lloyd davis

📅 Daily note for 2 October 2024

Daily noting is rare at the moment, largely down to being busy, about which I should not complain! Lots of very interesting work, working with new people – which in itself is quite tiring. #

LocalGovCamp last week felt different – more positive, ambitious, optimistic than it has been for a while. In one session Theo⬈ mentioned that with the new government it feels like we have a window now to make some serious change happen in the sector. The last thing we want to be doing at LocalGovCamp ’25 is mulling on what could have been. He’s right. #

I am pretty certain the answer to this problem (how can digital stuff help councils make things better for local people while not going bust?) is based on changing the focus on what constitutes the local bit of local public services. Much of what happens behind the scenes has no positive impact on people’s lives. Let’s find ways to share the burden of those things, and let councils focus on where their local context, and democratic accountability, really makes a difference. #

Phil wrote up⬈ his LocalGovCamp experience. #

As did Carl⬈. I’ve missed Carl. #

Lloyd has been making some fun vlogs recently.⬈ #

Jerry Fishenden: “Forms? Where we’re going, we don’t need forms!”⬈ #

Chunks, anchors and textcasting

Lloyd is experimenting with adding anchor links to the chunks of text that make up his daily note style blog posts. It’s an interesting thing to do, and is very reminiscent of the way Dave Winer structures his blogging. Lloyd is doing inside of WordPress, which I can imagine must be a bit of a faff, while Dave W’s got a custom blogging platform that just works like that.

Most of my blogging here is in the form of daily notes, which are, like Lloyd’s, chunks that I write as it occurs to me to do so throughout the day. Interestingly, if for some reason I don’t open MarsEdit (the editor I use to compose all my posts here) first thing in the morning, the daily note often doesn’t get written at all. It has to be open, almost to encourage me to record and reflect as I go about my day.

I think maybe the concept of ‘textcasting’ which Dave W has been promoting recently might be a part of all this.

I would really like to find a way to improve my flow around this stuff, particularly now I have landed upon Raindrop.io as a really great way to store helpful links. I took a look at IFTTT to see if I could at least send the links automatically from Raindrop to Bluesky, but it appears that Bluesky hasn’t built out that kind of integration yet, which is a frustration.

What I would like is for Raindrop bookmarks to be pinged out to Bluesky (maybe Mastodon and Twitter/X too, why the hell not?) straight away, and then for the title and the link to be dropped into the daily note post for that day. So not a WordPress post for every Raindrop bookmark, but the post for that day is created if it doesn’t exist, or added to if it does.

What complicates this is that I use MarsEdit to write these notes, and that’s a desktop app on the Mac. Maybe there’s something I could do with Shortcuts or Automator on MacOS instead? I’ve never used those though and wouldn’t know where to start.

Another podcast!

lloyd-bcnfpToday I was at #barcampnfp – a rather fun unconference for people working in charities and other not (just) for profit organisations. I was flying the flag for TaskSquad, the fantastic youth employment startup that Mary McKenna is leading, and where I am doing some work at the moment.

I really enjoyed the sessions I attended, and will blog more about some of the topics later on. However, one of the best bits of the day was getting to hang out with Lloyd Davis, one of my favourite and best people, and while we chatted we switched on an audio recorder and did a podcast.

The mp3 is here for you to download and listen to. Alternatively, head over to Lloyd’s post where there are some show notes.

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