Weeknote #40: Crossing points

What happened this week?

A shorter note this week due to time constraints. My planned sprint to half-term felt like a slow crawl. Some highlights:

• A high-energy kick-off meeting with the newly-recruited team for our UKRI-funded ATR project. Workshops are being planned.
• Cyber security training sessions for 50+ staff run by Cyber & Fraud Centre Scotland. A good grounding in the basics and useful reminders about core protections at home and at work. Key takeaways: make everything private, get off social media, commit time (and money) to password management.
• Hosting a visit from the Estonian Ministry of Culture. We fielded questions on digitisation and digital preservation as they launch a reimagined National Library.
• Time spent evaluating where we are with AI testing, adoption and governance. Gaps are surfacing, alongside a festering sense that plans, guidelines and policies won't (yet) affect anything fundamental about our core work. It's been super helpful to talk to other cultural sector leaders about how they are folding institutional values into their differing approaches to AI. This post from Hugh Wallace was a helpful reminder that, when faced with a hype cycle "purposefully designed to beguile and confuse", context really, really matters.
• An early-morning coffee with Hannah Parham, newly-appointed Director of the Landmark Trust, with fellow Trustee James Delaney from Blockworks (the folk creating learning experiences in Minecraft).
• A cathartic download of increasing workloads and creeping overwhelm with Amina Shah, National Librarian. Her empathetic, people-focussed approach was really helpful and provide space to pause and reset.
• After ten years on the to-do list, we finally managed to draft and sign our wills.

Slow AI event 🐌

John Fitzgerald and I have pulled together a free lunchtime event at the Library with Sam Illingworth, talking about his new book, Slow AI.

12.30-13.30, Thursday 29 October, National Library of Scotland.

Interesting things

• How Musk’s Doge team took a wrecking ball to Washington - don't read this if you like staying calm.
• I've pitched the Library's attitude to digital transformation as one of "pragmatic optimism", identifying areas of improvement whilst recognising operational constraints. In The hard-nosed case for Optimism Lewis Silkin presents a similar case for "realistic optimism" being integral to strategy, especially when approaching AI possibilities: "the hype waves away the risks, the fear dismisses the opportunity, and neither really helps with the practical work of adoption." 
• I thought the trend of deep-scroll websites was over. The new site for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has other ideas.
• Photo-sharing app A/Side looks a lot like early Instagram and continues the trend for private, controllable online spaces doing one thing well.
• Some good things from Arts Council England: a Freelancers Handbook for the culture sector and FIRE, a new framework for understanding digital audiences.
• Yes, no AI is now a feature – LibreOffice has made "no AI" one of their official features. Have any public sector organisations in the UK attempted a full-scale replacement of Google or Microsoft?
• AI Adoption Research from DSIT highlights the barriers to AI use at scale – 71% of the businesses said "we have not identified a use for AI in our organisation".
• The Wikimedia Foundation has discovered activity by “rogue” OpenAI agents threatening the viability of their open model – "Our collective priority should be the health of the overall web ecosystem so that it continues to benefit all people." Amen.
• Good news though, the tech industry will soon invent books.

Watching, listening, reading, doing

📺 East of Eden (Netflix)⭐⭐⭐⭐

📺 Traitors (BBC) – a fun watch together ⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎧 On rotation: Beck, Sea Change and some late 80's Dylan, Oh Mercy. The school choir version of Landslide really got to me this week. Watching the boy hang out with his friends brought back deep feels for being seventeen.

🏃 A couple of hilly runs last weekend. I also received an invite to a social running club which I might try out next week.