Monthnote, January 2025

I've been considering some changes to the posts I publish over the last few months. What better time to (minorly) freshen things up than the start of a new year?

This post ushers in a couple of things:

• My first monthnote. I'm embracing – at least partially – the weeknote format of publishing "regular communication about work in progress" (see Giles Turnbull's fulsome explanation on his Doing Weeknotes website). I've struggled at times with the graft that goes into writing some of my longer posts, and this hopefully means I can keep my oar in without feeling blocked.
• I've moved publishing platform to Ghost. I love Buttondown – it's a super efficient site for sculpting and sending newsletters – but I've yearned for more control of look & feel and site navigation, as well as a place where I can produce standalone web pages (like this one) without necessarily having to send a newsletter.

What I've been working on

January is January, so there's been the disconcerting-but-familiar feeling of lethargy and sponginess after the Christmas break, coupled with the long list of stuff that didn't get done at the end of last year.

There's been a lot of emphasis on planning. Our new Business Manager has instigated some much more thorough processes, so that's required rethinking how we've approached things previously. It's felt really positive – it's bringing the whole Research Data Scotland team into the mix, and making us ask some difficult-but-necessary questions about priorities – but it's hard graft and not always straightforward.

Elsewhere we’re shaping up a nice discrete piece of service design work with the team at Nexer, and we've been having some watch-this-space chats with the Scottish hub of Public Digital.

It's taken a while to get off the ground, but we're moving forward with some work to reorganise our Microsoft 365 set-up. This should help beef up security, introduce some better workflows and, fingers crossed, improve how the whole team are using the tools we have at hand. Putting my AI scepticism partially to one side, we're also introducing some Copilot productivity trials.

Delighted to see my team embracing working in the open with their own weeknotes; why not find out what Adam and Jen have been up to? (in far more interesting prose than me)

I’ve drafted a couple of papers, one looking at how we might standardise remote access to data – based on Felix Ritchie’s recommendations for the Future Data Services review – and the other looking to officially conclude the first phase of service development work we undertook last year.

Some important, potentially sector-defining, papers have been published this month. I've perused, but need to spend some more time on, the blueprint for modern digital government and these white papers on the National Data Library.

The announcement that I've taken over as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Charity Finance Group went out. Equal parts daunting and exciting.

Other distractions

📖 Reading
Do audiobooks count as reading? I’ve tended to exclusively listen to non-fiction, but after months of inactivity (I couldn't finish a single book during the last quarter of 2024) I’ve moved on to fiction too, which has dramatically upped my pace. Maybe a January thing.

• I eventually finished Taffy Brodesser-Akner's Long Island Compromise, started waaaay back in September, which I loved in parts but proved to be a bit of a slog overall.
• David Nicholl's You Are Here provided a gentler follow-on, and Marnie and Michael's will they/won't they stomp through Cumbria was a charming spirit lifter.
• I whizzed through Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists over the course of a weekend. I found both captivating and surprisingly complementary in that they focus on small-things-that-are-actually-big-things. Despite one being set in space.
• The book that enthralled me most was James by Percival Everett, a retelling of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of Jim, the runaway slave. It's a gripping adventure story exploring power, race and identity and doesn't flinch in terms of its language and descriptions of wanton cruelty, but is all the more powerful for it.

📺 Watching

• The Traitors obvs.
• FX's compelling adaptation of Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe's superb book. The Troubles doesn't make for particularly easy viewing and it's worth following up with the BBC's outstanding Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland.
• I sneaked to the cinema to see A Real Pain, which was a joy; Kieran Culkin is exceptional.

🎧 Listening

• I'm not normally their biggest fan (bit too whimsical) but I'm really enjoying the new Franz Ferdinand album.
• New Self Esteem album is on its way, hoorah.
• For a few unconnected reasons, I've drifted back to Bjork this month. Pleased to report Homogenic is still stunning.
• Podcast-wise, I've tried and failed not to become too absorbed in pods covering the awful twists and turns of US politics, but on a lighter(ish) note the whole family listened to the latest Serial production together: The Good Whale is the twisty-turny story of Keiko, the killer whale star of the 1990s film Free Willy.
• Tortoise's Elon's Spies, a short series from last year, is a prescient reminder of why Musk is just about the worst person in the world to have access to anyone's data.

Links of interest

A few bits and bobs that have caught my attention.

• Shamelessly pilfered from the Storythings newsletter, this data visualisation of ships on the Firth of Forth is a simple and fun set of stories told with data.
• Complementing my previous grumbling about AR/VR, this piece (by a self-proclaimed VR diehard) highlights why the tech is failing.
• I bookmarked this ages ago, but finally dug in over Christmas – Adrian Hon's post is the best thing you'll read on zombies, running, and what does wrong with gamification.
• Tumbled down a rabbit hole finding out why hyperlinks are blue.

🗓️ Thank you for reading.