Weeknotes — 13th to 17th January 2020
What we got up to
Objectives and Key Results
Last week was time for us to take a look at the Objectives and Key Results we’d set ourselves in the last quarter and create some new ones up to the end of March.
Overall we think we are learning how to use OKRs effectively to focus our work. We will probably publish soon on our more egalitarian take on setting and scoring them.
This quarter we will be hoping that less is indeed more. We set four objectives for Q3 2019, which had fourteen key results. We set four objectives for Q4 2019, which had in total eighteen key results — we felt far too many. This quarter we are setting three objectives that have three key results each for three months. Let’s see how we do!
Speaking At Django London
We spoke at the Django London meet up about our work and use of Django in the 2019 General Election campaign.
Everyone was extremely kind and it was a very engaged and thoughtful audience. Thanks to the team for having us and Yelp for hosting!
Website
We basically redesigned our website to reflect the work we have done since October, which should be updated soon. Our thoughts inevitably turn to the need for a content management system…or not.
We are going to ditch Medium however. We hoped that some of our more opinion rated pieces would be effectively distributed, but this doesn’t seem to have worked out.
Meetings
Outside of this we had some workshops and kick off meetings for our consultancy work. Some of which moves into the international sphere for the first time, which is quite exciting.
We had the first meeting of the Labour Together report commissioners and we are keen to get the ball rolling on that.
What we’re thinking about
Overall we are puzzling over how to share more widely all the very dense learnings we’ve made over the time we’ve been around. We’ve locked in publishing them at quite a clip now but how do we effectively publicise them and reach those who we think would be interested?
What we’re reading
There have been an avalanche of analyses of our current political moment in the UK, which we are ignoring here to highlight other things.
The Liberating Structures London year in review is really interesting. We’d be intrigued to head to their next gathering.
We’ve been following the international project for a while and think it’s really cool that there are people thinking so deeply and granularly about social interaction design. We particularly think about it in terms of meeting facilitation, as we reflect on how much room for improvement there is for social movement gatherings. It’s interesting how they’ve used Liberating Structures games and techniques to bootstrap their own internal organisational structures.
BatUX is an awesome website that explains user-centric design through workshopping Batman’s suit.
We read about Citizens Advice’s product governance process and wondered if we should do the same for our advisory board.
We are Common Knowledge, a not-for-profit workers’ cooperative. Working directly with grassroots activists, we design digital tools that make radical change possible. We are guided by the values of agency, solidarity, pragmatism, thoughtfulness, interdependence, openness, optimism and cooperation.
