📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 20 February 2026

Short week last week as I took a couple of days off for half term. Also, I need to get into the habit of writing these during the week they actually refer to.

This week’s worky highlights:

• Some more Skillstats demos, which were as helpful to me as they were those on the receiving end. Some great challenge around accessibility which I need to look into.
• Am doing some thinking around combined / strategic authorities and their potential role in supporting collaboration and innovation between councils and, eventually, other place based services as well. I think there’s a thing here, and there’s not a huge amount of conversation out in the open about it.
• As part of the above, I got Google’s Notebook LM to do some of the heavy lifting in terms of research for me, which has been a real time saver.
• Well over 50 people signed up for LGR Camp, which is great progress!

Not really work stuff:

• I’ve been nagging people on LinkedIn to try and post the interesting things they put on there on the open web as well. Most people respond graciously, but I don’t want to become annoying about it!
• Ironically, I feel I am in the opposite boat where I publish things here on my blog on the open web but am not sure anybody is reading them! Need to find a way to non-annoyingly repost them on the social spaces, which is weirdly tricky when you don’t use post titles very often. Am encouraging people to sign up to get posts emailed to them, but not many folk are biting on that right now.

Media consumption:

• Watched The Seven Dials on Netflix which was enjoyable but felt weirdly paced. I think either make it a single feature or at least a 6 parter?
• Some classic daft comedies got watched with the kids – Dodgeball, Blades of Glory, etc. More fun for me than the kids I think, who senses of humour appear to be more sophisticated than mine!
• I had a load of half finished books on my Kindle, so I polished those off, which gave me a sene of achievement.

Here’s a photo of one of our cats, Wallis, sitting very properly on the sofa: