Ways of working
🔊 Monday was International Women's Day. Sit down, shut up and pass it on by Ella Fitzsimmons tells men in the tech industry to pass opportunities on to women. “Sacrifice your own privilege, your industry profile... Be brave enough to disrupt your own industry, your own culture. Put your money where your tweets are.” Written in 2015 but still relevant (though thankfully more frequently heeded).
💰 MHCLG is testing a more flexible funding model for the Local Digital Fund because “project momentum and continuity are key ingredients for success.” Fund teams not projects.
📊 Data scientists at Wellcome wanted to make better use of open-source tools so Hetco Design created a visual system that indicated how open and how robust a piece of software is. Here’s Hetco’s quant-qual approach to creating data visualisations. Also, it won Best use of data at the Design Week awards.
And speaking of data visualisation, here’s how to write alt text for it. Spoiler: you probably can’t convey the whole meaning. But, as Amy Cesal says “that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.”
❤️ In the past year, communities of practice (COP) have been more important than ever for many teams. ‘Alone but not apart’ etc. Interesting to read this paper about the typical lifecycle of online communities, and this post from 2017 about the 4 stages of online community development: 1. Inception 2. Establishment 3. Maturity 4. Mitosis (or death). According to the definitions of the stages, this Delivery COP went from dead to maturity during the past year.
💤 This piece is a decent attempt to pin down what contributes to the condition known as ‘Zoom fatigue’. TL;DR, limited movement, looking at yourself all day, high cognitive load, looking into colleagues’ eyes frequently. Actionable? Turn off that camera. |