Here are 3 things from this week.
Always learning
On Thursday I spoke at a #YouEqualTech event in Birmingham, the discussions focused on diversity and inclusion.
Becky Pauley spoke about her experiences of changing career to become a software engineer, and her onboarding experience at JetStack. She shared her experience with User Manuals (something we’ve introduced at Substrakt to positive effect).
Becky also spoke about consent-based decision-making, which was a new idea to me.
Instead of the more widespread consensus-based decision-making, consent-based decisions embrace the idea of ‘safe enough’ decisions to achieve rapid progress.
Rather than getting everyone to agree, consent-based decision-making only stops when someone actively disagrees. It felt like an interesting idea and one I’m going to explore further.
Metaverse
The idea of the metaverse seems to be, in commercial terms at least, somewhat in the doldrums at the moment.
However I don’t think this conversation is going to go away any time soon, there’s simply too money invested.
But I still don’t think everyone means the same thing when they talk about a (or the) metaverse.
This article from Benedict Evans (subscribe to his newsletter if you don’t alrleady) is a smart and insightful reflection on this problem, exploring what people might mean by ‘the metaverse’, the direction of travel, and a potential timeline before it becomes something we all need to engage with (and, indeed, whether that will ever happen or not).
Mixed media
I’ve started producing edited transcripts of the podcast conversations I have. The first of these, with the V&A’s Kati Price, went up last week.
It turns out it takes a pretty enormous amount of time to do this (never underestimate the amount of work implied when you see ‘this interview has been edited for clarity’, a raw transcript is often fairly difficult to follow), but I’m pleased that we can make these conversations available to more people by doing this.
I’ve already had feedback from folks who have said they don’t have the time or inclination to listen to a podcast, but can (and will) make time to read through an article.
As ever, making something more accessible has benefits beyond the obvious.
The second transcript (from a chat with the National Theatre’s Nicholas Triantafyllou) will be online shortly.
