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Well here we are, halfway through the year! I’m composing this at lunchtime on Monday, as Hannah and I went away last night after our son’s debut for his new basketball team. They absolutely destroyed the other team in a friendly, and he scored a 3-pointer on the final buzzer, which was pretty special.
The reason we went away was ostensibly it being 21 years tomorrow since I proposed to her on Prince Edward Island in Canada. That was half a lifetime ago for both of us, and we have fond memories. It’s also two years tomorrow since her mum died, so there’s sadness mixed in there too.
The kids stayed with my parents for the first time in a year. Our son doesn’t really need babysitting as he’s 16, but it’s only fair that he goes along with our 12 year-old daughter. It seems they had a good time. Hannah and I certainly did, basically replicating what we did last time we went away: getting an upgrade at the Crowne Plaza and going for dinner and cocktails at Khai Khai.
Last week, my son started doing some work for WAO, ensuring that we have transcripts for all of our podcast episodes. He’s doing a good job so far. We’re recording another couple of episodes today for Season 7, with Laura currently releasing episodes of Season 6 we recorded over the last couple of months.
I started doing some user research for the workers.coop around Member Learning group. We’re following-up on responses to a survey which asked people for their learning preferences, etc. so that we can create targeted, relevant offerings. In related news, I updated a consent form for Bonfire user research, taking into account Hannah’s feedback (she’s a user researcher for NHS England).
WEAll, one of our clients, decided against using Hylo after testing it in May. This was mainly based on our recommendation due to the lack of effective moderation tools. Now, they’re planning to test Discourse, which is a much better option. So John and I were scoping that out.
Anne’s still finishing off her dissertation and final year of uni work, but she’s rejoined us for a couple of days per week. This is good as she’s very organised (not that the rest of us aren’t!) and brings a different angle and energy to our work, particularly with Participate.
In other news, we’ve had more house viewings but no offers yet. Everyone’s expressed how lovely they think it is, but I guess the housing market is a little slow at the moment. I just hope we don’t miss out on the place we want to move to.
This week is the last one of a crazy few weeks of football trials for my daughter. She was offered a place at Sunderland’s ETC with the final trial for Newcastle’s ETC being on Friday. It’s her choice, but I’m keen for her to join the former as she’ll be mixed with girls a year up, and it’s a more established setup. She was in Newcastle’s ETC this last season, and if she’s offered a place and opts to stay there it’s no bad thing.
So this week I’ll be continuing with client work, doing a bit of business development for September, and considering whether to respond to UNESCO’s call for contributions r.e. the definition of algorithm literacy and data literacy. It’s a tight deadline, but Ian O’Byrne and Tom Salmon have expressed an interest in collaborating, so we’ll see. Ideally, I would have read Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI this weekend, but… I didn’t.
The post Weeknote 26/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.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.
The post Weeknote 25/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
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:
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 post Weeknote 24/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.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:
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 🤘
The post Weeknote 23/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.This week has been half-term for the kids. Hannah took the week off as it contained a Bank Holiday and she doesn’t work Fridays; so she got 10 days off in a row by only taking three holiday days.
I’m not sure why I bothered even trying to work, to be honest, especially as I took Monday and Friday off and attended a funeral for an elderly neighbour on Wednesday. All of this explains why I managed a total of 12.5 hours of work this week…
There was a lot of admin (invoicing, paying corporation tax, claiming back expenses, etc.) this week as we crossed the end of May / start of June boundary. I did get to do a bit of work on client projects, though, including launching the free How to set up a worker co-op email course over at workers.coop.
I also did a bit with Laura for Participate relating to their new platform, with John for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance relating to testing their new community platform, and with Ivan on some Bonfire UX stuff. I’ve also been working on transcripts for Season 6 of The Tao of WAO podcast, the first episode of which has just been released.
We’re into football trials month. Except, because it’s junior football, you have to call them ‘open sessions’. Our daughter is going to approximately a million of them, whereas our son switched basketball teams last week but is staying put for his football team. What with it being the middle of GCSE exams, I feel like parenting is my full-time job at the moment and I just work around it.
Next week is back to a bit of normality. Except, I suppose, my son is now on study leave so I’ll have to make sure he’s got some sort of routine…
Photo of Public Enemy #1: a Common Horse Chestnut tree near our house which seems to have a pollen machine-gun.
The post Weeknote 22/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.It’s Bank Holiday Monday and I haven’t yet written last week’s weeknote. That is to say, I’m writing it now, a day late. I haven’t got the energy or inclination to use florid language, so you’re getting bullet points.
Last week, I was mostly:
This week is half-term and Hannah‘s taking time off to spend with the kids. I’ve got today, which I’ve largely wasted by sleeping in, going to the gym, reading, and playing video games. Oh wait, those are the things I enjoy doing 😂
Image from a page of Sarah Bakewell’s excellent Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, which I’m reading at the moment in hardback. There’s a great interview with her about the book and its origins in this podcast episode.
The post Weeknote 21/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.There are many ways of measuring time. These weeknotes are one way. Calendars are another way, with my favourite way of marking the months being the French Republican Calendar. We’re just entering Prairial, my favourite month! As a reminder of this, I subscribe to daily updates from the Republican Calendar bot on the Fediverse. (I also find the Moon Phases bot handy.)
This week, then, there’s been a lot on. My son started his GCSE exams, my wife went away on a work trip, and I gave my daughter a ‘Golden Boot’ trophy for banging in 42 goals in all competitions this season. Yes, I’ve turned into one of those parents, but it’s a form of recognition and encouragement.
Now that I’ve got access to ChatGPT’s plugins and ability to browse the web, I’ve been using it to conversationally explore options for our 20th wedding anniversary in September. The user experience of doing that by having a chat with a chatbot is approximately a million times better than miserably trawling through sites full of ads. Although I’m sure that the advertising will arrive soon.
Work-wise, I continued working on the WAO projects with which I’m currently involved. I can’t talk about the Greenpeace work, sadly (because it’s pretty great), but we’ve been setting up Hylo ready for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance to test as their new community platform. It’s going well so far. I’m waiting for feedback on the three projects for workers.coop, and there hasn’t been loads to do on the stuff for Participate recently. There will be once we get people in the bigger tent on their new platform.
At the suggestion of Joe, from whom we subcontracted some of the work, WAO ran a retrospective on the project for CAST that was funded by Sport England. Although we delivered some really useful stuff, it was a frustrating project to be involved with in many ways. It turns out that was largely to do with change of project leads, staff turn over in the National Governing Bodies (NGBs), and a miscommunication between whether (and how) we should interact with the NGBs directly. Lesson learned.
Laura hit publish on a post we’d been working on together entitled Practical utopias and rewilding work which came out of our last couple of co-op days. It features a graphic that I created with five topics/areas for us to focus on. As ever, it’s the intersections and overlaps that are interesting. Related: Laura, who’s awesome at ensuring things get written-up, published a wiki page entitled Our principles even-over everything else. Even-over statements are powerful things for any group of people.
On the exercise front, my ankle is still bothering me. It’s over three weeks since I went over on it while running through some mud, and then had to keep on going because I was a long way from home. I’ve aggravated it since then by stumbling on an uneven bit of path while looking at my phone, and so recently I’ve been on the exercise bike instead of running. It’s very boring, and with one of the exercise bikes out of action at the gym, like a game of musical chairs but with old people pedalling slowly and reading books.
The weather always gets much better at this time of year, and so I’ve been up at the field at the top of the hill near our house with the kids a few times. We’re accumulating more equipment as my daughter, in particular, gets older and wants to improve her technique. So we had the cones, speed ladder, and ‘top bins’ for free kick accuracy training. It’s good fun, and my job is mostly encouragement, ball retrieval, and giving out tips to which they sometimes listen.
It’s the sharp end of the football season and, although my team (Sunderland) took a 2-1 lead to Kenilworth Road, they were out-muscled on a tiny pitch by Luton Town. It’s a shame, but I’m not too sad; another season in the Championship to build the squad before being promoted to the Premier League is no bad thing. We’re watching all of the football on TV at the moment. Manchester City might have won the league and Southampton been relegated, but it’s otherwise all to play for!
Inspired by the social documentary photography I discussed in my last weeknote, I got out my mirrorless digital camera (a Sony NEX-5 from before smartphone cameras got much better). It reminded me that you can stuff as much AI as you want into a camera, but the lens makes a huge difference. I’ll probably start taking it out and about with me a bit more, but in the meantime, I also had some fun generating some AI art which looks like black and white photographs from last century.
I’ve been messing about with my Steam Deck, finally buying a fitted case and screen protector for it, in addition to the travel case which it comes with. For some reason, I’d never installed the Heroic Launcher so that I could get the Epic Games store, and therefore Rocket League. It’s amazing on that form factor, and because it’s all cross-play, I’ve got six years of progress on there from playing on the PlayStation.
Over at Thought Shrapnel, I posted:
Next week, we’ve got some planning to do as our MozFest House proposal was accepted. We also need to figure out what else we need to get done while in Amsterdam next month. That, for me, includes which Japanese arcades to experience. We also need to do some business development, and discuss whether or not we’re redesigning our website. I think we should aim for radical simplicity, like this (but more design-y).
Photo taken on field near our house on grass-cutting equipment.
The post Weeknote 20/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.This was my last week at work for three weeks. Just as I did in 2022, this year I’m taking three weeks off in April, August, and December, as well as a few days here and there. I find that it’s only in the third week away from work that I can truly unwind.
Unwinding is different to relaxing. I’m not really someone who find pleasure in long periods of relaxation, if I’m perfectly honest. Life is short and I need things to do. So I’ll be spending my time on holiday with Team Belshaw in Scotland, doing DIY, and walking at least half of The Pennine Way. I’ve swapped running for walking 20,000+ steps each day in preparation for the latter. In fact, I’m just back from a walk with the rest of Team Belshaw which encompassed some of the best of Northumberland (mud! beaches! ice cream!)
Talking of exercise, Morpeth Riverside Leisure Centre, which I’ve been to ever since moving here nine years ago, closed on Wednesday. That is because the new leisure centre (also next to the river, just a bit further round!) opens next Wednesday. I’m not sure why they had to have a week inbetween, and they haven’t informed us of a refund. But you can have a look around the new place for yourself (no, it’s not a parody! I like their enthusiasm).
Also on the exercise front, our kids haven’t had any football matches this weekend, nor have they any scheduled for next weekend. As a result, I was up on the field at the top of the hill helping my daughter with various skills. The photo above shows the high-tech solution I came up with to practice getting it in ‘top bins‘. My son has been a little unwell and so hasn’t been playing sport or training this week.
Blog posts continued tumbling out of me this week:
I also finished the resource for Catalyst on Open Working. On the same topic, Anne published a post rounding up the work we did via CAST for Sport England. Adam Freeman-Pask, who is Head of Digital Innovation for Sport England also published a post heavily influenced by the programme. That’s the end of that project, which we started back in May last year.
We’re replacing this work on our roster with three smallish projects for the Member Learning group of workers.coop. We’ll be turning the MVP of the CoTech Digital Candle service into something a bit more fully-featured. In addition, we’re creating an email-based course (see others) on the basis of worker co-ops, as well as doing some user research to see what kind of support existing network members would like.
In addition, I worked on other client projects for Greenpeace, Participate, and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. That involved doing a whole range of things from to figuring out badge pathways, installing and configuring a wiki, booking flights to Badge Summit, and writing more of a digital strategy. I had some interesting conversations including about Navigatr, drafted another email course (on ‘Reframing Recognition’), did some invoicing, and submitted a proposal for ePIC 2023 in December.
Next week I’m on holiday and walking around a lot.
The post Weeknote 13/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
I boiled snow for the first time this morning. Last night, I wild camped somewhere in The Cheviots as the clocks ‘sprang’ forward. Waking up before dawn, I put my iPod on shuffle, skipped one track and listened to Surprise Ice by Kings of Convenience. The song couldn’t have been more apt, given that my tent was covered in snow and ice!
The overnight camp was in preparation for walking at least half of The Pennine Way in a few weeks’ time. I’ve got all the kit I need, so I was just testing the new stuff out and making sure the existing stuff was still in good working order. The good news is that it’s very unlikely to get colder during my walk than it did last night, and I was warm enough to sleep!
This week, I’ve been helping WAO finish off our work (for now) with Passbolt and Sport England, continuing some digital strategy stuff for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, doing some work around Greenpeace and KBW. I updated a resource I’d drafted on open working for Catalyst, and put together a proposal for some badges work under the auspices of Dynamic Skillset.
We had a co-op half day on Tuesday in which we ran, and eventually passed, a proposal about experimenting with a ‘drip release’ model for our content. Essentially, this would mean that we would have patrons (platform TBD) who would get our stuff first, and then everything would be open a few weeks later. This emerged from an activity of us individually coming up with a roadmap for WAO for the next few years. We were amazingly well-aligned, as you’d hope and expect!
This week, I published:
I also helped a little with this post from Laura, and she helped me with one that I’ve written but has yet to be published. I’ve also drafted another couple of posts and an email-based course. I also (with a little help) created a weather app using the OpenWeatherMap API. Which brings us onto…
I’ve continued to find ChatGPT 4 really useful in my work this week. It’s like having a willing assistant always ready. And just like an assistant, it sometimes gets things wrong, makes things up, and a lot of the time you have domain expertise that they don’t. AI-related stuff is all over the place at the moment, especially LinkedIn, and I share the following links mainly for future me looking back.
While I got access to Google Bard a few days ago, the experience Google currently provides feels light years behind OpenAI’s offering. This week there were almost too many AI announcements to keep up with, so I’ll just note that ChatGPT was connected to internet this week. Previously it just relied on a training model that cut off in 2021. Also, OpenAI have announced plugins which look useful, although I don’t seem to have access to them yet.
There are lots of ways to be productive with ChatGPT, and this Hacker News thread gives some examples. I notice that there’s quite a few people giving very personal information to it, with a few using it as a therapist. As Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin point out in the most recent episode of their podcast Your Undivided Attention, AI companies encourage this level of intimacy, as it means more data. However, what are we unleashing? Where are the checks and balances?
Writing in Jacobin, Nathan J. Robinson explains that the problem with AI is the problem with capitalism. Robinson’s attitude reflects my own:
It’s interesting that we talk about jobs being “at risk” of being automated. Under a socialist economic system, automating many jobs would be a good thing: another step down the road to a world in which robots do the hard work and everyone enjoys abundance. We should be able to be excited if legal documents can be written by a computer. Who wants to spend all day writing legal documents? But we can’t be excited about it, because we live under capitalism, and we know that if paralegal work is automated, that’s over three hundred thousand people who face the prospect of trying to find work knowing their years of experience and training are economically useless.
We shouldn’t have to fear AI. Frankly, I’d love it if a machine could edit magazine articles for me and I could sit on the beach. But I’m afraid of it, because I make a living editing magazine articles and need to keep a roof over my head. If someone could make and sell an equally good rival magazine for close to free, I wouldn’t be able to support myself through what I do. The same is true of everyone who works for a living in the present economic system. They have to be terrified by automation, because the value of labor matters a lot, and huge fluctuations in its value put all of one’s hopes and dreams in peril.
If ChatGPT is going to revolutionise the economy, we should probably decide what that should look like. Otherwise, we’re running the risk of Feudalism 2.0. We’ve heard the hyperbole before, but if AI systems are exhibiting ‘sparks’ of artificial general intelligence (AGI) then we shouldn’t be experimenting on the general population. Perhaps Nick Cave is correct and that the problems with the world are “certitude and indifference”.
Next week is my last before taking three weeks off. I’m very much looking forward to a family holiday and am psyching myself up for my long walk. Ideally, I’d like to do the whole 268 miles in one go over a two-week period. But I don’t think my family (or my body!) would be up for that…
The post Weeknote 12/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today, so I’d like to take the opportunity to thank both my own mother and my wife, Hannah, for being fantastic mums. I spent time with both of them, separately, at Druridge Bay this week. It’s a wonderful place.
Laura‘s been back to work this week which I’ve been delighted about. We recorded the first episode of Season 6 for The Tao of WAO, submitted proposals for The Badge Summit, co-worked on various client projects, and ran community calls. I’ve also done some co-working with John and Anne, did some more work with the workers.coop Member Learning group, and enjoyed my chats with James Polansky, Tim Riches, and Abi Handley.
It’s only a few weeks now until I’m walking the first half of The Pennine Way, going form north to south (Kirk Yetholm to Middleton-in-Teesdale). I think I’ve bought everything else I need now, including the Rab SilPoncho which can double as a tarp. I’m still weighing up whether to replace my cheapo Mountain Warehouse Carrion 65-litre rucksack which I used for Hadrian’s Wall with the latest version of the Sierra Designs Flex Capacitor (60-80l). It’s probably £175 I don’t need to spend at the moment, to be honest, although the buckles on the Mountain Warehouse pack do my head in.
This week I published:
Last week I ‘admitted’ to effectively just copy/pasting from ChatGPT to create posts on LinkedIn. I’ve actually found a better workflow:
It’s interesting to see just how little some people know what’s going on with large language models (LLMs). There is no ‘there’ there, so anthropomorphising platforms makes no sense. It just makes those doing it look daft.
Next week, it’s a pretty normal week as these things go. I’m taking three weeks off in total in April, so there’s a few things I want to get done so that I haven’t got anything hanging over me, work-wise, before my break.
Photo taken at Druridge Bay on Sunday
The post Weeknote 11/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.I’m going to start this week’s update with a bit of an admission. A post I’ve shared and has got plenty of traction, especially on LinkedIn, was written in the following way:
Is there anything inherently ‘wrong’ about this? The only reason it can write in a somewhat similar style to me is because it’s been trained on a huge corpus of data that’s included my writing.
Although it wasn’t focused on this particular episode, Niall Winters asked an interesting question when I mentioned I’d found ChatGPT useful in my work this week.
I was surprised by the question. I’m not sure why or when it would or should be expected in my line of work to acknowledge this? I don’t really see it as much different to having an assistant doing some research. After all, if people can’t tell the difference between my writing and ChatGPT imitating my writing, then doesn’t that free me up to do other things?
Here’s another example. I know a bit of HTML and CSS, but have never really used much JavaScript (JS). So it was amazing to me when I discovered this week that it’s possible to create simple games using HTML, CSS, and JS using ChatGPT. I’ve created a couple which are moderately fun to play and which were entirely created by me providing prompts. ChatGPT provided the code, and iterations upon it. You can find the games via this blog post.
I’m not particularly interested in the moral panic around AI, but I am interested in getting manual, repetitive tasks done more quickly. I’m also very interested in an assistant that can help me be more creative, as has been the case with some of the work I’ve done this week, as well as the games I’ve created.
Here are the posts I’ve published this week. You’ll have to decide which ones were pretty much fully written by ChatGPT, which were the ones where I used it as an assistant, and which were written entirely by me. Answer at the end of the post.
On Wednesday night, Anne and I ran a session as part of Open Education Talks on entitled Integrating Open Recognition into program and course designs. The linked post not only contains the slides, but also a pre-recorded version of our 15-minute session. It uses Anne’s experience attending The University of Lapland for five months as a lens for how Open Recognition useful augments microcredentialing.
This has been the third and final week of Laura being away. Much as I’ve enjoyed working with John and Anne, I’m looking forward to Laura’s return as she’s my main partner in crime. On Friday afternoon I created a long etherpad of all of the things she needed to be caught-up on, and then recorded a Loom video talking her through it.
I’ve been working on client projects with and for Greenpeace, Participate, Passbolt, Sport England, and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. I’ve also been doing some work as a member of the Member Learning group of workers.coop. It’s looking like we’re going to have a bit more capacity earlier than we though, so from mid-April WAO is available for additional client work.
There’s been a fair bit of snow here this week, and our combi boiler decided to stop work on Friday. Thankfully, the broken part was easy to repair so we weren’t cold for too long. However, it has meant that all of our kids’ football training sessions and two of the matches were called off. They enjoy their sport, but they’ve also enjoyed the additional time they’ve had to hang out with friends.
Although we’ve booked to go away on holiday to Scotland for a few days in the Easter holidays at the start of April, we haven’t yet booked a summer holiday for Team Belshaw. Part of the reason for this is that we were planning to take our youngest out of school for a week after our eldest has finished his GCSEs. However, by the time we found out when that would be, everything is super expensive. And I mean like at least twice as much as I would expect it to be.
So that plan might be out of the window and we could just be taking him for a nice meal instead. That would mean that we could drive to the south of France for a couple of weeks during the school summer holidays. It’s still up in the air, to be honest.
Next week, Laura’s back and I’m expecting her to come in like a hurricane wrecking ball, even though I’m sure she’ll be very chilled after a few weeks in Costa Rica. I’m looking forward to finishing off work for one of our clients and doing some more planning for my Pennine Way expedition next month. Hopefully the kids’ sporting activities will be back to normal and it will be warm enough for me to run outside again.
Photo taken looking out from the top of our house taken by my wife, Hannah, and then edited by me. The first two posts in the list were written entirely by me. ChatGPT helped me with the third one, and I only really tweaked the last two.
The post Weeknote 10/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.I’m not sure what proportion of the North East population is in London for the Carabao Cup Final this weekend, but it’s sufficient that there are no sporting activities for our two kids on Sunday. That means Team Belshaw can go out for Sunday dinner as a family for the first time in a while. I’m looking forward to it.
This past week has been half-term for our two, while Hannah and I have taken a couple of days off work. It’s also been the first of three weeks of holiday that Laura is taking, so both home and work have been different. It’s amazing how those two worlds can collide, especially this week where we successfully used nonviolent communication techniques in a family setting to defuse some issues.
During my three days of work this week, I’ve been:
Other than that it’s been the usual taxi service for my kids and standing on the touchline watching them play football and basketball.
My daughter played for Newcastle United’s U12 ETC against Doncaster U13 ETC and Tyneside Tigers, a recently-formed 11-a-side team comprising players from a futsal team — including several Sunderland ETC players. She played well, although for some reason they played her in defence for part of the Doncaster match! In her grassroots team’s game this morning she scored a hat-trick while playing in midfield and then striker, so it was business as usual.
My son is playing basketball this afternoon. Last night, we went to see Team GB vs Belgium at the arena where he also plays his games. Unfortunately, Team GB were well beaten, but it was a good atmosphere. Tonight, we’re planning to go and watch Plane (2023) at the cinema until late while my daughter and friend have a sleepover at our house.
Next week, I’m planning to lead a session on storytelling for the OSN Open Recognition working group, holding the fort a little while Laura’s away, doing regular client work, leading the workers.coop session mentioned above, and finding out more about North East rural co-working via a local in-person session.
The post Weeknote 08/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.Spring, as they say, has sprung.
(I was going to write this weeknote on Friday night, but it felt too early to do so. And then I completely forgot to do so over the weekend.)
Some quick bullet points on last week:
This week it’s half-term for our kids, so I’m taking Monday and Friday off. It’s a bit easier when they’re older as you don’t have to entertain them as much; it’s more like just encouraging them to get off their phones…
The post Weeknote 07/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.Sitrep: I’m starting to write on Friday at 17:00, sitting in the car at the side of an artificial football pitch, and not believing the temperature gauge when it says it’s 10°C outside. These things don’t factor in wind chill, as I have learned from bitter experience. Ten Storey Love Song by The Stone Roses has just come on the radio, so it looks like the weekend is starting off a positive note.
I published three posts on three different blogs this week:
There’s another one that I’ve got in draft form on Google Docs which you can take a peek at if you like; I don’t particularly care if you see how the sausage is made. Thanks to John Bevan, ChatGPT, and several people in my network for grammar corrections, content, and questions, respectively!
Last week I neglected to link to January’s issue of Thought Shrapnel so I’ll do so now. So far in February I’ve published the following over there:
On the work front, this seems to be the time of year where we wait for clients to catch up with the work we’ve done for them. I’ve spent a good bit of time in Whimsical, a tool which does a great job of allowing you to quickly visualise things which are either unspoken or buried in mountains of text. I like it.
Without wanting to be enigmatic, I’m going to continue talking about the type of work I’ve been doing this week rather than the particular projects. So, for example, I’ve been:
I mentioned in my last weeknote that I was taking our daughter to the Newcastle United vs West Ham match on Saturday. It turned out that I then went to the Sunderland vs Fulham FA Cup 4th round replay game on Wednesday night. She was supposed to come, but then worked out that she’d be tired for her Science test the next morning. My dad still came though and, although Sunderland lost, we still had a good time.
It’s the usual four sportball games this weekend for our offspring. I do enjoy watching them, but doing so means that I do precious little else. I may manage to get to wash the cars on Saturday morning and hang out with my gaming buddies on Sunday evening. It’s a good job that I only work around 25 hours per week and my life is otherwise deliberately low-stress 😅
Photo of a copy of the book (The Names by Don DeLillo) that I was reading and enjoying until earlier this week. Unfortunately, I had to stop reading immediately as it was impossible for me to continue. Can you see why?
The post Weeknote 06/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.I’m starting to writing this by the light of the fish tank, no-one else is up. I try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, as it seems to negate the needs for stimulants like caffeine (which can be a migraine trigger for me).
Talking of migraines, I had three in five days over the past week. Thankfully, I’ve got my meds to stave off the worst of them, and the flexibility to work around them. The trouble is that I’ve now had the maximum number of tablets I can have this month so… I’m either going to have to slightly overdose or just not take one (😱) if I get another.
Tuesday afternoon/evening was enough to provoke a migraine in anyone this week. I took our daughter out of school early for a County football match in Consett. This is not a part of the world I’ve ever had the misfortune to visit before, having previously believed that standing on the side of the pitches at Hirst Welfare was the coldest place in the North East. Not so.
The short version of this story is that the manager insisted on taking the full squad of 22 girls (19 turned up) to the game, with the intention of essentially playing one ‘team’ per half. They warmed up for an hour before kick-off while I and the other parents did the opposite.
The match kicked off at 16:30 and the first half saw the Northumberland team go 3-0 down versus Durham (although it could have been a lot more). We assumed that the floodlights would go on at half-time, but… no-one could find the caretaker. Eventually, after much hand-wringing and both players and parents alike sheltering from the biting wind in the changing rooms, the match was abandoned. A few of us took our kids to the local McDonald’s.
All of this was disappointing enough, except that our daughter had also turned down the chance to be a ball girl at the Newcastle United match that night in the semi-final of the League Cup at St. James Park. It was a bit galling to come back home, turn on the TV and see some of her peers from Newcastle’s Emerging Talent Centre (ETC) parade round the pitch.
Life has a way of evening things out, however, so at her ETC training session on Friday night, it was heartening to find out she’d won tickets for the Newcastle vs West Ham Premier League match the next day.
Well now, after writing so much about our daughter’s exploits my son (or his friends, who may or may still be reading this far down a fairly text-heavy page) will be expecting me to redress the balance. So I’ll start by saying that while the above was happening on Tuesday, he and my wife were attending a virtual meeting with his school talking about post-16 options. He’s currently planning on studying Geography, Maths, and Physics at ‘A’ Level at the Sixth Form of the school he attends.
There’s always drama with junior sports, and so this week in my son’s world has been his basketball team. It all sounds like handbags at five paces, but some of the older, more talented players seem to have taken their ball home (if you’ll pardon the pun) because of the way they’ve been treated by their coach. I don’t go to his training sessions, as he can walk down by himself, but from what I’ve heard second-hand, there’s potentially blame on both sides.
The problem, of course, is that these days you find out about kids activities via WhatsApp groups. Or rather my wife does, and sends me screenshots, as I don’t use any Facebook Meta products. (A few better ways than this have popped up recently, such as Spond, which one of our daughter’s team uses.)
As a ‘Code of Conduct’ for such a WhatsApp chat would perhaps seem a little ‘heavy-handed’ when the group is set up, there’s no agreed way of dealing with drama. So what happens, and I’ve seen this happen a few times, is that in the heat of the moment, some things are said about perceived unfairness, or about commitment, or similar. Things escalate, and then there is inevitably some heavy-handed deleting of messages by whoever is the admin. This breeds resentment. People leave.
It’s no different at work, to be honest, even among those who should know better. This week, for example, someone had an almost visceral reaction to the suggestion that it might be good to encourage those other than the usual suspects (in this case cis/white/male) to step forward for a thing. I managed to have a private chat with this person who, it turned out was ‘amped-up’ (their words) from something else. They deleted their posts.
There are increasing numbers of strikes in the UK at the moment, something of which I am entirely in favour. If your pay is not rising with inflation, then you are getting a de facto pay cut. It’s as simple as that. So when on Wednesday our kids’ schools tried to keep open despite striking colleagues, I sent an email to our daughter’s headteacher explaining why we’d be ‘educating her offsite’ about things including why it’s important not to cross picket lines.
Our son, who’s a few months away from his GCSE exams is, at 16 years of age, old enough to make his own decisions. He went in, but (it would appear) spent a good couple of hours in the hall shuffling post-it notes around a desk in the main hall.
I may be several hundred words into this weeknote, but it would be neglectful of me not to talk about the work I’ve been doing this week. Last time, I mentioned that I’d met with a few people from CoTech who were interested in setting up a ‘digital candle’ service for those considering setting up co-ops. Well, I stood up the world’s most MVP-ish site using GitHub Pages and got it CNAME’d to start.coops.tech.
You’ll notice that it’s literally using my Google Calendar for the ‘booking system’; the seven of us who have volunteered to field the calls have got a spreadsheet and a chat channel to co-ordinate. We’ve had eight bookings so far, but for one reason or another the first four bookings all cancelled or were no-shows on Friday afternoon. I think some of that is to do with process (i.e. me handing over to others without making that clear to the person who booked), some is to do with people not turning up for ‘free’ things, and some to do with it being Friday afternoon. A couple have rebooked, so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Alright, it’s going to have to be bullet-point time because I want to get to the gym. Here goes in terms of the rest of the stuff I’ve been doing this week:
Next week, we’re collaborating with Bryan for the first time since he resigned as a member/director of the co-op and became a cooperator. We’ve also got some things to work through and get planned as Laura is heading off to Costa Rica for three weeks at the end of the month. Speaking of which, I should probably start doing some more preparation for walking (some of) The Pennine Way with Aaron in April.
Photo of some very nice tapas dishes Hannah and I had with a bottle of wine on Friday night at The Auction House.
The post Weeknote 05/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
I guess I should start this week’s update by saying hello to my son’s friends, who seem to have discovered this blog. I’m pleased you’re reading something, guys! Congrats on ripping your eyeballs away from TikTok for more than three seconds.
Now that we’ve reached the second paragraph and we’re safely beyond the average 16 year-old attention span, I can get down to business. I’m not going to lie: this week has felt quite long. This was partly because Hannah was away for a couple of nights meaning I had to do some solo parenting (always ‘fun’) but also because John came down with something which meant I was covering for him on the WAO projects we’re working on together.
While there’s been a lot of context-switching this week, I have enjoyed the diversity of the types of work with which I’ve been involved:
I had my first proper migraine of 2023 this week. They don’t affect me as much as they used to in terms of their intensity, but I guess they have a more wide-ranging impact in that I both consciously and unconsciously adapt my life to avoid triggering them.
My son said that I often talk more about my daughter’s sporting achievements than his. This is partly because I tend to write these on Saturday afternoons, after she’s played a football match in the morning, but before his basketball and football games. So I definitely won’t mention that she scored a hat-trick and received Player of the Match again. Whoops.
Anyway, I’m very proud of him in a way that will probably make him cringe if and when he reads this. He asked for an English tutor after he got his mock GCSE exam results last Friday and had his first session this week. She said how she’d learned things from him in terms of the way he interprets texts.
My son’s basketball team has just been promoted back to the top division, so I’m looking forward to that game this afternoon. He’s got a football match tomorrow and my daughter’s making her debut for a boy’s team that she’s recently signed for. Yes, my weekends largely involve driving my kids to sporting fixture and watching them perform. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Next week will almost inexplicably include days that mark the start of February. I’ll be involved in the same projects as this week, although hopefully John will be better. I’m looking forward to getting that CoTech digital candle service up-and-running, fixing my iPod (again!) and having a more normal week where neither Hannah nor I’m away.
Image taken from an original by Vincent Burkhead
The post Weeknote 04/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.I’ve spent most of this week in the Netherlands with my WAO colleagues. We stayed in an American-style villa north of Amsterdam, complete with jacuzzi, ping pong table, and trampoline! Instead of client work we worked on things like the journey we’ve been on since being founded in 2016, how we can have a more consistent approach to projects, and contributor pathways.
A big part of meeting up together, though, was just to be in the same place for the first time in three years. Due to the pandemic, it was the first time Anne, our intern-turned-cooperator had met John and Bryan IRL. So Laura taught us all different types of poker (for peanut M&Ms), we played video games, went out for dinner, as well as going to an awesome ‘new school arcade hall’ called TonTon Club. Some of us also managed to sneak in a run.
Back at the ranch, it was another birthday celebration which we celebrated in Newcastle-upon-Tyne at Lane 7 and I Scream For Pizza. Everyone had a great time, and Hannah won bowling for the first time in Team Belshaw history. Our daughter played in a football match where she scored a hat-trick and was awarded player of the match. The Boy has a game today.
What’s been interesting to me this week is being able to see (with data!) the impact that increased alcohol consumption, less protein, and later bedtimes has had on my body. While I had a great time, routines are important to feel well-rested — as you can see on the Garmin ‘Body Battery’ chart above!
Next week will be back to client work. Part of our time away was to kind-of-formalise having a Project Lead and a ‘Context Understudy’ for each client. We couldn’t really think of a name other than something like ‘Skills Provider’ for other roles, but I’m sure the naming and approach will evolve. For me, it means that while I’ll probably still be involved in some way with each of the seven projects we’ve got on at the moment, I don’t have to keep the context for all of them in my head 😅
Photo of windmill near Heerhugowaard
The post Weeknote 03/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
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