I'm reclining on our bed, laptop propped on a knee, listening to music I've recently added to my Plex server. Right now, it's a bit of Thievery Corporation while the rest Team Belshaw are either watching a film or gaming. I can hear my son shouting at his mates through the wall. If it was a few years ago, I'd be going in telling him not to use that kind of language, thank you very much.

Writing & Creating

Here, I published:

Stacktopolis: a SimCity 2000-inspired game about real-world tech sovereignty problems

Turning the TechFreedom risk framework into isometric chaos, as you juggle jurisdiction, continuity, and surveillance risks across your charity’s tech stack.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

March 2026: building, badges, and Borges

What I’ve been up to this month.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Want a clearer view of your tech stack? Join the TechFreedom pilot cohort

Map your dependencies, see where you are exposed, and sketch a more resilient roadmap with a small pilot cohort of peers.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

I didn't publish anything over at Thought Shrapnel other than wishing everyone a happy Easter. This was partly because I was working on an app I'm calling nvAge, which is in the spirit of two of my favourite apps of all time: Notational Velocity (last updated: 2011) and nvAlt.

nvAge — Local-first notes

A fast, private notes app. Type to search, Enter to create. Your notes are plain Markdown files on your own machine.

nvAge

The promised “nvUltra” never materialised, so I've taken matters into my own hands. It's called nvAge because of the post-quantum encryption library it uses. It's looking great and working happily on my Mac Studio, and kind of working on my Linux laptop.

It's not a one-click install, and you probably already know if you want something like this. So I'll let you give it a try if it's your kind of thing.

Reading, Listening, and Watching

You'll be pleased to know that I finished The Castle by Franz Kafka and started reading White Out by Ragnar Jónasson. My wife, Hannah, greatly enjoyed reading it when we were in Iceland back in 2019, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I've nominally got Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the back burner, but I didn't read or make notes on any of it this week. I listened to a couple of episodes of No Such Thing as a Fish, and am half way through Adam Greenfield's conversation with Cassie Thornton on Lifepod about “The Hologram” and the viral practice of mutual care.

I watched a pretty cool video about the Osireion in Egypt:

Working

Tom and I met to plan the TechFreedom workshops in more details. We've now got a few people signed up to the pilot cohort, with the first session happening on Wednesday 22 April. Do have a look if it's something you or someone you know might be interested in!

While my consultancy website was admirably fast-loading, I decided it was too abstract and that I wanted it to be warmer and more welcoming. And nothing says that more than Doug hugging a large orange fox mascot – right?

It's now less than a month until WAO closes, so we had a half-day on Monday to figure things out around money, logistics, and sharing resources as we “compost” the co-op.

Laura and I are organising our time to get the INASP Discovery and Definition phases done for their Rising Scholars website project. I think we're pretty clear what we're recommending at this point, which is good as I'm off next week and then Laura's taking the week after that off.

With the other WAO project, the Amnesty International UK community platform pilot, we're about 70% done with the evaluation report. It's shaping up nicely. We never pull any punches with these things, but we do so nicely (if that makes sense).

I met with Nate who's getting everything set up for the Digital Badges Proof of Concept project through Dynamic Skillset. You can check out the kanban board to see what we're up to. I've scheduled the first testing workshop for the end of April.

I also had a chat with Karen about my Stacktopolis game, which got her thinking about what could be done in Canada around digital sovereignty.

Personal

I should have taken this last week off as, whether it was the clocks going forward, the start of spring, or the very changeable weather, I've been pretty tired. Thankfully, it was a four-day week.

Team Belshaw went over to my parents to see them, my sister, her partner, and my nephew. My niece is recently off to the south of France looking for work on super yachts, after recently gaining a qualification for that purpose. Meanwhile, my son, Ben, is talking about changing university course – which might mean he has to start again from the first year.

Other than taking my daughter, Grace, to referee some district matches, to go for a few walks nearby, and to go swimming and to the gym, I've been very much home-based this week. Today, Easter Sunday, I've eaten a lot of sugar. Hannah made an excellent Easter Day meal along with a magnificent simnel cake.

I am sleepy.

Next week

I'm off work this coming week, so I'm not planning to blog here, but I am planning to catch up with things over at Thought Shrapnel. Team Belshaw is off to Lindisfarne tomorrow as Storm Dave made it a bit windy to go today.

Hannah and I are thinking about going away for a night sometime this week, and we've booked some flights to Barcelona for the end of July / start of August for the four of us. Whether or not we stay in Barcelona is still TBD.

Over the last few months, Tom Watson and I have been building TechFreedom, a practical, cohort-based course for social purpose organisations like yours. We're going to be helping participants from up to 10 organisations think more clearly about their tech stack and digital dependencies in a volatile and uncertain world.

Across three online sessions, you'll map the services relied on by your organisation, assess risks across five lenses, and sketch a plan to work towards a more resilient roadmap. We designed the course for people who value stepping back from day-to-day delivery, working through a structured process with a small group of peers.

Registration is now open at techfreedom.eu and sign-ups have started coming in already. We're capping the number of places available on the pilot cohort, so if this sounds useful, book your place soon to secure a spot at this introductory price.

To give you a flavour of what to expect on the course, we've updated the TechFreedom website with some practical tools. Stacktopolis is a game which shows in a quick, fun, visual way, about how risks can compound and lead to problematic consequences.

Bringing that into sharper focus for your organisation, we've added a new “going deeper” section to the alternatives and risk assessment page of the site. This gives you a weighted risk profile, demonstrating just how much the SEE / ASSESS / PLAN approach could help your organisation think clearly about your digital dependencies.

So, if your organisation wants a clearer sense of where you stand, TechFreedom is for you. Take a look at the games and tools, share them with your colleagues, and when you are ready, join us for the pilot cohort. All the details, including dates and pricing, are at techfreedom.eu.

As I explained in a post a couple of months ago, I find the ideal structure of a year to be one in which I take blocks of three weeks off in April, August, and December. With the pending closure of WAO on May 1st, that didn't seem sensible.

I am tired after a busy month. This roundup post details what I've been up to in March. TL;DR: I have been sitting in front of my computer making shedloads of stuff.

The controversial question of AI

Looking back, it seems like ages ago that I completed a series of posts inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The trilogy used stories from Labyrinths to examine how AI can reshape decision-making in mission-driven organisations:

• When AI tools give you choices but take your agency is the second post in the series and focuses on the difference between choice (selecting from options presented to you) and agency (shaping which options exist in the first place).
• When AI remembers everything and organisations forget how to choose is the third and final post, and uses 'Funes the Memorious' to argue that more data doesn't produce better decisions – unless it's paired with judgement to determine what matters.

I'm unapologetically using AI on a daily basis, despite what other people may think of me as a result. If, like Steve Jobs famously said, a computer is a “bicycle for the mind” then LLMs are like e-bikes.

It is important, though, to work with these tools, rather than having them do everything for you. I explored this idea from different angles in a couple of posts:

• DOUG.md suggests that using some form of NAME.md is the equivalent of a CV to travel between tools and part of how we present ourselves in digital work.
• My 7-step approach for authentic AI-assisted blogging was probably my most controversial post this month; it's certainly the one that got the most attention. My friend Jess Klein challenged me to write up my AI-assisted workflow, so I did just that.

Making stuff

I have been prolific this month in building tools with Claude Code. Some of these are for my personal use, some for professional use, and some are for both. The following list isn't even everything I've built: for example, I haven't blogged about the macOS apps I've built for playing music or generating playlists on my Plex server, or the transcription app that I built.

It's pretty insane to have shipped this much stuff; It's probably why I'm so tired:

• ChronoTasker: turning my to-do list into a clockface – I needed a way of mapping my tasks onto the same interface as my meetings, etc. So I built ChronoTasker, which I have since renamed TaskDial because Laura said it sounded too much like “chronic”.
• Sightlines: small, practical systems thinking tools for mission-driven organisations – three interactive tools (boundary judgements, stakeholder mapping, feedback loops) based on work I've done around Systems Thinking for Dynamic Skillset clients. They still need a bit of work but the idea is solid.
• Badge Studio is back! – for years I've wanted to de-brand Andrew Hayward's Mozilla-era badge generator and add a fun 'randomise' button. Now I can, so I did.
• Blog posts in the Stream, that is what we are – Terry Godier made an app called Current but it was Apple-only. So I created Stream which is open source and cross-platform. It's a “velocity-based” RSS reader where articles arrive, linger, and fade like a stream, rather than piling up like another inbox to deal with.
• Stacktopolis: a SimCity 2000-inspired game about real-world tech sovereignty problems – this started as random post-it note during an in-person TechFreedom planning session with Tom. I had a lot of fun turning the TechFreedom risk framework into a game requiring players to balance jurisdiction, continuity, and surveillance risks across an organisation's tech stack.

Another post that received a lot of attention was Badges that change shape to show skills development. As the latest version of the Open Badges standard is essentially a visualisation layer on top of a data layer, I explored radar-plot polygons generated from data showing increasing skills. It's essentially turning badges into mini e-portfolios.

TechFreedom and sustaining the work

Tom and I launched TechFreedom properly this month. In TechFreedom and the risks hiding in your tech stack I set out what we're doing and then in Secure your place in the TechFreedom pilot cohort! we opened bookings for the first cohort of 10 organisations. Sessions run in late April and May.

With WAO closing, I've been thinking about sustainability. I'm happy to say that people have already responded to my post You can now support Open Thinkering – some by supporting me directly here, and others via Ko-fi or buying my e-book How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis. My work has always been free to read, but if you see value in what I create, you can now contribute.

Weaknotes?

There were five weeknotes this month, as the Sundays just kept on coming:

• Weeknote 09 – returning from holiday, and getting straight back into building things.
• Weeknote 10 – the first full week back: client work and TechFreedom prep.
• Weeknote 11 – launching landing pages for CalAnywhere, TaskDial, and Groundwork. Divesting from Spotify in favour of Plex. Mother's Day and migraines.
• Weeknote 12 – meeting Tom in Newcastle, building a Plex coverflow app, starting work on the final WAO project.
• Weeknote 13 – the clocks changed, I felt old.

I need a break. I'm looking forward to slowing down during my week off next week, but with WAO closing on May 1st, “slowing down” in April might be more of an aspiration than a plan...

On Friday, Tom and I were reviewing photos of sticky notes from our in-person noodling session the week before. One said “SimCity 2000-style scenarios". I remembered that we'd talked about how much we'd enjoyed playing that game as kids, and how we could use it as a fun, educational way to teach concepts related to TechFreedom.

Well, never one wishing to disappoint, I spent longer than strictly necessary this morning coaxing Claude Code into creating what I think is 80% of what I had in my mind when Tom and I were discussing the idea.

👉 Play Stacktopolis

In the game, there are three risk areas that you have to keep under control:

1. Jurisdiction
2. Continuity
3. Surveillance

These are taken from the TechFreedom risk framework. The idea is that players understand the risks, and in a fun way, understand the trade-offs between cost and control.

It's Open Source, so feel free to fork and remix the game. Also, if this is the kind of thing you're interested in, consider joining the TechFreedom pilot cohort!

I have felt old and tired this week. To be fair, this is exactly what I thought being in my mid-forties would feel like – not that it makes it any less frustrating.

Anyway, the world is 🔥 outside it's 💨 and my body clock is off as we've entered daylight saving time. 🕰️

Writing

Here, I published:

Blog posts in the Stream, that is what we are

A velocity-based RSS reader. Articles arrive, linger, and fade. You are not behind.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Secure your place in the TechFreedom pilot cohort!

Only 10 spots available. The price will increase significantly for the next cohort.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

You can now support Open Thinkering

I’ve been publishing this blog for two decades now. It’s always been free to read, and it’s going to stay that way. But if you see value in what I write and would like to support it financially, I’ve enabled that to happen.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes

I agree with this clear-eyed metaphor from Greg Wilson, riffing off Steve Jobs’ famous quotation that computers are “bicycles for the mind”. It’s certainly been my experience that LLMs have enabled me to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have done! Check out the ‘Tools’ section of my Dynamic Skillset website, for example. And that doesn’t even list everything… [I]f a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes.

Thought Shrapnel

Your future needs you. Your past doesn’t.

A useful reminder — especially for me. Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

The hard work of building a thing now isn’t writing the code

Last week, after seeing yet another person wax lyrical about Current (on this occasion without even using it!) I decided that I needed to do something about it. Most RSS readers ask you to “mark as read.” Think about what that language implies. You’re granting the article a status change, like an administrator processing paperwork. Read. Filed. Handled. Current asks you to release. You can release from anywhere. In the river, a long swipe left on a card sends it flying off the screen.

Thought Shrapnel

Thought Shrapnel’s 50 most-referenced sources (2008-2016)

I’ve been travelling to and from Huddersfield today (2.5 hours each way) for my daughter’s JPL football match. My wife and I shared the driving, so I took the opportunity to do some reading and also… get Claude to do some analysis of Thought Shrapnel (2018-2026) For those interested, the chart at the top shows my 50 most-referenced sources, from a total of 2117 total sources. The top 50 are links below; no massive surprises!

Thought Shrapnel

I must trouble the reader to correct the errata... For I am quite tired.

Well, indeed. My little robot friend says the origin is as follows: That line is from the 1704 pamphlet “A Defence of a Book intituled The Snake in the Grass. In reply to several Answers put out to it by George Whitehead, Joseph Wyeth, &c.” by the Anglican controversialist Charles Leslie. Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

Each came down with spectacular clarity, each a wingless fuselage, quietly descending to the depths of the ocean floor.

This is an incredible read, and I’d encourage you to set aside the time to do so. I’m old so I literally printed it out to give it the attention it deserves. Cade Diehm, founder of New Design Congress, explains where we’re at. It’s a long essay, so this post is going to be longer than your average Thought Shrapnel post. Diehm argues that last year, there were a couple of long-standing trends which combined.

Thought Shrapnel

Clippy sez: Just Do It

Wow, rude. Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

2026 is about ‘Aspirational Humanity’ – amongst other things

The key themes in this slide deck are interesting, especially as I like to be able to name things that I’m seeing/sensing: Aspirational Humanity – “As artificial intelligence hyper-flattens mass culture, anything denoting evidence of humanity becomes exceptionally desirable.” Sensorial Potency – “The drive to over-optimize everything has left us in a sensory void.” Subversive Sincerity – “The performance of ironic detachment is growing tired, and the fantasy of regressive nostalgia is no longer meeting expectations.

Thought Shrapnel

A Victorian-era LLM

If you scratch away the surface, I’m still a History teacher underneath, so I love this idea of training an LLM on Victorian-era texts! It’s pretty slow, but fun. Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. He is not a modern AI putting on an accent — his vocabulary, ideas, and worldview are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.

Thought Shrapnel

Reading, Listening, and Watching

It's inexplicable that I'm still re-reading The Castle by Franz Kafka and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But there we are.

I enjoyed watching this short video:

One of the latest episodes of The Adventure Podcast featuring Simon Jeffries on mindset was pretty good, too.

Working

Laura and I continued to sprint on the INASP project which focuses on their Rising Scholars website. We've done plenty of work on it this week, including user research interviews with staff and the community.

The other WAO project I'm working on, the Amnesty International UK community platform pilot, is now in the “get the evaluation written” phase. WAO itself is, of course, closing in just over a month, so we had former member Bryan Mathers create some imagery for us. I'm sure he won't mind me sneaking in a sketch we ended up not taking forward. It references our inaugural planning meeting, a decade ago.

I kept things ticking over with Nate for the Digital Badges Proof of Concept project through Dynamic Skillset. We've submitted our first deliverable (technical architecture) and you see the kanban board to see what we're up to.

Tom Watson and I now have a couple of people signed up for the TechFreedom pilot cohort, which kicks off towards the end of April. Another person has said they're going to join us. We ideally want 10 people, but will go ahead if we get 6. We spent some time noodling on the workshop sessions this week and also talked about making a SimCity 2000-style game.

More on that tomorrow 😉

I also had chats with:

• Stephen Lockyer who is an enthusiastic early adopter of TaskDial (let me know if you want an invite code!)
• Laura Kirsop who is currently CTPO at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and who I've known for years. She put me in touch with Justin Spooner from Unthinkable Digital, with whom I also had an enjoyable conversation.
• The “AI group” which has met irregularly ever since we worked on a UNESCO thing together. This time around, Bryan Alexander, Laura Hilliger, Ian O'Byrne, and Karen Smith came along. Helen Beetham couldn't make it, unfortunately.
• Tim Riches, CEO of Navigatr. We talked about my polygonal badges post, among other things.
• John Fitzgerald, Digital Evolution Manager at SCVO (with Tom)
• Steve Hawkes from The Developer Society about WAO closing, and so on.
• Will Heinemann from Torchbox who showed me their new Possibility Mapping workshop, which is not unrelated to my Sightlines tool.

In terms of apps, I've made tweaks to TaskDial as a result of the chat with Stephen Lockyer, have made huge strides with Stream, and have also started to reinvent MoodleNet on top of Bonfire. Don't get too excited, but perhaps more soon...

Personal

My son, Ben, and I went to see Project Hail Mary at the cinema. He fell asleep, and I didn't get what all the fuss was about. He had quite the week, talking to his university tutor about potentially changing courses from Sport to Geography, and also wild camping with his mates halfway up Helvellyn in gale-force winds.

My wife and I spent most of yesterday travelling to and from Huddersfield with our daughter for her football match. The wind spoiled it, really – that, and the fact that two of her team mates ended up in hospital with injuries, one with a fractured wrist! Along with someone being sidelined with a hamstring strain, and only taking a squad of 12, they were down to 9 players at one point. They still only lost 2-1!

I've done some exercise this week, but not a lot. I'm trying to lean into the rest that I've been prescribed. Did I mention that I was diagnosed with Phase 3 (“parasympathetic”) overtraining syndrome? Oh right, yes, I did. 😅

Next week

I was going to be taking two weeks off work, including next week. But given the co-op is closing and we've got stuff to do, that didn't feel right. So, given that it's a four-day week due to Good Friday, I'm going to work this coming week.

Hopefully I'll sleep better this week. The change of seasons, coupled with changing my exercise regime and medication, means my routine is all out of whack.

I've been publishing this blog for two decades now. It's always been free to read, and it's going to stay that way.

But, as my co-op is about to close after 10 years, it's made think about ways to sustain the work I do alongside my consultancy business. If you see value in what I create and would like to support it financially, I've enabled that to happen. Think of it as unlocking the digital commons.

I've set up a couple of tiers:

• ⭐ Patron — £5/month or £50/year
  Your name on the Patrons page as a thank you.
• 🧠 Thought Partner — £50/month or £500/year
  Your name on the Patrons page, plus a monthly one-to-one session with me. Good if you want a sounding board for ideas around technology, education, or whatever you're currently up to.

You can sign up at the link below:

Become a patron →

If you'd rather become (or remain) a free subscriber, absolutely nothing changes. Thanks for continuing to read and share my work!

A note on the Patrons page: if you do sign up, your name will appear there by default. If you'd prefer to remain anonymous, just reply to this email and I'll leave you off, no questions asked.

Thank you for supporting my work – however you choose to do it 🙂

– Doug

PS If none of these work, and you'd just like to buy me a one-off coffee, you can do that via Ko-fi ☕

Most social purpose organisations depend on US Big Tech in ways that become apparent when something breaks. A few weeks ago, Tom Watson and I decided to do something practical about that, and put together the TechFreedom programme.

Most organisations can't see what's gathering overhead. You depend on platforms that set the terms, change their rules without warning, and leave you exposed when conditions change.

TechFreedom is a three-session programme for social purpose organisations who want to understand their technology risks and do something about them. Working as a small cohort, you'll audit the tools you rely on, explore practical alternatives, and leave with a plan for reducing your dependency on Big Tech.

The pilot cohort is capped at 10 people and 2 places have already gone. Sessions run on Wednesdays 22 April, 6 May, and 20 May 2026, 13:00–15:00 BST.

👉 Secure your spot here

The pilot rate is £300 + VAT per person, in return for open, honest feedback on the programme. Later cohorts will be priced significantly higher, so this is the cheapest it will be.

So what are you waiting for?

FAQ

Do I need to be technical?

No. The programme is designed for people who make strategic decisions about technology, not people who implement it. If you can list the tools your organisation uses, you have everything you need.

How many people from my organisation should attend?

One person per organisation. Ideally someone with oversight of technology decisions: an executive director, operations manager, or trustee. They can always bring insights back to colleagues.

What do I need to prepare?

Nothing. There is no pre-work. The first session starts with building your inventory from scratch.

What happens if I miss a session?

The sessions build on each other, so attending all three gives you the most value. If you need to miss one, we can arrange a brief catch-up call.

Like everyone else, back in the day I used to use Google Reader. Then, I used Feedly. More recently, I've installed on my server FreshRSS, a free, self-hostable feed aggregator, and used an app called Fluent Reader to connect to it. I've been searching for the perfect RSS feed reading experience for two decades at this point.

There have been lots of attempts to reinvent RSS readers over the years, but none have really invented a new approach to it. So, when I saw Current, an “RSS reader that does not count,” I realised it had put into words something I'd wanted for a long time

Traditional feed readers feel like just another inbox, and one that you're always behind with. Terry Godier, the creator of Current, calls that need to get to the equivalent of inbox zero a “phantom obligation,” and it's what spurred him to build his app.

I think it's a great idea, but the catch for me was that Current only runs on Apple platforms (macOS/iOS) and I split my time across different systems (Android, Linux, macOS). So I wondered whether we might be able to create something similar in a browser, talking to something like my existing FreshRSS instance.

What do you know? It turns out you can.

What is Stream?

Stream is my homage to Godier's more polished, paid-for offering. It's just a small AGPL‑licensed web app that I've created, mainly for my own use, to to talk to a backend such as FreshRSS or Feedbin to fetch and sync feeds.

That means Stream never stores RSS subscriptions itself. You either run something like FreshRSS yourself, on your own server, or you pay a service like Feedbin. Stream just logs in and shows you what's there.

As it's browser-based, I can open Stream on any device and see the same view of my feeds. It presents everything as a single 'stream' of posts, rather than folders of unread items. As you can see from the 2-minute walkthrough video, it's very simple.

Origins and influences

I've already mentioned Current as a recent influence, especially in the way that it talks about different “velocities” of sources. Feeds that publish multiple times per day go past quickly, and the work of less frequent publishers sticks around a bit longer.

Fraidycat had a similar idea years ago. It asked you how closely you wanted to follow a given source, and Stream borrows that idea of curating your attention without requiring a browser extension.

There's no denying that Stream is similar to Current. I considered just keeping it in a private GitHub repository and only using it myself. I don't particularly want to be sued. However, my feeling is that nobody owns these kinds of ideas. UX patterns spread over time: for example, the “pull to refresh” gesture that's now in every app was first implemented in the paid Twitter client Tweetie.

I see Stream in that tradition. It is clearly influenced by Current and Fraidycat, and I've said as much here and in the GitHub repository. Terry even replied to me on Mastodon, in a message that has since disappeared, to say he was not annoyed and hoped I would develop the idea further and find some “quiet for reading.”

The code of Stream is released under the AGPL so anyone can run their own copy, inspect how it works, and/or send improvements. It's just another experiment for me – in this case, making feeds work a bit more like my attention.

Where next?

Stream can currently connect to two backends, FreshRSS for people like me who self-host, and Feedbin for those who prefer a hosted service. The README in the GitHub repository goes into more detail about how to set that up.

Stream is not a service I'm planning to run for others. It's more of a tool that I created for myself that I'm sharing in case it works for you. What are you currently using for feed reading? Does this approach work for you?

Last month, I stumbled across the above quotation via L.M. Sacasas and have been thinking about it since. The problem definitely is that we don't know what to do with our time any more.

What is it that we are trying to achieve? What does a flourishing life look like in the second half of the 2020s? 🤔

Writing

Here, I published:

Sightlines: small, practical systems thinking tools for mission-driven organisations

The work of mission-driven organisations is complex, but complexity can be hard to talk about.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Badge Studio is back!

A simple, client-side way to generate badges for use in Open Badges and recognition projects.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

My 7-step approach for authentic AI-assisted blogging

Posts I publish here are mine. I’m holding myself accountable for them, and you too should hold me to that, even if AI was involved in the process.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

Claude Cowork vs Claude Code

Yes, Claude Cowork is great, but the secret sauce is actually Claude Code which you can access via the Claude app. Even better is doing so from the command line interface (CLI). The advantage of the CLI is that you’re fully in control of your project. The difficulty, of course, is that unless you grew up having to load computer games via DOS, and unless you’ve got a mental model of how product development works, it’s going to feel very odd.

Thought Shrapnel

Recursive logical fallacies

I did not enjoy studying Formal Logic as a Philosophy undergraduate. But it stood me in good stead. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people who wouldn’t even understand what’s wrong with the above reasoning, and in fact it explains a lot of what is wrong with the world… 🙄 Source: X via Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

Disgust is a complicated emotion

This is definitely not for everyone, but ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn) is awesome and always makes compelling videos. This one weighs in at a little over an hour and a half, so I’m still watching it. Ever since studying Philosophy of Art & Literature as an undergraduate, in which we looked at why people watch horror films, I’ve understood that disgust is actually a complicated emotion. As ContraPoints explains through the Saw series of films, so-called film critics have things all wrong.

Thought Shrapnel

Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak

It’s almost a decade since one of the greatest economic harms a country has ever self-inflicted. Yes, I’m talking about Brexit. Finally, we’re getting to the stage when our current government, which is not the one that instigated the referendum, can say that “Brexit did deep damage”. Let’s hope we get back into bed with our European neighbours ASAP. The decline in Britain over the last 10 years is tangible.

Thought Shrapnel

A useful reminder

Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

Why it’s all kicking off (again)

I’m not saying that you need to be an expert on the history of every country of the world, but when there’s a major crisis going on, understanding why it’s all kicking off is at least worth understanding. Source: Ted Rall

Thought Shrapnel

Maybe the loose end isn’t a failure of facilitation

Tom was talking to me about his thinking about this post when we met up earlier this week to discuss next steps for TechFreedom, our joint project. Essentially, the problem is that things like workshops, events, projects, and even programmes of work have an internal logic to them. This logic dictates whether or not they are designated ‘successful’. Whereas, the world is a messy and complicated place, and simply giving people opportunities to connect and think things through can have much more profound consequences.

Thought Shrapnel

Institute of Pragmatic Solutions

Everything that’s wrong with the world, captured neatly in one cartoon. Source: Tom Gauld

Thought Shrapnel

Creating the conditions to make things possible

This post by Dave Snowden, originator of the Cynefin framework, relates to post I shared by Tom Watson about ‘loose ends’. I have been writing recently, and will write more, about the difference between containers and landscapes: how interventions can be real within their boundaries and yet leave everything structurally unchanged outside them. The coaching session that produces genuine insight. The workshop that shifts something in the room. And two weeks later, nothing.

Thought Shrapnel

LLMs are “in the game, even if they’re not strictly playing it.”

The widely-referenced “stochastic parrots” paper from five years ago is no out of date. In it, Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. argue that LLMs remix patterns in text without genuine understanding. This has knock‑on effects for how we (should) use and trust them. It’s a familiar argument, using the same approach as John Searle’s famous Chinese Room argument about ‘black box’ symbol‑shuffling without understanding. I don’t know Pete Wolfendale, but I have just discovered that he is an independent philosopher based in Newcastle‑upon‑Tyne, so I should probably look him up.

Thought Shrapnel

Reading, Listening, and Watching

I'm still re-reading The Castle by Franz Kafka and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I went to watch Sinners with my son, Ben, on Monday which was absolutely excellent.

I watched ContraPoints' latest in ~20 minute chunks while tinkering around with various things via the command line. Very insightful.

Last week, I mentioned how much I'm enjoying listening to my music collection via Plex rather than Spotify. After seeing that it's now possible to do 'cover flow' in CSS I decided to build a macOS app to use on my Mac Studio so that I could browse and play the albums on my home server.

I'm really pleased with it! The code is on GitHub.

Working

Laura and I started sprinting on the INASP project after we had the kick-off meeting on Monday. We've done a lot of work on it this week and made plenty of progress. Relatedly, I had a chat with Ivan from Bonfire on Friday.

In the other WAO project I'm working on, the Amnesty International UK community platform pilot came to an end on Friday. So with the time remaining our job is to evaluate that and suggest next steps.

I met with Nate for the Digital Badges Proof of Concept project through Dynamic Skillset. He sent me the first deliverable (technical architecture) over the weekend, which I'll be reviewing tomorrow. We're working as openly as possible, so you can see the kanban board to see what's involved.

This week, I've used Claude Code to create the 'Overflow' app I mentioned above, as well as:

• Contours – A topographic skills-profile visualiser. This was inspired by this post about polygonal badges.
• Plex Music Library Cleanup – Command line tool to find and fix duplicate albums and tracks-as-albums in a Plex music library.
• Plex Grounded Playlist Generator – Self-hosted web tool that generates large, situation-aware Plex music playlists using a configurable LLM, grounded entirely in your actual library.
• Sightlines – Three interactive systems-thinking tools for mission-driven organisations: boundary drawing, stakeholder mapping, and connection graphing.
• Stream – Velocity-based RSS reader. Articles arrive, linger, and fade. (I'll be publishing a post about this tomorrow)

I've also updated TaskDial based on user feedback. Let me know if you want an invite code – I'm using it every day, and it's a gamechanger.

Other than that, I met up with Tom in Newcastle on Tuesday. We've had our first sign-ups for the pilot TechFreedom cohort, and will be promoting it publicly with a payment this coming week. I had chat with Nate and Ivan, as I already mentioned, and also Jess Klein and Simone Ravaioli. I heard back from Ghost that while my application was one of only a few they followed-up with out of hundreds, they're not taking me through to the second round of interviews.

Personal

Getting sick of running so slowly, based on guidance given to me by the consultant who diagnosed my overtraining syndrome, I ran slightly faster on Thursday. I was absolutely battered afterwards: completely knackered and had to take my inhaler about 10 times during the rest of the day. A good reminder that I really do need to take things easy.

My daughter, Grace, recovered from her shin splints to play for Boro Rangers against Halifax Town yesterday. It was a good game and she played well, but they lost 1-0. Talking of football, I'm writing this while watching Arsenal vs Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final. I was delighted that my team, Sunderland, beat their local rivals Newcastle United earlier ⚽

Other than that, I've slept a little erratically, and with the warmer weather, been out cleaning our cars and cutting the grass. Hannah, my wife, keeps trying to give me all of the tasks, because it's Spring and apparently that's when things are done...

Next week

I've got several of conversations lined up for tomorrow, and then a few more on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then I've got some in-person noodling with Tom on Thursday, then some co-working with Jess on Friday.

I usually take three weeks off work in April, or try to anyway. This year, the plan was to take two weeks but now it's looking like I'll only be taking one. The reason? WAO is closing, and there's plenty to get done before that happens on May 1st.

On Wednesday, I was talking with my friend Jess Klein about my use of AI. Along the way, I mentioned how easy it is to tell when someone has just copied and pasted from an LLM – in fact, it's got to the point where I can even tell which model they've used.

When I shared how I approach writing for this blog, I realised that I had a 7-step process that I'd never written down. Jess suggested that it would make for an interesting blog post. So here we are.

Since moving to Ghost over the Christmas holidays, as well as my Sunday weeknote, I've maintained a rhythm of publishing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Full disclosure: that's only been possible because I treat AI as part of my writing and publishing workflow. Happily, I've had great feedback in terms of comments and private messages, an increased number of subscribers, and my work being shared more widely on social networks.

This post is recursive in the sense that I'm going to walk you through how the 7-step process applies to the creation of the very thing you're reading. I'm going to cover how I try to avoid creating AI slop, the ways in which I use an AI style guide, and what I talk about when I talk about “authenticity.”

At the end of the post I've shared three resources:

1. Conversation with Perplexity that led to a draft post
2. Raw version of the draft the LLM created
3. My AI style guide

Enjoy reading how the sausage is made! 🌭

What am I even trying to do here?

Before I share the 7-step process, let's just take a step back and name what I'm actually trying to do when I use AI in my writing and publishing workflow:

• Maintain a publishing schedule that I find sustainable
• Share things that I've been thinking about which I consider worthy of other people's attention
• Ensure that what I publish feels like “me”

AI lowers the friction of getting from an idea I have while brushing my teeth to a draft that I can then iterate upon. Using an LLM, especially one I've been using a while like Perplexity, is conversational and contextual. And it means that I avoid the tyranny of the blank page.

When Cory Doctorow shared recently that he uses a local LLM as part of his workflow, people were not happy. So I'm donning the flameproof suit before hitting publish on this post 🔥

My 7-step process

Here's the process, broadly speaking, that I go through when creating a post to publish on this blog:

1. Come up with an idea for a post
2. Have a conversation with Perplexity
3. Get it to generate a post (based on this style guide)
4. Rewrite the post
5. Run it through GPTzero.me
6. Do another ‘editor’ pass through a different model in Perplexity
7. Publish

💡 💬 Steps 1 & 2: Come up with an idea and have a conversation with Perplexity

Inspiration comes in many forms. I've published posts recently based on books I've read, conversations I've had, and podcasts I've listened to. In this case, it was a chat with Jess, who I've known for over 15 years at this point. I felt safe in conversation with her, and her encouragement mattered.

So on Thursday morning, while I was getting ready for the day, I was having a conversation with Perplexity. Sometimes that's voice-based, but usually when my wife and daughter are in, it's text-based, otherwise I get a shout from another room: "What did you say? Who are you talking to?"

If you have a look at the conversation I had, you'll notice that the initial prompt was reasonably long. I kind of know what I want to say, but I just want to hash it out with an interlocutor. Sometimes doing that right now (even if you're doing something else at the same time) can be useful.

In the conversation for this post, I explored:

• Ways of structuring the post
• How to frame this as my situated practice rather than something prescriptive
• Ways to link this to academic theories

For example, I ended up rejecting an idea to include links to Donna Haraway's work because, although I spent some time reading resources, I didn't have time to sit down with them and read them thoughtfully.

📝 🤔 Steps 3 & 4: Get the model to generate a draft and then rewrite it

Once I'm happy with the structure and content, I then ask the LLM to generate a full draft based on our conversation. This is based on the style guide I've created, which is essentially telling Perplexity not to use (or overuse) certain words, phrases, and grammatical tics.

This leaves me with a draft that I should imagine many people would just hit publish on. Sometimes I ask it for suggestions for a title for the piece, sometimes I don't.

At this point, I'm on my laptop, so I copy/paste it into Ghost, the platform I use for this blog. This is my raw material. You can see the draft that Perplexity created for me here.

Next, and often at a different time, either on my desktop or laptop, I make the text my own. Sometimes I cut out whole sections if I don't think they're useful. I use my own voice and idiosyncratic way of writing. I add links where relevant.

So by the end of Step 4, the post feels like me even if I've had significant help with the structure and approach from an LLM.

✅🤖 Steps 5 & 6: Run through GPTZero and use a different LLM as an editor

Just as I do for all of my posts these days, once I've finished with this one, I'll run it through GPTZero to double-check. Sometimes, when I'm feeling tired or lazy, I tweak less than at other times. I'm not necessarily trying to get a 100% “human” score, but rather just check that I'm being honest with myself.

This is why I often end up publishing in the morning (UK time) as I tend to run Steps 5 and 6 just before I hit publish. Then, if I have been tired and/or lazy, I've got time to restructure and tweak.

(As an aside, it's interesting using that tool for other people's work. You see how often people write the introduction themselves, copy/paste the LLM output, and then tweak a few words here and there!)

The last step before hitting publish is to do what Cory Doctorow does, except with a more powerful model. I use different LLM (e.g. Claude) as an editor and ask it to find typos and grammatical errors. It's particularly good at also pointing out clichés and clumsy wording.

Sometimes I just ignore everything other than the typos, other times I restructure whole sections. The point is that it's a thoughtful process, not just asking it to “process” my text.

🎉 Step 7: Publish

The last thing I need to do is to find an image to accompany my post. Depending on how inspired I'm feeling, I'll ask an LLM for suggestions. Most of the time, though, I'm just exploring Unsplash.

Other than that, I just add the post metadata, then hit publish. Occasionally, I ask Perplexity to come up with short posts to promote the post on LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Bluesky. A lot of the exact details of Steps 5-7 depend on how much of a rush I'm in, to be perfectly honest.

This still feels like me

Having dabbled with AI since GPT 3, I'm used to the usual arguments against using AI for... well, anything. Often, and especially with writing, I've heard people use the word “authenticity” as if they even know what that is. To me it's a thought-terminating cliché, just like the word “rigour”.

To me, authenticity is a construct. It is not something that lives inside the text itself, but is rather a relationship between the writer, the reader, and their shared context.

I'm happy to share my work openly when:

• The ideas originate from my own experience, practice, and reading/listening
• The expression of those ideas sounds like me – even if AI has helped me along the way
• I'm willing to defend what I've published and answer questions about it

So, from this point of view, the use of LLMs in a writing and publishing workflow does not make something “inauthentic.” It's how the tools are used, and how willing you are to share your workflow. Jess challenged me to write this up – unless I'm somehow embarrassed about it? Which, of course, I'm not.

Posts I publish here are mine. I'm holding myself accountable for them, and you too should hold me to that, even if AI was involved in the process. If you're already using, or thinking about experimenting with AI in your own writing/publishing workflow, let me know how you're approaching it.

How are you thinking about all this?

Links

I've linked to these in the text itself, but just to have everything in one place:

• Conversation transcript with Perplexity that led to this post.
• Unedited Step 3 draft that I used as the starting point before rewriting.
• AI Style Guide which helps LLMs I interact with avoid sounding too “AI”

Back when I worked at Mozilla we did a lot of work on Open Badges that's still relevant over a decade later. One of the things I've always thought was a simple, but super-useful, tool was Andrew Hayward's Badge Studio.

The original Badge Studio uses the Mozilla branding, making it easy to stay within the brand guidelines for community, Mozilla-wide, or team/product badges. Although it's now out of date, at the time, that kind of constraint made it incredibly useful to quickly create the visual element of Open Badges.

Andrew maintained the code in a GitHub repository, so for years I've wanted to strip out the Mozilla branding, update the codebase, and add a 'randomise' button to make it more playful. Thankfully, due to my new-found superpowers with Claude Code, I've done just that.

Give it a go:

🔗 dynamicskillset.com/badge-studio

🧑‍💻 github.com/dynamicskillset/badge-studio

What Badge Studio is good for

As a simple, client-side badge generator running entirely in the browser, it's an easy way to tweak some colours and settings (or hit randomise if you like) and get a downloadable badge image in PNG and SVG formats. These can be used with Open Badges – or anywhere you need a recognition marker.

I think this is helpful in three ways:

• Keeps badge design light, so you do not need design software, a brand team, or a lengthy review cycle just to prototype a new badge. I'll be using this for the Digital Badges Proof of Concept project I'm working on up in Scotland.
• Supports rapid iteration, meaning you can sketch a pathway of badges and adjust visuals until they feel coherent.
• Lowers the barrier for experimentation, so educators, community organisers, and project teams can try new ideas around recognition ideas without committing to a full-blown credentialing platform.

Try it, reuse it, or fork it

If you issue, or are thinking about issuing badges, think about using Badge Studio as a lightweight badge design approach before you commit to anything. Alternatively, you could fork the codebase, add your brand colours, icons, or whatever else you want.

Some next steps:

• Give it a try, tell me what you think. Do you like the 'random' button?
• Remix it, show me what you've done with it
• Hire me so we can work on these kinds of things together 🙂

I'm considering a version which helps build out radar-plot style badges, as I suggested recently. Ideally, this would be done programmatically in response to evidence, but there's no reason why they can't be built in a dedicated tool and issued manually to begin with.

The work of mission-driven organisations is complex, but it can be difficult to talk about that complexity. It's easy to feel, but not necessarily see. Sightlines is a new, practical response to that problem.

With the help of Claude Code, I've built three simple tools for thinking more clearly about complex situations. Each tool takes around five minutes to go through, and they can be used in sequence. You can try the full journey or start with a specific tool at dynamicskillset.com/sightlines.

Before you pop over there and get cracking, just a note to say that Sightlines is best experienced on a laptop or desktop, as the diagrams need space to build. In other words, it does not (currently) work as well on a smartphone-sized screen.

The three tools

1. Where Does Your System Begin and End?

The first tool helps you decide where to place your boundary. Before you can make sense of a complex situation, you need to decide what to focus on. For example, are you discussing:

• A team within your organisation?
• The way several teams interact?
• Your whole organisation?
• The ecosystem within which your organisation operates?
• Something else?

Knowing what's out of scope for the 'system' that you're discussing is a basic but important step when starting to develop systems thinking skills.

The example shows a grant-funded programme, with service delivery, partnerships,
and staff capacity sitting inside the boundary, and funders, local media, and
statutory services sitting outside – but still shaping what happens within.

2. Who Else Is in the Room?

Complex situations usually involve several groups of people with multiple perspectives and diverse sets of interests. The second tool therefore invites you to identify the key stakeholders in your situation:

• Who are they?
• What do they want?
• What are they keen to avoid?

That last question is particularly important, as it's easy to list what people want but being explicit about what they're trying to avoid helps open up more honest conversations.

The example shows a planning process for an annual review which maps out trustees,
funders, staff, and participants, each with their own 'wants' and things to 'avoid'.

(Note: this is probably the tool that still requires a bit of UX work)

3. How Does It All Connect?

The third tool is about feedback loops based on the connections between important elements of your situation. These loops are often where interesting dynamics live. These loops can be reinforcing, meaning they exacerbate problems over time, or balancing, meaning they push back towards stability.

The example shows the challenges around volunteer recruitment, showing how reputation, quality, capacity, and demand all feed into each other.

How you might use Sightlines

These are intended to be light, introductory tools. You do not need any background in systems thinking techniques or terminology to use them, as the prompts guide you through each step.

You might want to use Sightlines:

• On your own, to think through a project that feels stuck or hard to describe.
• With a colleague, as a prompt for a conversation about why you are seeing a
  situation differently.
• With a small team, as a short activity in a meeting or planning session.

The outputs from these tools aren't meant to be shiny, finished articles. They're intended to be works-in-progress to help make your thinking visible and give you something tangible to discuss.

Where this comes from

I run a consultancy called Dynamic Skillset through which I help mission-driven organisations deal with complexity. After my postgraduate studies in Systems Thinking in Practice, I've been thinking about ways to make that kind of thinking accessible to the organisations with which I work.

Sightlines is an attempt at that.

The tools draw on a three-part series I wrote on systems thinking for We Are Open
Co-op. You can still read those posts here (I've added an archive link as WAO is closing soon):

• Part 1: Three Key Principles (archive link)
• Part 2: Understanding Feedback Loops (archive link)
• Part 3: Identifying leverage points (archive link)

For those willing to help improve Sightlines, it's an open source project.

Remember: this is v0.1

Sightlines works and I would happily use versions of these tools with clients already. However, I've called this v0.1 for a reason: there are things I want to improve,
including drag-and-drop functionality, and I plan to iterate as I learn from how people use it.

What would help me most right now is knowing whether Sightlines is already useful
to you. Feel free to leave a comment below or email sightlines@dynamicskillset.com with your thoughts.

To get you started, here are three things I am most interested in
hearing about:

1. Is it already useful? Did working through the tools change how you think
   about your situation, or give you something concrete to share with a colleague?
2. Where did you get stuck? Were there prompts that felt unclear, or steps that
   did not quite fit your situation? Even small friction points are worth knowing about at this stage.
3. What would you add or change? If you could improve one thing about
   Sightlines for your context, what would it be?

Screenshots of your outputs are very welcome too. You are welcome to share Sightlines
with colleagues — after all, the more people try it, the faster it will improve!

Spring is really trying to get a foothold in the North East at the moment, but keeps being rebuffed by cold winds and squally rain showers.

I'm composing this on my laptop in the car as my daughter, Grace, referees a couple of football matches. We've agreed that I'll slowly withdraw from watching from the sidelines, and eventually just drop her off and pick her up. Independence training for teenagers. No football match for her yesterday as she's suffering from shin splints.

My son, Ben, was home last night inbetween lifeguarding shifts. We all had breakfast together this morning with my wife, Hannah, to celebrate Mother's Day. Flowers and cards poking gentle fun at the relationship between kids and their mums were involved. I'm going to visit my own mother later today 🙂

I've taken a migraine tablet and had a full pot of coffee this morning. I've known one was coming for the last 48 hours, but they're not as bad as these days – partly due to learning how to manage them, but also statins seem to have made a difference. (According to my GP, I don't need to be on them any more, but I've asked to stay on them for this reason.)

Writing

Here, I published:

DOUG.md

I suspect that, over time, many people will end up with some form of NAME.md that travels with them between tools. It will sit next to CVs and portfolios as part of how we present ourselves in digital work.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

When AI remembers everything and organisations forget how to choose

At the end of the day, organisational capacity is not a technology problem; it’s a leadership problem. It begins with the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about how much of what your organisation does is truly its own.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Badges that change shape to show skills development

Most digital credentials are frozen at the moment of issue, either you ‘have’ the badge or you do not. What happens when badges are just a view of recognition data?

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Meanwhile, over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

Tree Hug

This made me laugh. Entitled Tree Hug by Bulgarian street artist Vanyu Krastev. Source: Street Art Utopia

Thought Shrapnel

Ending an archaic and undemocratic principle

I’ve always been against unearned privilege and the idea of a ‘natural’ hierarchy. It’s antithetical to who I am and stand for, and I’ve felt that way ever since I can remember. A good example of this in the class-stratified UK is the House of Lords. While it’s important to have a second chamber in a democracy, the idea of it being made up of heredity peers is absolutely ridiculous.

Thought Shrapnel

US Big Tech infrastructure as “legitimate targets”

More reason to divest yourself of US-based Big Tech platforms. (Join the first TechFreedom cohort!) Iranian state-linked media this week published a list of offices and infrastructure run by American companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications. According to Al Jazeera, the companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle. Many of these companies operate regional offices, cloud infrastructure or data-centre operations across the Gulf, including in the UAE.

Thought Shrapnel

How to Create a Freelancer Dashboard

Link to video I ran a 90-minute workshop this morning, which started life as a 1:1 session. Around 10 people ended up coming, mainly from a couple of Slack channels - hence the “Hey Slackers…” intro. Below is the email I sent afterwards with all of the links, etc. I’m posting it here for reference 😀 Thanks for joining this morning’s session, or for registering if you couldn’t make it.

Thought Shrapnel

The Fifth Horseman

Five years old, but still as relevant as ever. Source: Bill Bramhall

Thought Shrapnel

How to stop thinking

I am not someone who meditates, precisely for the reason outlined in this explanation from 2015 by Ajahn Brahm. His simple approach to show you that it is possible to stop your thoughts encroaching is compelling. Source: YouTube

Thought Shrapnel

How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?

An insightful post from Max Read about stylistic preferences with regards to human vs AI text. Every relevant technology changes writing and, in turn, literate culture. In many contexts most people can (more or less) correctly differentiate between A.I.-generated output and its “authentic” counterpart–but cannot correctly attribute the output. What’s funny about this is: We actually really want to prefer human-authored writing! In open-label tests, where the excerpts are shown with attribution, people consistently express preference for whatever text is labeled human, even when the text is actually A.

Thought Shrapnel

ROOTS: Return Old Online Things to your own Site

Whatever you call it, having everything in space you control has always made sense. Why am I doing all this? Because I got inspired by the concept of POSSE: “Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere.” For me, ROOTS is the logical first step toward that: “Return Old Online Things to your own Site” (yes, I made this up). Why? If I do decide to delete my X account or if Blogger gets quietly discontinued, then I don’t care: it’s all on my site already.

Thought Shrapnel

Reading & Listening

I finished Ian Rankin's Exit Music yesterday and started re-reading The Castle by Franz Kafka. It doesn't sound like it would be an enjoyable read, but it's so atmospheric:

The Castle [...] is the last novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1926. In it, a protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Graf Westwest.

Kafka died before he could finish the work and the novel was posthumously published against his wishes. Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal.

I'm still (slowly) re-reading and highlighting Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile. I didn't listen to podcasts this week but instead listened to a lot of new (to me) music. I'm particularly enjoying Bad Bunny's back catalogue, although my Duolingo Level 50 Spanish skills aren't much use for understanding what he's on about 😅

I do love my music, and have been a heavy Spotify user since 2009 when I sold pretty much my entire CD collection. This year, though, I've realised that, while not technically Big Tech, it's still something that is worth divesting from. So I've been curating my MP3 collecting using the excellent Plex. In particular, Plexamp is a work of art.

Working

Laura was back this week, and INASP accepted WAO's tweaks to the contract, so we started work on that project. More on that after the kick-off meeting tomorrow. We did a minimal amount on the Amnesty International UK community platform project as the Pilot is still running, and our remaining days are to evaluate that and suggest next steps.

We Are Open Co-op is closing and as part of that we've asked former member Bryan Mathers of Visual Thinkery to provide some “closing thinkery” to accompany the assets we're creating to archive our resources. All four founding members had a good chat on Thursday with some great reminiscences about the highs and lows over the last decade 🙂

I met with Nate and Tila separately about the Digital Badges Proof of Concept project. We're working as openly as possible, so you can see the kanban board to see what's involved. I'm actively looking for ways in which this PoC can lead to wider adoption in Scotland, and then the rest of the UK.

When I'm not working on client projects, blogging, or researching/reading, I'm creating new software with Claude Code. I've now got landing pages for all three projects I've developed in the last six weeks: CalAnywhere, TaskDial, and Groundwork.

A 1:1 session ended up as a 90-minute workshop for ~10 people on how to create a freelancer dashboard on Friday. Other people couldn't make it, so I created a short 'what you missed' video:

I've also set up TechFreedom to accept payment from those who want to attend the first cohort, but haven't deployed the changes to the website, as Tom and I are sorting that out early next week.

Other than that, I had interesting chats with Don Presant and Serge Ravet which led directly to my post about badges which change shape to show skills development. I also had a first-round interview for a Product Management role at Ghost, which may or may not go anywhere.

If you'd like to have a chat before I take a couple of weeks off at the end of month, find time here ☕

Personal

I'm very slowly increasing my exercise frequency so as not to exacerbate my recently-diagnosed overtraining syndrome. My body seems to be able to handle exercising every other day for 20 minutes at a time, so that's what I'm doing.

I'm spending a lot of time in front of a computer at the moment, but that's not unusual for this time of the year as there's more work to be done, and my creative juices are flowing.

All work and no play makes Doug a potentially dull conversational partner, though, so I will report that I enjoyed watching the F1 movie with Hannah and Grace, and that I've been looking at a cheeky short trip while I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks soon.

Next week

I'll be working on the three projects mentioned above, getting a new idea off the ground (teaser screenshots), and helping Ben think through what he wants to do next year. He's been talking about a working holiday in Australia, so if you've got any experience/opinions related to that, let me know!

It's been a while since I talked about Open Badges, “a type of digital badge that is verifiable, portable, and packed with information about skills and achievements.” It's something I've been interested in for 15 years at this point, and I was on Mozilla's badges team back in the day.

In this post, I want to talk about something that Kerri Lemoie mentioned a while ago, and which I was talking about with Don Presant and Serge Ravet this week. Namely, badges that change shape to show skills development. It's something I've thought about for years, ever since seeing the (now-defunct) Workshape.io website.

Let's use the image at the top of this post as well as the one above to guide our imagination. Consider a badge that isn't a fixed image: instead of something static that suggests the binary of something being completed or not, it's a polygon. The badge is a radar plot demonstrating recognition of a learner's development over time.

Let's dive in a bit further.

What badges could be

The technical standard behind Open Badges has improved enormously over the years. The latest version, Open Badges v3, uses the Verifiable Credentials data model, which is the same data model used for things like digital identity documents. This makes badges more portable, more trustworthy, and harder to fake. It also makes the badge image optional, meaning it's now a view of the data, rather than containing the data itself.

So, if the image is just a view, that view can change. We can generate it from the underlying recognition data instead of fixing it at the moment of issue. Badges become mini e-portfolios, able to show progression. They can show the journey as it is happening.

Perhaps the closest mainstream equivalent to a “changing credential” is the GitHub contribution chart. Here's mine:

This grid of green squares that fills in as you commit code has become surprisingly meaningful in developer culture – to the extent that some people write scripts just to keep it green! It's also a thin kind of credential, showing activity rather than practice. It tells the viewer nothing about collaboration, documentation, care, or context. Everything is flattened to a single dimension: were you active today?

A radar chart, as shown in the image at the top of this post, is different. It contains multiple axes, each representing a dimension of practice. The shape of the polygon determines how far someone's development has been recognised. Two people, for example, could have the same overall “size” of polygon but completely different shapes. And the shape can change over time as recognition of their learning and development is added.

What the axes could represent

In the Workshape.io example, they use 10 different types of common activities that developers perform. Things like analysis, front-end development, and code review.

Axes are not neutral, and choosing what goes on each axis is a decision that each community needs to make about what is worth recognising. Badge design is recognition culture made visible.

As well as simply adding different competencies to the axes, here are some examples of the kinds of things that could be represented on a polygonal badge, guided by Serge Ravet's excellent Recognition Practices Occupational Framework:

• Dimensions of practice – for recognition practitioners, the axes could include things like:
  • Facilitating peer recognition
  • Documenting contributions
  • Working across institutional boundaries
  • Developing recognition literacy in others
  • Advocating for non-formal recognition in formal systems.
• Modes of recognition – the axes could also help distinguish different types of recognition. This is a great way of differentiating between someone who is highly regarded by their peers but invisible to formal systems vs. someone with all of the credentials but no presence in relevant communities.
  • Informal recognition (e.g. a thank-you, a citation, an invitation)
  • Semi-formal recognition (e.g .a community badge, a peer-validated portfolio)
  • Formal recognition (an accreditation, a licence)
• Levels of context — the badge axes could show at what scale someone's knowledge, skills, or dispositions have been recognised:
  • Micro (individuals and small groups)
  • Meso (organisations and communities)
  • Macro (sectors and public policy)

These, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Someone with better design skills than me might be able to layer multiple polygons on the same grid. The result would be more like a map than a medal.

Next steps

I've got more to say on this, but I'll leave it there for today. Just a quick note on the technical side: I think this is the easy part. The Open Badges specification allows for SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) which is actually a text-based image format. So a radar chart in SVG is just a polygon where the vertices are calculated from a set of numbers.

This means that an issuing platform or wallet could generate the image directly from the credential data, and regenerate it whenever new recognition data is added. SVG's are super-accessible as well, as they can carry with them alternative text descriptions and structured metadata. So the polygonal badges can be read by humans and machines alike.

I'm working with Skills Development Scotland, the Awards Network, and Nate Otto from Skybridge Skills to develop a proof of concept for a national badging system. I'd love to build on that with some innovative work around what visual progression looks like for learners.

Sadly, the microcredential model still dominates policy conversations. Last year, I co-authored a report for Ireland's National Digital Leadership Network, arguing that we can do a much better job than we're currently doing around skills recognition.

So, if this is the kind of thing you'd like to work on, please do get in touch. I think we're missing the willingness to treat badge design as a genuine design problem. It involves communities, values, governance, and aesthetics. It's not just a technical checkbox.

And finally, the question I've been asking myself and which I'll ask you, dear reader: what would you put on the axes of your own radar badge?

This is the third in a series of posts using stories from Jorge Luis Borges' collection Labyrinths to examine how AI is reshaping decision-making in mission-driven organisations. My first post explored how AI systems become inescapable in The (AI) lottery is already running. The second looked at how they can narrow our choices before we know we are choosing in When AI tools give you choices. This third post comes at things from a different angle: what happens when the tools give us everything we asked for – and it turns out that everything is... too much?

From from 1917 to 1983, architect, systems theorist, and inventor Buckminster Fuller kept a diary he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. It was an obsessive record of his life:

Fuller's Chronofile contains over 140,000 pieces of paper, as well as 64,000 feet of film, 1,500 hours of audio tape, and 300 hours of video recordings. The Chronofile is cross-referenced alphabetically using 13,500 5x8 inch index cards. Photos from Fuller's childhood from age four were added retrospectively.

It was his attempt to capture a life in its full detail, to make what we would call today a searchable “external memory.”

Most mission-driven organisations have something akin to a Dymaxion Chronofile: email archives, CRM systems, analytics dashboards, shared documents, and video conference recordings. These days, AI tools often augment these systems, ready to retrieve any fragment on demand and to summarise whatever they find. It can feel like warp-speed-like progress: nothing disappears and everything can be brought back into view.

We might think that perfect recall is an amazing gift or something to try and achieve. The experience of people with Hyperthymesia would suggest otherwise. It's a rare condition in which people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in exhaustive detail. It's important to note that they do not experience this as superpower, but as distracting, intrusive, and tiring.

It turns out that forgetting is how humans function. We don't only store information, but compress it, reinterpret it, and let things fade into the background so that we can act now, in this situation or context, and with this set of priorities.

The same is true for organisations. There's a difference between being able to recall everything and being able to decide what to do next. AI tools might promise to make our institutional memories searchable and analysable at scale, but the risk is that we confuse accessibility with usefulness.

The cost of remembering everything

In Borges' story Funes the Memorious, the protagonist falls from a horse and acquires a perfect memory. He remembers everything. Every leaf on every tree he has ever seen, individually and in every configuration of light. Every word of every conversation. Every sensation of every moment. His recall is total, instantaneous, and flawless.

It absolutely destroys him.

Why? Funes cannot generalise. He can't abstract. He cannot, in any meaningful sense, think. As Borges writes: “To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details.” His mind becomes like a hard drive full of uncompressed movies, storing every pixel of every frame but never producing a summary.

The story is usually read as a parable about the limits of memory. But it's perhaps more usefully read as a parable about the limits of information. Funes does not lack data; he is drowning in it. In many ways, drowning in data is a worse problem than lacking it, because it disguises itself as competence.

When you can recall every fact, it is easy to mistake recall for insight, like a student who crams for the exam, but then has no idea what to do with that information in real life. ​

The limits of dashboards

As I explained in the second post in this series, there's a difference between choice (selecting from options presented to you) and agency (shaping which options exist in the first place).

Likewise, there is a useful distinction to be drawn between legibility and significance:

• Legibility means that something is capturable as data. So, for example, website traffic, programme completion rates, or social media engagement levels. The kinds of things that can be counted, tracked, graphed, and benchmarked.
• Significance means how important that data is in terms of actually mattering as to an organisation's mission. Sometimes legibility and significance overlap, but often they don't and are pulling in different directions.

The most significant things an organisation does, such as building communities, doing advocacy work to change how people think about an issue, or creating the conditions for systemic change, are frequently the least legible. They're difficult to quantify not because they're “vague” but because they're complex. It's difficult to put a single number on complexity.

For example, a youth charity could find it very easy to tell their board how many workshop sessions they delivered within a financial year and how many young people attended. But it's much harder to figure out the significance of that: Do those young people now feel more able to challenge injustice? Are they more likely to seek support when they need it?

We know that AI systems are biased towards the legible. They're very good at identifying patterns in data that exists, but blind to things that haven't be measured – or couldn't be measured. So the danger is that sophisticated AI analysis starts pulling organisations even more towards optimising for what is measurable rather than what is meaningful.

Look, nobody sits down with the aim to replace significance with legibility. The shift looks and feels more like erosion. The tools make legibility easy and satisfying, so significance ends up getting crowded out.

Over time, programmes with tidy metrics start to look more “effective” than programmes with messy but profound outcomes. If they're not careful, mission-driven organisations might find a new CEO comes in and starts moving resources away from programme producing transformative but hard-to-measure results, and towards a programme that produces modest but “dashboardable” outputs.

AI tools can make it all too easy to prioritise legibility over significance.

Identical, but not the same

Borges wrote another story that illuminates this from a different angle. In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a 20th-century writer produces a text that is word-for-word identical to Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He achieve this not by copying it, but by arriving at the same words through an entirely different process. Borges argues that the two identical texts mean completely different things because of the different contexts in which they were produced.

I would agree.

Context matters when it comes to AI-generated analysis. A recommendation emerging from deep organisational knowledge, contextual judgement, and hard-won experience may indeed look the same as a recommendation generated by an AI model processing the same data. The words in the recommendation could even be identical – e.g. “Focus on community engagement and donor stewardship to enhance relationships and increase contributions.”

But they're not the same recommendation. The process matters – not because process is in and of itself “sacred” – but because the capacity to generate the recommendation is a form of organisational intelligence. This capacity contains tacit knowledge, relationships, institutional memory, and a feel for risk that does not fit neatly into a prompt. Outsourcing that capacity means that the organisation becomes dependent on a tool that might be able to produce the output but can't reproduce the understanding that once lay behind it.

The case for strategic forgetting

Going back to the story of Funes the Memorious, his tragedy is that he can't forget. Everything is equally present, equally weighted, equally demanding of attention. He has no hierarchy of relevance, no framework for deciding what matters and what does not. He has, in a sense, infinite data and zero judgement.

The antidote to this isn't ignorance but what could be called strategic forgetting: a deliberate, principled practice of ignoring, or setting aside, information. Organisations might decide to do this not because the information is false, but because attending to it does not serve the organisation’s purpose at this moment.

To be clear, this is not an argument against evidence-based decision-making. Rather, it's an argument about what evidence-based decision-making actually requires. Organisations need not just evidence itself, but a framework for relevance, a prior understanding of what they are trying to achieve.

Without this kind of framework, more data just becomes more noise. AI tools, which excel at producing more data, can easily become “noise machines” if the organisation lacks the judgement to direct them.​

It's my belief that the organisations that will use AI most effectively are not the ones that generate the most analysis. Instead, the most effective ones will be those that can take a comprehensive AI-generated report and say with confidence that they'll act on two of the findings and set the rest aside.

The judgement is the thing that can't be automated. It's the product of mission clarity, institutional memory, contextual understanding – and the courage to be selective in an environment that rewards comprehensiveness.

What we've learned from this series

Beginning with a question about perception, the first post in this series asked: do you know you are inside a system? I explored how AI tools move from “optional” to “inescapable” and how governance mechanisms can accumulate without producing accountability.

The second post asked: can you see what the system is hiding from you? We examined how AI tools narrow the space of choices before the decision-maker arrives – and what it takes to recover awareness of the paths that were closed.

This post asks: can you still think clearly inside the system? I've argued that more data does not produce better decisions unless it is paired with the judgement to determine what matters. AI tools can erode that judgement even as they multiply the information available.

These three questions form a sequence:

1. You can't recover your choices if you do not know you are inside a system.
2. You can't think clearly about your choices if you're unable see them.
3. Seeing them is not enough if you are overwhelmed by everything else the system shows you.

Borges spent his career writing about systems that are beautiful, total, and quietly inhuman: libraries, lotteries, infinite gardens, perfect memories. In each case, the system works exactly as designed, yet the humans inside it are diminished. The organisations that will cope best with AI are not the ones that adopt the most tools or generate the most data. They're the ones that retain the capacity to step back from the system, and ask whether it's serving their purpose.

At the end of the day, organisational capacity is not a technology problem; it's a leadership problem. It begins with the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about how much of what your organisation does is truly its own.