These weeknotes are going to be short. I’ve just realised I lost my glasses somewhere between Wembley and home…but I’m pretty sure I brought them home, so it’s a mystery. Gonna have to get some ugly back-up glasses from the pharmacy tomorrow morning.

It was such a good week, really productive. The team is building a lot of shared understanding, and there was a great series of workshops in the office with i.‌AI on Wednesday.

We’ve also onboarded a user researcher, which means we can get started properly. I had wanted to end the week by prioritising which risky assumptions we’d look at first, but given they’d only been with us for about 4 hours, it didn’t feel fair to ask them to shape a research plan around what we pick. They’re picking up context really fast though, and they’re being quite pragmatic.

The initial plan is to test what we’ve got and see how users respond. We know it’s the wrong thing and has holes in it – it doesn’t follow GOV.‌UK design language and the interface is really not intuitive – but there’s value in it as a provoc-otype. The responses it’ll garner, the conversations it’ll allow us to have, are the most important part – so why wait until we have something we think will be more successful?

Alpha is all about velocity of learning, not velocity of delivery, and the sooner you can get to insights, the better. Alpha is discovery.

Fairly sure we’re not going to be finished before the end of the year, and our biggest constraint will be the availability of people at local planning authorities to test with. We’ll just have to do our best with who we’ve got and what time they lend us.

Anyway, go and peek at our weeknotes for Extract for more detail on what we got up to.

The art of less

Picked up a new book that looks like it could be good. I’m sure this quote from the preface will interest a lot of you.

“We know that having well-designed administrative processes is vital for any large organization to operate effectively. However, many organizations seem to over-do it. They develop processes, policies and practices to address almost any eventuality. They require their staff to spend their working days fighting through these thickets. The upshot is people feel frustrated. Employees find they have less and less time to do their main job. Customers and members of the public feel like they are not getting the products or service they want or need. Organizations do more and more but get less and less done. Despite all this activity, everyone feels dissatisfied.”

It’s called The Art of Less and it’s making me long for being in a startup again, where there’s just enough process to make things work well. (To be fair, GDS was great for it too.)

The Witch

For Hallowe’en, we watched The Witch starring Ralph Ineson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Kate Dickie. It’s been sat in my watchlist for a while and it didn’t disappoint. Delightfully creepy, no jump-scares, natural horror if anything.

Autumn internationals

The international rugby tournament started up this weekend. Instead of watching it on telly, I looked to see whether there were any tickets going at Twickenham or Wembley. Managed to find some £38 tickets for South Africa vs Japan at Wembley so went along.

Turns out they hadn’t sold many of the £140 tickets with the best view, so loads of us got to sit in those seats anyway. Great fun to see some live international sport on a Sunday!

Japan played well and never lost their spirit, but South Africa came out on top (as you might expect). We’re going to South Africa in a few weeks’ time, when they’ll be playing in Europe, so this was to make up for the fact I won’t be able to see them playing at home!

Sunday Runch

Had a fun Sunday run at brunch-time with Himal today! If any other South Londoners fancy it, let us know. (Got some of you on Strava anyway.)

Bookmarks

• Designing a design studio, 13 mins. I loved this. Anna reflects on running a small design studio that tried to be ethical, creative, and caring rather than purely profit-driven. It got me thinking about what I’d like to do next. Running a little agency would be fun, but I’ve never been in one. Dunno what good looks like. Maybe it’s obvious? Anyway, thank you for this gift of a piece, Anna.
• The Weaponisation of Openness? Toward a New Social Contract for Data in the AI Era, 9 mins. The open data movement helped spread knowledge but is now being exploited by large AI companies that harvest public resources without consent or pay. This extraction is causing institutions to close access, risking a ‘data winter’ that harms public benefit and research. A thought-provoking piece on the need for new governance and benefit models to ensure public-spirited efforts don’t prop up value-extractive businesses.
• The work is (often) people, 4 mins. Work is mostly about people, not just outputs. Leading means building real trust, doing emotional work…and sometimes feeling drained by it. That effort is hard but valuable because it helps people and the service grow. Been reading Richard Sennett’s Together which has lots in it about this.
• Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One, 7 mins
• Universal basic capital would create a fair AI economy, mins
• AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service, 5 mins
• “Data Commons”: Under Threat by or The Solution for a Generative AI Era ? Rethinking Data Access and Re-use, 18 mins
• Here’s proof that those iPhone typos you keep making aren’t your fault, 4 mins
• Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI, 21 mins
• Effective labour, 6 mins
• The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me, 7 mins
• ‘AI’ As A Marketing Term, 7 mins
• Metrics I use to help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity: makers time and collaboration time, 9 mins