Edinburgh

Last weekend was busy with birthday parties, so here's a double weeknote covering 2 weeks.

Online/offline maps with Map my Patch, Hive Architects, couple of new bits of work.

### What i did A shorter working week as I handled various life things, with secondary school visits for my daughter (eek), family days in school, doctors, and lifts. But I still managed some good stuff I think. * Monday I met with The Progressive Farming Trust about some work. It's a small but interesting piece around Open Knowledge. I've said for a while that the general vibe around the sector is one of being less open, so this raised my spirits! * Tuesday I attended the Ada Lovelace Community Forum as they develop their survey around public attitudes to AI. I gave some feedback on questions, but mainly I listened to other community members thoughts. Then on Wednesday I went to visit a small charity in Sunderland to talk all about systems and information. * I wrote, and deleted a post all about how the general narrative is that everyone is using and talking about AI but that I don't think this is right in reality. I deleted the post not because I think the overarching point I was making was wrong, but I don't think I was getting my point across in the right way. The conversations this week and for a while now, around the country with people outside of the little tech bubbles is not the same as the narrative suggests. And my frustration is that narratives drive attention away from other things that are important. * Thursday started with a bang as Doug and I had a conversation about a Spark Grant to run a Digital Sovereignty Unconference in Newcastle. The idea was well received, and the feedback was to go wilder, which is uncommon! * Also met with Liz on Thursday to discuss what next for the OR programme. We are awaiting the official evaluation, but have been putting together some of the wider resources and plan to take a ready made programme, which we know works, to some funders who might appreciate such a thing. * Also had a request to go back and do some work with a Local Motion area. Always nice to be asked back, especially when it comes to collaborative/place/governance type things. ### Building things Spent a bit of time this week going back to Map My Patch, a simple survey tool I built back in the Data For Action days. It allows the creation of survey questions and geographic capture in a quick and easy way. Going back to it with fresh eyes, and with better skills probably, was great. Alongside a re fresh of the branding, I've added new ways to draw on the map, no longer just points and shapes, now routes, shaded areas and boundaries. But more than that, I also made good progress in what I really wanted the tool to be, which is to support mapping both **online and offline**. Some of the real learning from the Neighbourhood mapping work is that how people interact with things is important. A physical map makes this easier. Allow people to draw on a physical map and they are more likely to do so. But that's not very easy to explore en-mass. So I've been building out Map My Patch to support pulling from paper maps into shape files. Lots of fun! Sneak peek at the paper map and the digital identification ### Wrote Wrote a piece this morning about our need for Friction, called Finding friction ### Watched Yesterday I went to watch the Banff Mountain Film Festival world tour. I watch it every year. The highlight film in this batch for me was The Hive Architect, a film about a man making places for wild honey bees to make hives. Funny and poignant in equal measure. Well worth 12 minutes of your time * * * ## Links This Week Decision Studio - a Hugging Face Space by llm-semantic-router - Enter a description of a situation and ask any number of decision questions—multiple‑choice, yes/no, or rating‑scale. tsiconsultancy.com - Doing Great Work Is No Longer Enough: The Incrementalism Paradox and Why We Need To Measure Trajectory # Megatrends 2026 | Download the Report - CIFS arrived at 11 structurally distinct megatrends that span geopolitics, economics, demographics, climate and sustainability, social life, health, technology, infrastructure, and urbanisation. Together they provide a coherent picture of many of the major transformations shaping our societies over the long term. Historical Ownership | LandExplorer User Guide

This note was meant to be shorter as the week was very long. What happened this week? GovCamp Scotland on Monday went well. I enjoyed being on the welcome desk but had to jump into a few meetings a...

This week I have learned: the importance of play (part one): fascinated by the work Jude Pullen and Max Park’s latest experiment, the AI Divergence Engine. It’s made me realise that, un…

Candid commentary on technology, retro games, Macs and other things, written by Craig Grannell.

My week notes for week 38 of 2026 #100daystooffload #WeekNote

My week notes for week 38 of 2026 #100daystooffload #WeekNote

2026 is invited to get straight into the sea

Fiestas Patrias 🇨🇱

It’s Jimothy week

Co-ops are vibe, running a RELAY, meeting new people, doing diagrams, usual waffle.

* The start of the week was fairly busy. Began with a coaching session with Jesse, who probably listened to me unload a little bit of my general frustration with the wider workings of the social purpose sector: a closing down, a lack of collaboration, a lack of imagination, and me generally feeling a little bit grumpy about the whole situation. I did have a moment of serendipitous colour coordination between my hat and my coffee cup, which was good. Jesse helped me with a few things, and it's good to get coaching. I think it's good for you. It's good for me anyway. * Met with a new client who's grown rapidly over the last 6 months and is really trying to play catch-up with all of their systems.Also caught up on general bits of client work at the start of the week including write up of an Organisational Resilience session I ran last week, and trying to help an organisation make decisions on their systems. Often the decisions are fairly easy for me to help with, but in this case the organisation is a little bit different, so their needs are very nuanced, and there aren’t many tools built for such nuance… * Also met with Ali on monday, which was lovely. Always sharing useful, sensible things on the internet, so it was great to talk. * * * Tuesday we ran a FIELD STATION experiment "How might we run AI in a different way?" - you can read what we were doing here. Did it work? Yes and No. If this was a product test, then absolutely no! The thing that we've built, which kind of splits open-source models across multiple machines through the browser, does work, although it is a bit flaky. We ran into technical problems during the live experiment, meaning some bits worked and some bits didn't. But it wasn't a product test! (here's the tool we made for it if you are interested - use at your own risk) What we were really looking to do was experiment, so in that sense, yes, it did work. We learned a huge amount! We met some really interesting people who were exploring various angles around this: some people I've known off the internet for a while and some new people. Lots of really rich discussion. The experiment really showed us both the possibility, I think, of something like this and also the challenges that need to be addressed. I've already begun, later in the week, working on some of those challenges and improvements, moving into a new era of the approach. It really reinforced that doing it in the open is brilliant because you get to meet people who are also curious about this and want to do things. * * * Thursday I was in London for the Co-tec AI and Communities and Cooperatives event, which was very interesting. I'm not part of a co-op, but I've worked with some. Co-ops have such a lovely vibe and I was made to feel very welcome. I think that the day was really interesting for me to hear from people who were developers who have both been wary of AI and also have used AI, and the tensions. * Maybe it improves productivity in certain areas, but then, if you're charging a daily rate with some of your clients, what does that mean? What do you do there? You're obviously faster in lots of ways, but does that mean you're cheaper? * I heard from some people whose productivity had massively increased in some ways: the volume of code and the things that they're able to do increased, but there was massive mental burnout from having to review all of that code and context switch. Just because you can now work on five codebases at one time when previously you couldn't, because you couldn't write that much code. You have to context switch. You have to be aware of the architecture, thinking about the wider: What does all of this mean, and where does it fit? Are we making the right decision? That's an awful lot of mental load that people are dealing with, and you've got all these two pressures kind of converging: you're expecting people to produce more, produce faster, yet actually, the mental load of that means that's harder to do, or at least for a long time, a long term. In all the discussions around AI I think we miss the wider point around the changing nature of work, no just job losses.I think that burnout risk is real. There were also discussions around where the gaps in knowledge are going to appear. If you've written code, you can review it, and you can understand the kind of architecture. AI machines, the frontier models now, can probably write better code than you could previously, but how do you consciously make the decisions? Do you have the experience to do that? Will it even matter in a few years? I think we're in this weird transition between those who have had knowledge of the previous way of doing things, converging with a rapid explosion in capability. I think we're in this middle ground of figuring out: What does that mean? I think people need to become architects of products and code rather than coders, but applying that mental model takes a bit of a shift, and then it applies to business models as well. What does that even mean? There was a panel discussion with Amanda , Giuseppe, and Mhairi. Lot's of things I could pick out here, but I kept coming back to value. What value and for who? We keep measuring in efficiency and productivity, but if you read the section above then I think we're thinking about value in the wrong way. I think one of the things that came through from Giuseppe when he was talking was around the idea that it still comes back to use cases and value. We used to have this thing around user-centred design, or service design, and most of the digital support infrastructure around the social purpose sector have just skipped over that. Again, I think we're at risk of just moving into an era where we just overwhelm people to do things that have no real value. Remember when everyone was telling you that you need to be doing ‘big data’. I bet they are the same ones telling you to ‘do AI’. Ok cool, but why? Also lots of talk about trust in AI, but not much about being trustworthy * * * Elsewhere, I started working on something called RELAY, which is the next stage of this distributed shared AI running across multiple machines across networks, sharing and distributing open-source models in a peer-to-peer way. I mentioned that the field station experiment had some challenges. One of those was redundancy. If you've got five people and you all share a model sliced up into layers across the web browser, all very well and good, but what happens when somebody closes that browser, the whole model collapses. How do you build in redundancy? RELAY is one of the ways that I've begun exploring how to do that. This wouldn't be web-based or require shared browsers, because I think that's a wrong delivery mechanism or interface mechanism for something like this. Basically, what it does is a bit of an orchestration layer, considering who has a GPU, who has storage, and what the latency challenges are. It uses workers to distribute models across them. They're a little bit like the old BitTorrents, trying to think about peer-to-peer distribution of this and creating copies of layers across a network so that you do have a bit of redundancy. Anyway, really scrappy diagram here and then a bit of a more well-crafted diagram here. This will probably be the next stage of the FIELD STATION experiment. Watch this space! Friday, forest Friday, lots of running. Enjoyed that. Played on my guitar again this week. Did some school work. * * * ## Interesting things * Gensyn | Introducing open-1b: the first model you don’t have to trust - Auditable training is the best defense against the future of AI we’re being warned about. * Governance Analysis #2: How is Digital Sovereignty Measured Beyond Physical Location? * From crisis to catalyst - Collective visions for civil society and philanthropy in 2026 and beyond * Product for the People 2026 lightning talk: From A to Z — notes - * Atlas of Data Center Politics - An interactive research atlas mapping the territorial politics of data centers: facilities, policy, political events, and the actors that connect them. * Care 2027: A Good Life in Every Neighbourhood - We will publish our proposal for reforming the English care system early in 2027 and we would like your help. * An E-ink bird frame for Raspberry Pi - real-time bird detection by audio, fully local AI, rendered as real, hand-cut 1800s bird illustrations? Yes please (thanks to Doug for sharing this)

This week I have learned: the enjoyment to be had at a marathon. Assuming that you’re doing the baggage, rather than running 26.2 miles which, from the look of it, looks like a laudable aim b…

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? Mon...

Hack t’planet!

My week notes for week 37 of 2026 #100daystooffload #WeekNote

Amsterdammers lining up to begin the City Swim (Photo: me) We place far too much faith in the first verb. Launch the intranet. Start the business. Join the platform. Introduce flexible working. Tak…

This is one of Michael's weekly update posts. You could read it. Nothing's stopping you.

My week notes for week 37 of 2026 #100daystooffload #WeekNote

tired of being tired

Candid commentary on technology, retro games, Macs and other things, written by Craig Grannell.