Weeknotes #16

Going in reverse this week.

  • A solid couple of days work on the dissertation – grounded analysis of interviews and first draft of the introductory sections. This will be the mainstay of my life for the next 18 days.
  • Saw an incredible one-person play, A Generous Lover, at the Camden People’s Theatre by La John Joseph. A real triumph of humour, storytelling, sound design and music. A must-see. Which also reminded me to work harder to beg/steal/borrow tickets for Burgerz again at Southbank Centre)
  • Spending a lot of time looking at rehearsal planning, warm-up techniques and the like for the Barberfellas. Five new songs to learn in the coming months (three of which I need to arrange)
  • Four days working at Mozart and one at Britten this week, plus a call with Sibelius and a draft proposal for Copland.
  • I’ve rejoined the Pink Singers this season and, well, it doesn’t half make me glad. Short rehearsal on Sunday and a lovely cycle in the autumn sunshine were both extremely restorative.
  • Restarted a fitness programme although so far I’ve not managed to make it to the gym because there’s so much on. Food habits are beginning to change again. Will hopefully get a couple of short sessions in this weekend. Needs must.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #15

Work

Initial engagement with Britten is wrapping up with a view to a bit more down the line, so I’m tying string around the packages I’ve left here and reflecting on what I’ve learned from this new type of endeavour. It’s a great team to work with, but it lives inside a large, complex organisation with some fundamental challenges in how it communicates its strategy; with quite siloed development and delivery teams. It’s exciting to see new ideas I’ve implemented take root to tackle some of these anti-patterns of good working practice. Time will tell if they are successful but already seeing some positive signs.

Play

First-time visitors from California to London staying this week, C & T. Wisely we held off planning anything too strenuous for the first couple of days as they were both entirely jet lagged after two days spent with family en-route in Ireland.

Study

Conducted my final interviews for the dissertation this week – and had some useful reflective conversations by chance with some burner friends which really helped me concrete the arc of the narrative. I didn’t expect inspiration to come from post-dinner chat but this serves as further proof that bouncing ideas off others is the way forward.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #14

Late weeknotes, from Spain.

Had a birthday – with a giant cake, lots of amazing music, friends and sweltering temperatures.

Work

Perhaps it’s the back-to-school time of year but the inbox has been busy to put it mildly in the last couple of weeks. A proposed continuation with Britten, a reignited lead in Copland and a go-ahead with an old proposal for Sibelius. And a bit of forward planning for sessions with Mozart in a couple of weeks. Now to plot all the leads onto the calendar.

Interviews for my MBA have made me realised how little I communicate what’s happening with my business, and the sort of work I’m after, to my network. This is pretty fundamental to entrepreneurs so something I can swiftly improve on – once the study is complete…

Study

Big focus of this week. I now have a dissertation document underway and a skeleton of what I need to include in it. My last research interviews are wrapping up this week and early next. I’ve learned an awful lot in the process of them and the process of sense-making and trying out new things is ongoing. Drafting continues over this week and next, ramping up big time in late September.

Life

Enjoyed a couple of days spent exploring Valencia and now eating lovely food, writing and sleeping near Javea. There are lots of croquetas. I also went for my first run in about three years (of approximately 5k). The exercise I’ve been doing over the summer means this wasn’t aerobically a challenge and, crucially, I did not experience substantial plantar fascia pain which is a very exciting development. I may try another, carefully, to see if this was a fluke.

The world

Politics continues to be entirely chaotic and I can’t really keep my eye off it. General election in October/November? Oof.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #13

Photo: Hsien Chew

A very full week with Britten, with a heavy focus on roadmap building, and nurturing cross-team community.

Around this I’ve been sneaking in research interviews for the MBA – these have been fairly instructive so far and my reflections on them have already flowed to many pages. Much more to do here over the coming couple of weeks, before getting into dissertation writing mode in earnest in mid September.

At the weekend, a visit to Cardiff for the biennial Hand in Hand LGBT+ choral festival. The Pink Singers organised the first of these back in 2013 (and I was privileged to help with the organisation). It’s grown in stature considerably since – growing from 400 singers back then to 1,000 now, and representation from over 30 choirs from all around the UK and Ireland.

For me it was a reminder of the impact that these positive queer communities can have (even the BBC took notice). Each choir grows from strength to strength each year, amassing new members and taking on more ambitious and varied performance opportunities. This can only be a good thing for acceptance in society more generally and it’s great to be a small part of it.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #12

These are hectic times indeed. Every minute of the diary is allocated until October 9th (final submission date for masters) so weeknotes might be a little more brief until then.

Work

Plenty going on between Britten and Mozart – lots of context switching, multi-tasking and the potential for longer-term initiatives. Thinking a lot about roadmaps and prioritisation in non-commercial settings and for service teams. Thinking about how to organise innovation work. Reflecting on how great communities come about in large teams. Lots of good stuff.

Study

Lots here too. Attended my (hopefully) final tutorial day, which focussed on the final assessment for the course, and got underway with research interviews which have proved more enlightening than I could have hoped for on a couple of levels. These will continue through August before I start writing up in earnest.

Play

Spent about 36 hours of family time in Wales (despite the unseasonal August wind and rain), a glorious two hours with this podcast about one of my favourite art groups, the Flaming Lotus Girls, and lovely catch up with former work folks Vic and Chris for a reminisce about old (work) times, plotting future adventures, reflecting on loss. Good for the soul.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #11

Travis Alabanza in Burgerz, Photo: Lara Cappelli

Late weeknotes: every spare minute is full right now – must try and make sure time is spared for this in the coming seven or eight weeks.

Work

I’m at capacity for the next few weeks between Britten and Mozart. Good progress happening with both – but culturally couldn’t be more different. Making context switching very, very interesting.

Play

Snuck a few days at the Edinburgh festival seeing amazingly talented friends Scottee, Harry, Ginger, Jayde, Travis all producing wonderfully powerful work that left us speechless. Also saw some stand-up, glee-style radness, and got to gad around Edinburgh in mostly sunshine (unusual) and eat incredible food lovingly cooked by Pino and Peter, and longed after by Daisy dawg. A little spa session was well-timed, and some bao and gyoza at Lucky Yu were a culinary treat. Next year I want to go for a week.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #10

A really hectic but fun week:

  • I’m three quarters through a 10-week programme of exercise / sensible eating to lose 4kg. More on this sometime in the future, but so far I’ve lost 3kg so I’m pretty happy with how it’s going, and I’ve got way more energy. Mostly writing this for future reference: this stuff is not rocket science and it works.
  • Started in earnest working with Britten: getting to know the lay of the land. One of the more complex set of stakeholder relationships to unpick and figure out, but it’s a fun challenge.
  • Shenanigans renewing my British Library readers’ pass, followed by a lot of reading on research ethics and approaches, and designing a programme of interviews & surveys that I’ll be running in the coming weeks for my masters dissertation
  • Babysitting in a heatwave, which involved painting, naps, and playgrounds where the slides were a bit too hot to go on
  • Cycling around when it is simultaneously 37 degrees and thundering. Drenched midway, dry by the time I got home. WTF, London?
  • Watching politics move from dumb to dumber
  • Finally got to see Mag in the City Academy singers’ concert, Human. They are a great group, led by impressive and charismatic conductor and arranger Eamonn O’Dwyer
  • A quite special fundraising gig with the Barberfellas in support of ELOP at Waltham Forest Pride at the very friendly Wild Card brewery. Lots of great other queer acts and friends were performing, including Belt Up, Sophie of Colours and Sparks and Iron and Sparks. Technical reflections on the performance: having a really good mic setup and good foldback really helped us achieve solid intonation and blending despite being slightly unbalanced (3 basses / 1 bari / 2 leads / 2 tenors).

AND, the courgettes are starting to be harvested. They look like triffids. Tasty, tasty triffids.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #9

FaceAche

Been thinking about FaceApp, the app that’s been around for ages and transforms faces in a variety of ‘hilarious’ ways.

I already know what I’ll look like in 10 or 20 years: a sort of pasty version of Ned Flanders. But even so, I can understand the temptation to satisfy the curiosity of trying the app out, whatever the motivation. How well does the tech work? How realistic is it? Will we turn into our parents after all? I get it. I’ve used the cat filters in Hangouts and Snapchat and whatnot. They are fun!

And of course, pictures of us are, scrape-able. It’s hard to keep our images off the internet. Even my mum knows that – in 2016 she told someone she was ‘on Facebook’ even though she didn’t have an account. Her face was on there – that was enough for her. Although we laughed at the time, she was totally right! And if someone wanted to put her through FaceApp, they’d just need to find her picture on the service.

So the pictures themselves are kindof uninteresting, but what about the intent? What do our actions reveal about us? What does it mean to be a person who voluntarily uses FaceApp? Does it mean you’re suggestible? Likely to share? Is that information useful? Of course. But to whom? When? How? How much is that information worth?

It’s this kind of metadata that, combined with other seemingly insensitive bits of our digital footprints, can identify us and then be used for all kinds of mischief – even if the original data was anonymised (highlighted by this cheery 2018 paper by UCL & The Alan Turing Institute).

Levels of public literacy around this stuff are pretty low in society (celebrities and influencers in particular) which is one of the reasons I support the Open Rights Group. Primarily I follow their work to keep myself abreast of the issues, but I also support them to effectively educate and lobby our government to keep corporates in check – sensibly – on these issues, in order to protect our human rights. Coincidentally I went along to my first ORGCon last week and came away with quite a long reading list from the talks and debates.

We’re not creepy, honest (Screengrab of apple.com/uk/privacy, July ’19)

Apple in particular are making data security one of their key brand messages at the moment, realising that user data and metadata is at the same time one of their most valuable assets and their customers’ biggest concerns. But are their current mobile operating system APIs dealing with permissions in a sophisticated enough way? Apparently not. But I hope they are moving in the right direction.

For the next generation, whose entire lives will have been put online, sometimes by their parents, trying to control their digital footprint will be a near impossible challenge. FaceApp adds just another tiny vector to that. I’m really glad that the BBC has put together a simple kid-friendly guide to this stuff called Own It, although I must admit I’ve not noticed its promotion when I’ve been using other BBC services (which I do extensively).

Developing responsibly

In a timely development at this week’s Agile In The Ether, a monthly remote meet up for agile nerds, Emily Webber introduced a concept she’s been working on with doteveryone: consequence scanning. It’s a new event that sits in an agile cadence (e.g. within the fortnightly sprint cycle) and can be used by teams developing software to understand the positive and negative consequences of the things they are putting into the world. I look forward to putting it into practice sometime soon.

If initiatives like this become mainstream then at least accidentally well-intentioned tech could become less likely to be harnessed against us, so long as the players are not inherently of bad intent.

*

More squawking

Talking of bad intent, this summer there’s a nest of seagulls on the building opposite my house [METADATA!] and the birds are NEVER QUIET. They have even started swooping after people in the street. The nearest coast is miles away, but it apparently doesn’t matter – urban gull populations were up four fold according to research carried out in 2015.

After some basic research I am making owl masks to scare them away and to restore sleepfulness.

Blocking client work

Work-wise; a full week with Mozart this week, with a couple of other bits and bobs thrown in for fun. It was nice to focus almost exclusively for once –most of the time I’m context switching furiously (which will be the regular pattern again shortly).

Always be arranging

I put together two more choral arrangements this week which are in decent draft shape. Getting pretty quick with Avid’s music editor Sibelius now that I’ve done about 20 of ’em. Score editors have such a steep learning curve I’m not sure I could bear to switch.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #8

Work is ramping up. First full day with Britten this week, learning about what’s needed and the lay of the land, before things start proper next week. Full week of Mozart coming up this week. Busy times. MBA work will be filling every gap in between.

I spent a little time arranging Rag n’ Bone man’s Human for SATB and body percussion for the upcoming Pink Singers season that starts in September. I’m enjoying exploring the crunchy blues chords, and my inner drama queen is relishing the unashamed gospel nods too, with a few 7 or 8-part chords making their presence known.

In gentler news, my courgette plants have taken over everything else in the garden (perhaps in hindsight planting one would have been enough). I have a growing pot of raspberries in the freezer that I hope to turn into ice cream. A restaurant we love, Great Queen Street, closed last week citing increasing rent. It’s the story of so many smaller venues, shops and restaurants – another future victory for corporate monoculture.

After a ton of travel earlier in the year, a few new travel plans are reaching fruition in September & October, so a lot of careful diary planning is in order to make everything work.

Published
Category is: Weeknotes

Weeknotes #7

Long ones this week. Weekramble.

On Pride in London

Pride march days are ones in which I feel utterly able to be myself. I can hold my partner’s hand in public, dance around, and feel safe. Waves of endorphins sweep over me.

These feelings last! They spur me on to do a lot of the activism I do (at work and in my spare time). I’ve chased these feelings at prides in other cities including Reykjavik, Taipei, Mumbai and Sydney, each of which feels wildly different. I know pride marches aren’t for everybody (loud, crowded, asthma-triggering, exhausting things) but I love them.

I’ve attended the Pride in London parade for many of the years I’ve lived in this city. It’s a huge event of 30,000 participants and over 1m visitors, run almost entirely by volunteers and with a sizeable impact. But it’s come in for a lot of criticism in recent times, some of which is fair.

In 2012 the previous organisers were pilloried for its financial collapse. Although it’s difficult to analyse the financial affairs of Pride London and Pride in London productions (the companies behind the previous organisers), the most recent filed accounts by the new company behind Pride (London Community LGBT Pride CIC) suggest they are running a tight ship financially – managing income and costs to achieve 1-2% profit in both 2016 and 2017 (accounts here).

In 2018, the march was disrupted by anti-trans protesters, and Stonewall UK declined to march citing a lack of diversity – something the Pride in London organisers have taken on board and pledged to address in 2019 as a strategic priority (see impact report, p5) – we shall see. Stonewall are back in the fold this year, in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the riots.

This year, I’ve noticed three themes of criticism emerging already: size, cost, and what I’ll call ‘superficiality’. Obviously the three are interrelated but I’m separating them here to reflect on.

On size:

In its impact report from 2018, Pride states that it has prioritised increasing the number of groups represented, over increasing the number of places. In my experience as a member of the Pink Singers, this has resulted in the number of allocated wristbands being significantly less than the number that would like to participate. This seems to have happened to most groups. Whilst this is understandable, doing this without prior warning causes logistical issues but in some cases actual distress for those involved. Being denied the endorphin rush I waxed somewhat lyrically about in the first paragraph is particularly difficult for LGBT+ people who are more likely to suffer from poor mental health.

On cost:

Some groups have decided not to participate (e.g. Push The Button) complaining that fees for small businesses to march are prohibitive (in Manchester, it’s fees for attendees that raise eyebrows).

I think it’s fair that all groups pay to be part of the parade – even the non-profits. Part of feeling safe is not worrying about traffic running you down (Mumbai Pride was an interesting experience in this regard), and ensuring the event is appropriately secure and well run. Every group ought to make a some (however small) contribution to recognise that, and even charitable organisations can plan their activities such that they can cover these small costs.

And I agree that the robin hood principle should apply and the fee structure for marching groups at Pride in London could be reviewed such that marching fees explicitly place more of the financial burden of running the Pride event on larger companies’ shoulders. However, a huge £650,000 of Pride in London’s ~£1m income already comes from corporate sponsorship. So it could be argued that Pride are already making corporates subsidise community groups and small businesses (indeed, many think this has already been taken too far).

I also think the distinction between charitable organisations and small business that Pride currently has is fair and should be respected. Charities and community groups are meant to be non-profit. Charities have objects and publish income statements and impact statements as part of their annual return. They have to qualify and quantify the impact of the community work they do. Companies, on the other hand, have no such obligations to carry out community work (although many do for CSR reasons) and it is well within the gift of most organisations to figure out and plan for how to make £500 for this kind of event happen, especially ones that generate a profit to their shareholders.

On superficiality:

Harry Gay from the wonderful LGBTIQ Outside project highlighted that Pride in London had asked the group to make sure their bus of homeless pride participants was ‘visibly nice‘. To my mind, this is about as far away from the roots of the pride movement as you can get. You don’t have to be decked out to the nines to be proud, and Pride shouldn’t be enforcing this kind of behaviour.

How Pride can make change happen

Perhaps it is the failed financial legacy of the previous organisers, or perhaps the organisational culture, or just the sheer operational complexity of planning an event that quite literally shuts down the centre of a major city, that prevents Pride rapidly innovating to address the cost & size issues – e.g. moving the parade to a new route or increasing the length of time to grow numbers; changing the fee structure for participating groups, etc. Although Pride in London is about much more than parade day, I can see how challenging it must be to address these parade issues when this happens only annually.

But the idea that Pride should be all glitter and rainbows is dumb and exclusionary. It’s a protest, a visible reminder of the scale, breadth and diversity of a huge community.

One thing is for sure: all of these half-formed reflections make me want to better understand and get involved to help Pride in London figure out a way through them.

On two-way communication:

I hit my tolerance limit this week for communicating with people one-way. Wanna tell me what’s happening to you? Great. Fine. But ask how I am once in a while too.

In regular life and work:

Glastonbury was even more awesome than ever before, resulting in an even larger post-Glastonbury lurgy (it always happens – this week in the form of a giant throat infection). As a result, a quiet week, in which a potential new client Sibelius went on holiday for a few weeks, leaving an August gap that made me slightly anxious for a couple of days before it got rapidly filled by a new client Britten with a little bit of Mozart work intertwined [obviously all my clients aren’t dead composers]. All in all, it’s going to be a packed couple of months until early October when my final masters assignment is due.

I was invited to be a godparent (again) to a new human which is an incredible privilege and I’m looking forward to being a corrupting influence on baby Heston.

Baked my first sourdough loaf from a starter Luke gave me (which I have named Bob) and wow, it was delicious. Needed a longer second prove (ended up a little flat), but I am a bread-making convert. Cheap and tasty = the best.