The 24-Hour Funeral Service

Wowee. What a week.

Spent two days at State of Open conference which was good. Had a busy few days at work dealing with governance and related things.

A few things to note:

  • We defined some OKRs with the i.AI crew
  • I helped a team at GovStack plan their work on service patterns
  • I kicked off a quick discovery to validate some assumptions about potential data consumers
  • I joined a design crit, through which the team tightened their scope
  • I updated our roadmap and performance pages
  • We published a blog post about scaling the planning data service
  • One of our product managers, Ben, opened up his team’s OKRs

I’m especially happy about that last one. It’s proper working in the open.

Next week I’m presenting at a summit for planning people and I’ve had barely any time to work on my presentation. Thankfully Natalie told me about a story from her early years in planning, so I’ll be mining that for content. Thanks Natalie!

If anyone spots another 24-hour funeral service, let me know. I suspect the market for funerals at, say, 3 a.m. is really small. But a shop in Harold Wood sats otherwise.

One last thing: I think agentic AI will need people with UCD smarts.

State of Open

Had a good time at the State of Open conference. Got to catch up with Issy, finally met Dan, met Simon Wardley (incredibly), and more! Unfortunately I missed Terence but he was busy running one of the tracks.

I made a few notes:

  • Scarf created a framework to assess an organisation’s stage of adoption with any single open source project
  • CHAOSS noted that projects which had been forked to be funded by a foundation received a greater number and diversity of contributions, suggesting greater sustainability
  • The sessions on opening up government were lacklustre, sadly
  • The Chief Information and Finance Officer of the North Sea Transition Authority is an absolute pro

One comment from Amandine Le Pape, Chief Operating Officer of Element (and the Matrix protocol), stuck out. She mentioned how one person can create and maintain a project, but you really need a full product team to take it all the way.

The panel talk on opening up government was boring. One person talked about participatory methods which was good, but everything else was about open procurement. I don’t think real people care about that. I think real people want to see open accountability, with services sharing performance metrics.

It was inspiring to see people talk about contributing to open source projects. It reminded me of working with the Public Health England team on the coronavirus dashboard and recommending that we open-source it. Within a few days there were people contributing pull requests, fixes and improvements. A moment of happiness in an otherwise horrible time.

I left feeling quite inspired to talk about the work we’re doing with the planning data service. It’s not only solving problems for people in local planning authorities, we’re also creating digital public goods. Openly available, non-rivalrous data. (It was good to pick up a few licensing tips too.)

Entertainment

Last weekend we saw A Man for All Seasons at the South London Theatre in West Norwood. Having only seen the film before, I really liked the play, and the actors were really good. A bargain for £12.

This evening we watched The Substance, which truly is a body horror. I’m glad we finished our food before the grisly bits began!

Journalling

Failed to write in my journal this week, except for Monday. I’ll move the reminder to an earlier time.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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