

Talking of N-TUTORR, I ran the second of two workshops for them with Bryan Mathers. This one, on creating a badging policy, seemed to go down even better than the first, which was an introductory session on digital badging. It helped, I think, that Bryan created new imagery for the workshop as a result of our preparatory conversations. In general, I’m fortunate to work with such talented people.

The Friends of the Earth project we’ve been working on now has a canonical link in the form of a post on the FoE Experiments Team blog. Based on some desk research and email-based interviews, Laura and I have formulated some draft principles on how AI can be used responsibly as part of the environmental justice and digital rights movements. They’ll now go to a small number of experts who are being paid as part of the Mozilla funding to prepare for an invite-only online roundtable next month. FoE are also inviting around 50 people to be observers to ask questions and help shape things a bit.

We’ve pretty much finished the JFF-funded project evaluating an IRC Verifiable Credential for New Americans (i.e. refugees and immigrants to the USA). Although we were only tasked with collecting quantitative and qualitative data on the credential itself and synthesising the findings, we did, of course, go further than this. Our report, which I’ll share once we’ve written it up for the WAO blog, also gives recommendations to the IRC around credentials for their Job Readiness Training more widely, as well as to JFF in terms of developing and sustaining the wider ecosystem.

Laura, John, and I presented our findings to JFF on Thursday with a slide deck we developed alongside the report. I think we’ve done a good job! We’ve arranged to present to IRC separately next month. At ePIC 2024 in Paris the week after next, I’ll be using that deck as the basis for my presentation about the project. As I want to enjoy my time off, I’ve actually already submitted my slides for this and the workshop I’m running entitled Human-centric Open Recognition: Synthesis, Mapping, and Badge Creation Using AI Tools.

(If you’d like to test the GPT I created for this workshop, let me know! Someone ended up talking with it for two hours the other day, and said it was really useful. As ever, you’re welcome to my exhaust.)

Over and above all of that, we also managed to sneak in a monthly co-op day. Usually, we spend this time doing more creative and reflective work. This time, however, we needed to do some planning for the marketing that comes as part of business development. That meant spreadsheets 🥱

After a month(!) of inactivity on the WAO blog, I published, with the help of Laura, Finding Unexamined Assumptions Through Systems Thinking and Ambiguity. After some initial brainstorming with GPT-o1-preview about how I could bring together existing posts on Systems Thinking and ambiguity, Laura helped me humanise it and think through a consistent example which acts as a thread throughout the post.

All of the above meant that I didn’t really have much time to work on my project for Project Studio. I skipped this week’s session, and I’ll be away for the next two weeks. So I think I’m going to have to accept that I can’t do everything. It’s probably no bad thing anyway, as I think that the idea I had for it needs additional percolation time.

Next week, I’m up in Scotland at a family wedding. There is some talk of going to the Ninja Warrior UK adventure park in Edinburgh on the way up, so wish me luck! On the way back, the in-laws are staying locally for a couple of nights to hang out with Team Belshaw. Then, after one day back in the office, I’ll be heading to Paris for ePIC.

I’ve just looked out of the window while thinking of how to finish off this post, and saw squirrel in our garden looking somewhat pensive. It reminded me of this classic section of Eddie Izzard’s stand-up routine. Enjoy!

Photo: a sunset walk on the beach at Druridge Bay with my son on Friday night.