The Full Circle

New job, new series of weeknotes.

For new readers, a weeknote is a diary-style recap of what I got up to at work during the week. The main purpose is to help me reflect on what I did and whether I achieved my goals, which helps me work out what to do next week. It’s also a record of what I did that I can look back on later.

There are other reasons to write weeknotes, and lots of people in the public sector do it.

What I did this week

I joined the Digital Land team at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) working on making land and housing data easier to find, use and trust. Right now, the team is working on data standards and a data platform for the planning ecosystem.

Working in this space feels like coming home. Before joining Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2018, I was working at Porism on open linked data for local government. I learned loads about open data and local government during my time there, but I was relatively new to all things digital and product management.

Now that I’ve got more experience under my belt, I feel like I can make a decent contribution to data as infrastructure. This project plays on some of my strengths: platform-thinking, making things open, and using technology to create economic value. So I’m super grateful to Paul, Stef and Ann for bringing me in via Boring Magic. 🙏

Anyway, that’s enough of that, what did I actually do this week?!

  • Read the service handbook and got up-to-speed on the team, the platform and our ways of working
  • Joined a workshop in the office to map our value stream and discuss opportunities to unblock flow
  • Had a couple of 1-to-1s with team leads and Law
  • Tried adding RSS to the team’s blog, but realised I need to learn more about Jinja (and Python!)
  • Did some reading and thinking about marketplaces on my day off
  • Started shaping up the vision and a strategic narrative with Paul, ahead of a big planning workshop with the whole team next week

Throughout the week I was making lots of notes, jotting down any tasks, observations or opportunities that came up (borrowed from Amy), which I was going to process and organise each evening. But I didn’t get around to that, so I need to do it today. The main opportunity I noted is that we need to create a roadmap as a team and highlight the milestones that’ll impact us and other teams on the programme. Not a roadmap as a plan, mind you, just a collaborative activity to talk about the road ahead and discuss challenges and opportunities.

Drawings by Paul Downey. One shows Nyan Cat flying ahead next to the phrase ‘Make Data Faster’. The other shows a lad wearing a cap with ‘Make Data Faster’ on it.

And purely by chance, I topped off this data-heavy week by going out to dinner with data pal Adam, Head of Data Architecture and Engineering at National Highways. Perfect way to round off a homecoming!

Other things

We’re running another unconference for product people in the public sector on 19 April in London. Join us!

Running

I’ve missed several workouts in my marathon training plan due to injury, going hiking, and starting a new job. I’m trying not to beat myself up for it too much. This will be my second marathon and there’s still 10 weeks to go. Plus the northward equinox is nearly upon us, bringing with it earlier sunrises and longer days, meaning I can run in the morning rather than lunchtime.

Desperately need to start doing strength & conditioning exercises again though. My feet and ankles have been playing up, likely because I started wearing Nike Air Max 97s – which have a significant heel drop compared to the zero-drop shoes I wear for running.

IndieWeb

I really wish I’d gone to this weekend’s IndieWebCamp, especially because Keith, Terence, Maggie and Ana were there with Paul (who I really, really want to meet!).

It would have been good to talk about the privacy of Webmentions and alternatives, which I’ve read a bit about and been meaning to write about. I feel like the privacy concerns of those might be due to caching Webmentions, and building deletion requests into the protocol seems like a feasible feature. I’m not sure I like the alternative of using Mastodon as a replacement for Webmentions: it cuts out anyone who doesn’t use that platform, which doesn’t feel very Web-ish.

Anyway, like I said, it’s something I need to spend time thinking about in more detail.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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