Weeknote #37: Repair
A shorter note from a week in which the back-to-school germs hit hard. I was mostly moving at half speed, avoiding the school run and doing very little in the evenings.
What happened this week?
Monday was a day of catching up and scrubbing items off the to-do list that had been lingering for way too long.
On Tuesday I had a full day with the Heritage Fund Scotland Committee which always involves a lot of pre-meeting reading and thinking. There was the usual robust debate and analysis of large-scale funding bids across the country. This was followed by a nice catch up with former colleagues from National Museums Scotland.
On Wednesday afternoon I headed to Edinburgh Futures Institute for a volunteer briefing for next week's GovCamp Scotland. Everything's in place thanks to this year's organising team, although I have a weekend of placing name badges into lanyards. At the end of the day I snuck into the reception at NMS for the Playable Heritage conference. Here's a great event thread (remember those?) from Adrian Hon on Bluesky.
Thursday involved a few budget reviews. I've split off Digital from the main IT budget and its beginning to make a difference for tracking baseline spend and highlighting how little wriggle room we have for new work.
Discovery on the membership element of our CRM project is drawing to a close and it's revealed a lot of embedded complication, work-arounds and duplication of effort. We're in that super tricky phase of deciding where to push for meaningful change and what to park for future development - whilst bringing everyone along for the ride. Màiri Lafferty has summed up the challenge of delivering a coherent service across multiple teams and boundaries: "Organisations are good at assigning ownership of things. We’re less good at assigning ownership between them."
At the end of the week I joined the Braid Stakeholder Forum, thinking about key issues around Responsible AI with a super-smart group of Arts and Humanities practitioners and policy-makers. Lots to ponder, including how to provide easy mechanisms for communities to operate in AI-free spaces and the need to take a long-term view of recourse and repair.
Interesting things
- Is your organisation’s culture too nice? - three useful strategies on how to fix it.
- How are arts and cultural organisations actually using AI? - A summary by Jocelyn Burnham noting that genuine/productive AI use is largely being driven by individuals.
- I don't like LLMs - Martin Fowler articulates his "visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretence of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from."
- Eryk Salvaggio on resisting the influence of 'Radical Intentionalists' and the need of regulation "based on the mechanism’s underlying architecture — not vague ideas of superintelligence” (h/t John Fitzgerald):
The source of our problems isn’t that the system is thinking carefully about what to do. The greater risk at this moment arises from precisely the opposite position: autonomous text production wired to the execution of code, with no intervention from the one source of control we have required for every other risky system — responsible people and companies that can face real consequences.
- Experiments in going offline from Frankly Green + Webb.
- A nice example from Nottingham Forest of maximising a single point of production.
- Björk wisdom.
Watching, listening, reading, doing
📖 I've ordered AI for the Information Professional by Andrew Cox. It might sit on my desk at work for a while.
📺 Maternal Instinct (Netflix), following Neil Williams' recommendation. "Very dark" was spot on ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🏃 There was a little argy-bargy at the end of last week's Parkrun and hoping for better vibes this weekend (or just a Saturday lie in).
