mistergough.com2024-03-13T12:12:35+00:00http://mistergough.com/mistergough.comThe End and the Beginning2021-10-04T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2021/10/04/the-end-and-the-beginning<p>My youngest daughter started school today, aged 13. Both of my children now go to school so, in many ways, our unschooling journey is at an end.</p>
<p>I guess unschooling doesn’t strictly mean not going to school: unschooling is about being learner-led. Going to school was a choice for both children. They’re equally free to stop if they want. Of course it’s a stretch to equate this choice with true unschooling. There are rules that must be followed, things that must be done.</p>
<p>But I hope that, at the very least, the years my children have spent living with the freedom to choose might perhaps give them a perspective on school that most children don’t have, that I didn’t have.</p>
<p>Maybe the most interesting thing about that perspective is the ability to see school as a service: school can provide them with new groups of friends, different things to learn, different ways to learn them, and qualifications. If school doesn’t provide these things or if it fails to provide a worthwhile experience in pursuit of these things then maybe they’ll rethink their choices.</p>
<p>Everyone learns differently – this was always one of the realities that underpinned our decision to unschool. In an ideal world everyone would have the freedom to build their own education: school might provide something, friend groups another, time at home something else. There are so many ways to learn.</p>
<p>The real struggle for us when we started with unschooling was the binary choice we were forced to make. There were times when we were afraid we’d done the wrong thing. If we’d been able to choose from more options, had the ability to choose a blended approach, maybe we’d have gone for that.</p>
<p>Looking back now we can see that unschooling gave us all something that a more mixed way of learning wouldn’t: we lived abroad, we went on long walks across Europe, we made our own ways to learn and we learned through just being in the world.</p>
<p>But maybe the biggest thing that happened was that we learned together. Unschooling is a whole family thing and we went on the adventure as a team.</p>
<p>I hope my children enjoy their new adventures; my eldest started school last year and she seems to be thriving. I know my youngest will be the same. I hope we (their parents) will be okay too. I hope we did a good job. I wonder what the next adventure will be.</p>
Code, Discovery and Learning2019-06-11T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2019/06/11/code-discovery-and-learning<p>A couple of days ago my girls suddenly decided to learn coding.</p>
<p>Like most of the things they show an interest in, coding became an immediate obsession and for the past couple of days we’ve been writing Python on the Raspberry Pi, my phone, a laptop and a micro:bit. We’ve made an adventure games, a racing game, a version of Snake with LEDs (on the micro:bit). We’ve learned about variables and loops and inputs and graphics.</p>
<p>Much of unschooling involves bouncing around from one thing to another; sometimes sticking with something for a long time; sometimes picking it up and dropping it overnight (or even more quickly). One of the hardest things about this way of learning is letting go of pre-conceived ideas of how we learn or how we think we should learn. We expect to commit to something and see it through.</p>
<p>But the coding example is a reminder that switching around is never wasted: even a brief introduction to something—a passing glance—is enough to bury something in their consciousnesses for later use. The coding interest didn’t come from nowhere: we’ve had a Raspberry Pi for years; we’ve got computers and other computing devices and Arduino and micro:bit. Plus I’m interested in coding. I can do a bit myself.</p>
<p>I’ve taken the girls to technology events, and we’ve played with Scratch. We even built a couple of simple websites when they wanted to try that. But it never stuck. For one reason or another it didn’t spark anything and they dropped it.</p>
<p>I don’t know how long they’ll be interested in coding this time and it really doesn’t matter. However long they pursue it it’s both something to be an enjoyed and a means to an end: they want to do something and they’ve decided that coding might be the way to do it. They’ve dredged up something from their brains and found a new use for it.</p>
<p>But it’s also pure discovery. Many people who have been working for years—many “grown-ups”—still have no idea what they’re really interested in, or what they want to do as a career.</p>
<p>It’s hard work to find what excites you. It’s probably even harder to do that when you get older and you’ve only ever really known one path. So if you can’t use your childhood as pure discovery, rather than making a choice and sticking with it then when can you do it?</p>
<p>That discovery means freedom to pick up and drop things; freedom to try things on for size and decide whether they’re really for you. To the outsider—and particularly the outsider with very different life experiences—it sometimes looks like a lack of engagement. But it’s quite the opposite.</p>
Story Times2019-06-01T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2019/06/01/story-times<p>I asked <a href="https://x.com/mistergough/status/1134732358308044800?s=20">a question on X/Twitter</a> earlier today about historical novels for my eldest daughter (she’s thirteen).</p>
<p>Anyway, it became a bit popular (due mainly to a retweet from Twitter Celebrity <a href="https://twitter.com/MooseAllain">Moose Allain</a> whom you should definitely follow if you don’t already).</p>
<p>Anyway, as a result I got rather a lot of responses and so I made <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q0HYSB2QWpgaw6HXDmSHTcMGmYfTNhnER9oVLxfZJ5g/edit#gid=0">a quick spreadsheet</a>, which still needs a lot of work but I wanted to capture as much as I could before it all slipped by in the timeline. I’ve made it possible to comment on the spreadsheet too.</p>
<p>My daughter loves reading (both my daughters do) and she’s recently got more and more into reading historical novels. She’s gained quite a knowledge of the Tudors and right now she’s really into the Chinese Cultural Revolution.</p>
<p>Stories are a great way into learning a bit about history. Personally I loved Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel; I don’t know how historically accurate those books are (or indeed any of the other suggestions people made) but then history can be pretty vague anyway, and more often than not a matter of opinion. Finding something engaging is probably a lot more important in the beginning than complete accuracy. Once you’re passionate you can start to dig deep.</p>
<p>I’m going to keep working on the list. I’m particularly keen to organise it a bit more by era and add some notes. I’m also not sure how suitable all the books are for a thirteen year old so I’m going to do a bit of investigating. If you’ve read any of the books and have opinions please let me know here, on Twitter or in the spreadsheet. And if there’s something that would make it more useful to you then tell me. Thanks!</p>
Dabbling as a Craft2019-05-30T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2019/05/30/dabbling-as-a-craft<p>I’ve often found it hard to come to terms with the fact that I’m easily distracted by new creative pursuits; over many years I’ve had a go at everything from film-making and photography to coding and graphic design. Some of these I’ve properly studied while others I’ve just taught myself.</p>
<p>It can sometimes be disheartening to be only slightly good at things and not really good at any one of them. I’m jealous of people who have pursued a single craft, art form or creative discipline. I wish I’d started earlier, or stuck to something, or specialised.</p>
<p>But as I signed up for yet another course (I’m back to music production) I realised that maybe the dabbling is the craft itself. When I think about the things I do on a regular basis in my work—problem-solving, working out how to make things, prototyping—it seems to make sense that I can do a bit of everything. Most importantly it seems to matter that I acknowledge the dabbling and work with it.</p>
<p>I wonder how well we support people to dabble. Most of what we do in learning and work is still very much about specialisms. Or we look up to the true polymaths who are brilliant at everything they do. But we need people who can have a go at things, not only so they can acquire broad skills but also so they can remove the fear of creating, having a go.</p>
<p>Thinking about my own needs I know that I need to take a more deliberate approach to this partial learning. I need to better map out what I can do, what I want to do, what I’ll need to be able to do. And I’ll need to find the gaps and the opportunities for improvement. I need to commit to a programme of amateurism.</p>
Rebel Annoyance2019-05-23T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2019/05/23/rebel-annoyance<p>Someone posted an article recently about how to create a “rebel alliance” in an organisation: how to identify rebels and build a support network for them so that they can drive transformation.</p>
<p>There are some real problems with the very idea of rebels, not least of which is an implicit acceptance that everything must already be so bad that people have to set themselves against what exists to do anything valuable. This binary perspective isn’t necessarily the healthiest starting point for change.</p>
<p>And potentially, identifying rebels and rewarding them is the beginning of making them special. And this group of special people — a group who demand a disproportionate amount of attention — is potentially mirroring the status quo rather than challenging it. It’s ultimately an alternative hierarchy.</p>
<p>Then there’s also the danger of making quite mundane change seem rebellious. In the article I read those things which marked out the rebels were often slightly different ways of working, or technology preferences. Are these the kinds of rebellions we should be championing? If we’re going to rebel at all what would be the truly worthwhile causes?</p>
<p>But perhaps the most damaging thing around the idea of rebels is the way in which it continues the kind of combative language that is all too prevalent in business already. Do we really want to couch things in terms of incumbents and rebels or are there better ways to think about these things?</p>
<p>Tensions and problem-finding can be powerful ways of making changes. But finding problems and bringing together people as some sort of invading force might do little more than exacerbate things, back people into corners, escalate. How else might we do this? How else might we describe what needs to be done and the people who can do it?</p>
Design Begins at Home2019-05-09T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2019/05/09/design-begins-at-home<p>Working with a small company on a service design project has made me revisit how even an organisation with a handful of staff can be broken in terms of daily functioning (let alone any strategic capabilities) and how important it is that design work start internally.</p>
<p>There is sometimes an assumption in service design that the customer focus is sufficient a driving force for change that it can help an organisation reorganise internally to become better. And yes, an organisation-wide focus on purpose can be a powerful catalyst for change.</p>
<p>But many of the functions of good design (e.g, research) are based on even more fundamental principles (e.g. caring, listening) and so there needs to be a stage before, or at least in parallel with this customer alignment. And this internal focus provides one of the safest spaces available to an organisation.</p>
<p>A place that can get this right for itself can get it right for the other people they serve. A place where staff can listen to each other and care about what they hear has a better chance of listening to customers. A place that can try new things internally has a better chance of building new things externally. A place that can serve itself has a better chance of serving others.</p>
Substandard Work2018-05-30T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2018/05/30/substandard-work<p>Sharing work that’s a long way from finished—work that’s just the starting point or a single aspect of what we’re aiming for—is a crucial part of working with other people. And thinking of it as substandard is a useful step in getting better at that sharing.</p>
<p>It might seem easier to share work that’s 99% there, almost perfect, just in need of some magic fairy dust to make it better. But sharing far less developed things can be more beneficial for everyone.</p>
<p>There’s a pleasure that comes with the freedom to show substandard work: the implied trust that others have in you to make something better, to build on what’s there; the value you place in others to contribute more than just tweaks; and the loss of friction you feel as you no longer need to agonise over things being good enough.</p>
<p>Collaborative tools like Google Docs have given us the ability to stick half-baked ideas into a semi-public space. But they haven’t necessarily given us permission. Even explicit encouragement to throw something together can be meaningless when the relationship isn’t based on a reasonable level of trust.</p>
<p>Substandard work as a vital part of an iterative, collaborative process is different from the binary of success and failure. Rather than experimentation to see what sticks, substandard work is about the kernel of something valuable unfettered by the need to complete the picture before showing it to someone else.</p>
<p>It’s about finding the smoothest path between an idea and its audience; it’s about the kind of mutual understanding that allows that idea to become something better through contact with other people; and ultimately it’s a powerful way to learn.</p>
<p>If we wait, if we internalise the process of improvement, we close ourselves off from the immediate feedback that accelerates our ability to learn more than we can teach ourselves. But to different extents we’ve learned to internalise; we each have our own expectations of what makes something ready or good enough.</p>
<p>If we want to get better at sharing substandard work we need to help each other. We need to learn and unlearn: collectively change our ways of looking at what people share with us and develop the trust that allows us show people just the essence of something rather than the finished article. After all, the finished article might but substandard in its own way, and with a lot less opportunity for improvement.</p>
Instant Feedback2018-05-20T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2018/05/20/instant-feedback<p>This week I’ve been working with my students on a project around sports and physical activity. As part of the module we’ve been revisiting systems thinking to help us identify possible design interventions; we’ve had some fascinating discussions around positive and negative feedback loops (talking about things like whether it’s right to harness the power of addiction in this context, for example).</p>
<p>Feedback information is a core component of systems thinking: design interventions round reinforcing feedback loops can have an exponential impact; spotting the negative feedback loops can help us get deeply under the skin of a problem. These loops are all over the place when we’re talking about how to get people to do more exercise and we’ve become quite excited about the possibilities of working with deep motivations and fundamental barriers.</p>
<p>Discussions, mapping and research are all incredibly useful, but it’s hard to work on something as far-reaching as physical activity and health without reflecting on our own attitudes, particularly in this case what our own feedback loops might be.</p>
<p>I went to the gym for the first time in months today. I plan to do it regularly again, but in thinking about how to get back into the habit I’ve been considering how polarised my relationship with exercise has been since as far back as I can remember. I’m either exercising almost every day or not going at all. Most likely, the ideal approach is somewhere in between those two extremes, and before now perhaps I would have sought to find that balance. But thinking about feedback loops has changed my perspective.</p>
<p>It’s clear to me that when I start exercising heavily I get into a reinforcing feedback loop that makes me want to keep doing it. Conversely, a small amount of exercise inevitably dwindles to nothing: if I do too little I start questioning the point and then the downward spiral to inactivity begins.</p>
<p>Perhaps the reality is that the perfect point between addiction to exercise and a complete failure to do anything is such a knife edge that it’s almost impossible to find. Maybe moderation with exercise (as with other things) is just not a realistic goal.</p>
<p>Ultimately I might have to concede that my best option—the most effective place to concetrate my efforts—is in working with the addictive cycle of exercising and trying to maintain it. At least as long as I can, anyway.</p>
Pointless Fun2016-07-23T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2016/07/23/pointless-fun<p>The recent launch of Pokemon Go has spawned the inevitable rash of articles about how how we can harness the game’s popularity for all sorts of alternative outcomes, but most irritating of all perhaps is the way the formal education community has sought to use it as a way of (and there’s no nicer way I can think of putting this) tricking kids into paying attention to far less interesting things.</p>
<p>The implication from educators is that things like Pokemon Go are ultimately pointless: children might enjoy them—maybe even get a little addicted—but they’re the activity equivalent of empty calories. From this view comes an assumption that educators have some kind of duty to turn this pointless fun into something meaningful.</p>
<p>To me this perspective is fascinating, firstly because of the way it reinforces educators as the arbiters of what has value, but also in the way it places abstract knowledge at the heart of education; in other words, doing things is only really a way of learning things.</p>
<p>When we treat children’s passions as incidental to the real focus of learning—or worse, when we exploit them for our own purposes—we make a clear statement about what’s important. In formal education that inevitably means abstract knowledge or, to be more specific, knowledge that can be tested.</p>
<p>But imagine for a moment that instead of showing children how a game could help them learn maths we showed them how an understanding of maths made them better at a game. What do we need to win at Pokemon Go: statistics, calculus, game theory?</p>
<p>This shift of focus would be interesting, but it’s still an attempt to add unnecessary structure to something: it’s still an adult trying to rethink the relationship between learning and playing when, in reality, the whole thing is far more fluid. Children naturally seek out the knowledge they need to do what they want, and this “pull” approach to learning is at the heart of unschooling.</p>
<p>In contrast, formal education frames living as a way of gaining knowledge, rather than knowledge becoming a way to live better. But as long as we make knowledge the overall aim, and living just a means to an end, we continue to devalue childhood, and perhaps everything that comes after.</p>
<p>All we can say about Pokemon Go is that it is what it is: if children enjoy it then it serves its purpose. They will learn from it, yes, but any attempt by adults to rationalise that learning is almost certainly doomed to failure.</p>
<p>Learning is a far deeper and more personal thing than we can truly understand, and at the same time inextricable from living. Whether we’re attempting to harness someone’s interest to make them learn what we think is important, or trying to rationalise the interest itself, we’re imposing the observer’s own world view.</p>
<p>Real learning is a way for the learner to make sense of the world and develop their own way of relating to it. All of us need to allow, support and encourage that very personal drive, however it happens.</p>
Organisation as Technology2016-06-08T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2016/06/08/organisation-as-technology<p>In developing ideas and conversations around <a href="http://theself.agency">The Self Agency</a> we’ve needed to reframe our perceptions of organisations; when designing for the individual agent before the organisation this reframing helps us to articulate a more coherent relationship.</p>
<p>To date, my favourite definition of organisations has described them as “ways of organising”; this is immediately useful as it moves us away from the notion of an organisation as an entity in itself. Organisations as verb—as ways of bringing people together for something—provides a more useful focus.</p>
<p>After all, when we think of an organisation as a thing, it potentially becomes a vessel, something with a clearly defined inside and outside: increasingly useless as defining elements of the mental model of organisations. But more limiting is the way in which it sets an arbitrary boundary on the role of the individual: we become creators or consumers—inside or outside—when in fact we’re always both (and much more).</p>
<p>The verb perspective, the organisation as way of organising, isn’t perfect either. And so it’s increasingly made more sense to consider the organisation as a technology, in other words a tool, or set of tools, of varying complexity. Wikipedia defines a technology as:</p>
<p>“the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives”</p>
<p>Not only does this suit the definition of an organisation rather well, but it leads us on to consider how the relationship between individuals and organisations can be better conceived; the organisation-as-technology metaphor provides us with a more useful way of framing the individual. It becomes an enabler.</p>
<p>Rather than just a way of holding diverse people together, it provides a multi-faceted system that can be optimised for individual agency. In the way that simple technologies might enable one person to achieve one task, complex technologies can enable all manner of connections to support meaningful value creation. People become far more than components.</p>
<p>A technology metaphor also provides an easier way to foster uniqueness. We’ve begun to see organisations as places where we can install apps or operating systems, in many ways a reinforcement of the organisation-as-vessel view. One major problem with considering organisations to be something we can install something on/in is that we lose the individuality that is part of an organisation’s reason to exist.</p>
<p>We’ve seen this problem surface very quickly in organisations where organisational designs like Holacracy have been “installed”: in many cases it fails to suit the unique purpose and humanity of the organisation. This may seem obvious — that we can’t run all organisations exactly the same way — but the real limitation in thinking comes when we constrain ourselves to searching for an alternative operating system. It’s not the specific operating system that’s the problem but the mental model itself.</p>
<p>There are obvious parallels in computer technologies. A defining technology battle of the nineties, between Macs and PCs, largely came down to a battle of operating systems, and to a limited extent processing power. Either way, the parameters of the battlefield were somewhat narrow.</p>
<p>The real disruption came with a new technology, not operating system: the move to smartphones. And we see similar battles raging now. Competitive advantage has been won in all sorts of industries not from improvements in the operating systems (say, hotel brands) but in radical rethinks of the technologies (like Airbnb).</p>
<p>But this isn’t really about competitive advantage, or disruption: redefining organisations as technologies isn’t just about providing a better outcome for the organisation. The purpose of computers is not computing; the purpose is providing a means for humans to do something of value.</p>
<p>And so this should be the primary reason for redefining organisations as technologies: to provide a better way of creating the means by which humans can further their individual agency and achieve better outcomes.</p>
<p>The organisation-as-technology idea also provides us with a way of identifying the unique value of the organisation. When organisations are only perceived as differentiated by cultural differences, or minor variability in their operating systems, then they become interchangeable and disposable.</p>
<p>By way of contrast, a proprietary technology is a completely different thing: it is uniquely fit for purpose.</p>
Soft and Malleable2016-05-29T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2016/05/29/soft-and-malleable<p>Yesterday I helped out an Internet of Things (IoT) <a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23ThingsCamp&src=tyah">event</a> for pretty much anyone who wanted come along and learn/tinker/hack/build/break. If you’re new to the technology one of the things that might strike you is the cheapness, availability and increasing simplicity of much of it.</p>
<p>We live in a world where pretty much anything is possible. I don’t mean this in just the context of IoT, but rather in the context of everything. Between the internet, cheap electronics, developments in digital fabrication, even alternative models of democracy and ownership brought about through connectedness, we can—with the interest and will to do it—make almost anything.</p>
<p>And yet we don’t. There are, I’m sure, all sorts of reasons for this—from a lack of interest to fear—but I can’t help wondering if there isn’t something more fundamental in all of us; in the model we have in our heads that describes the world.</p>
<p>From an early age we learn that the world is hard and people are soft. We even have a phrase, “soft skills”, to describe those skills that are about people. We “mould” people through education, while at the same time we teach them indisputable facts about the world. Hard facts.</p>
<p>So people are designed, squeezed around the hard edges of the world. And all too often those people break or they stretch too far or get flattened by the hard edges when the hard edges aren’t real: they’re just perceived. And many times those hard edges are shored up by other people.</p>
<p>Sometimes there might be a little wiggle room: the opportunity to mould things. Within reason, like choosing the colour of something or changing our avatars. But controlled freedom can be worse than no freedom. It’s padding, a buffer between us and the things that are softer than we imagine.</p>
<p>In reality, the softness of the world—its malleability—is not the people in it, or even just the tiny interfaces between those people and the Hard Things. The softness and malleability of the world is everything but the people. And a failure to realise this is part of who we are from an early age; it’s almost inconceivable, even if we get shown again and again. Even if deep down we really know.</p>
<p>So I know that one event, one small opportunity to see what we can make, isn’t anywhere near enough to fully alter this fundamental perspective, but people are picking at it everywhere. And if we keep at it—if we keep bringing people together with each other and the means to mould what’s really, genuinely soft—then the balance will shift.</p>
<p>In the process—in embracing the malleability—the reversed perspective will help us find the hard edges of people again. Realising together that the world is ours to shape inevitably brings about a deeper respect for our own abilities to shape it.</p>
Where It Lives2016-05-22T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2016/05/22/where-it-lives<p>I’ve accumulated a lot of digital clutter over the years: personal blogs, company sites, side project paraphernalia. Every now and again I like to go back and sort it out, even if it can be overwhelming.</p>
<p>Regular updating is also necessary when the platforms I use change their functionality, or simply come and go. For a long time I had a blog on Wordpress; more recently I’ve moved that to my own domain, running on Jekyll. You may be reading this on there, or maybe on Medium; that’s really what this post is all about.</p>
<p>Sites like Medium make it easier and more tempting to just publish everything we write on them. But articles like this from <a href="http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/0900.html">Dave Winer</a> suggest that we stop and think before we launch fully into a Medium-only presence. Dave himself publishes on his own site first and then to Medium via RSS. It’s worth thinking about as an approach, not just because it makes us think about ownership, but also because it provides some clarity around what to publish where.</p>
<p>Medium’s new Publication features are great for getting content online easily, but they deliberately pull us further away from owning our own content. What we write and share increasingly goes into the stream, just like tweets. We feel like we have a branded presence, that the space we write in is ours, but little by little we’re letting go.</p>
<p>I’ve recently been thinking a lot about where content physically resides, including researching the vagueries of running my own mail server. Much of what’s involved to really own digital things, to know where they are, is way beyond most people’s capabilities, including mine. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but that the work and investment required often outweighs the benefits.</p>
<p>However, that’s not the case for everything. While a mail server might be just too much stress for the reward, owning—keeping—what we write isn’t actually that difficult. My recent exploits with setting up a static blog have brought some pleasure in knowing that I’m basically saving text files on my computer; everything I write on mistergough.com is created on my computer first and shared from there.</p>
<p>The best thing about blogging this way is that it now makes real sense to publish everything, for whatever project, on my own blog first. Previously this blog didn’t really serve that purpose: I used it for random posts, things that didn’t fit with any particular theme. But the increasingly ephemeral nature of platforms like Medium makes something as tangible as my static blog even more useful.</p>
<p>And so, I’m starting the work of putting all my writing through mistergough.com before importing elsewhere. Medium’s import feature even links back automatically to the origin of the post. Of course this requires a little more work than just publishing everything on Medium, but it feels right. All these platforms want our attention, our creativity, our efforts, to build their own products. We all know that, but perhaps we don’t really know how easy it is just to tweak things a little bit back in our favour.</p>
Static Blogging2015-08-09T00:00:00+00:00http://mistergough.com//2015/08/09/static-blogging<p>Over the past couple of days I’ve been moving this blog from its original <a href="https://mistergough.wordpress.com">Wordpress.com</a> version to a static blog.</p>
<p>Static blogs don’t use a database. The HTML files are generated at the point of creation rather than dynamically generated at the point of viewing. The most obvious advantage of this is speed for the reader, but there are side benefits too, such as better security and fewer management requirements.</p>
<p>There are lots of ways to generate static files, including the completely manual approach, but for this blog I decided to use <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>. Jekyll is a processing application that pulls together separate files and combines them into finished HTML pages. The point of this it to make it easier to separate content and presentation so that blog posts can be written in, say, <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>, just as with this one. It also means that you can reuse snippets of HTML in lots of places, such as page headers and footers.</p>
<p>Anyway, for an overview of Jekyll <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/">take a look at the website</a>.</p>
<p>Another reason for using Jekyll is the fact that it’s supported by <a href="https://pages.github.com/">Github Pages</a>, a simple website hosting platform that works from a dedicated Github repository. For free.</p>
<p>There are many different ways to set up a Jekyll and Github blog, and the right approach will depend largely on personal preferences, but <a href="https://pages.github.com/">this page</a> should give you an idea of what’s involved.</p>
<p>The first step is to get a Github account, if you don’t already have one. Once you have an account you can set up Github Pages as a dedicated respository.</p>
<p>After this you should clone the remote repository to your local computer. Github provides full instructions for this. Scrolling down <a href="https://pages.github.com/">this page</a> you’ll find instructions for getting Jekyll up and running. This can be a bit fiddly but what you want to end up with is jekyll running on your local computer for generating static files and enough of an understanding of git to push those files up to the Github repository.</p>
<p>Once you have the basics working you can play around with design, structure and content. Every update, whether it’s a design change or new post becomes a matter of pushing the modified files to your repository.</p>
<h3 id="css">CSS</h3>
<p>Jekyll has built in support for <a href="http://sass-lang.com/">CSS extension Sass</a>, which is well worth learning and using if you don’t already. Of course, if you don’t want to get into the design side at all you can just download and use ready made themes (<a href="http://jekyllbootstrap.com/">Jekyll Bootstrap</a> is worth a look). You can even use the theme I’ve built here by cloning all the site files <a href="https://github.com/mistergough/mistergough.github.io">from my own repository</a>.</p>
<h3 id="markdown">Markdown</h3>
<p>Markdown is a simple system for styling text documents. Jekyll has built-in support for Markdown which means that you can write your posts in a more user-friendly way and then let Jekyll handle the rest. It’s worth learning the <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown syntax</a> as it’s become something of a standard.</p>
<h3 id="commenting">Commenting</h3>
<p>The biggest drawback to Jekyll at this point is the lack of any good static commenting systems. At this point <a href="https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472138-jekyll-installation-instructions">Disqus</a> remains the most effective commenting system. It’s pretty easy to set up even if it’s not to everyone’s taste.</p>
<h3 id="importing">Importing</h3>
<p>Moving a blog from another platform turned out to be easier than I expected. Jekyll has lots of <a href="http://import.jekyllrb.com/">import extensions</a> for just about every major blogging system and moving posts here from Wordpress.com turned out to be pretty painless. The only snag turned out to be transferring images so if you have a lot of those you might need to put a bit more work in.</p>
<h3 id="feeds">Feeds</h3>
<p>Site feeds turn out to be pretty simple too. You can use the <a href="https://github.com/mistergough/mistergough.github.io/blob/master/feed.xml">feed.xml</a> template in my own repository without too much configuration or look around for other people’s. There are plenty out there.</p>
<p>So, if you like the look of this blog just take what you want and modify accordingly. I’d love to know how you get on.</p>
<h3 id="difficulty">Difficulty</h3>
<p>I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I’d spent a couple of days doing this. OK, not full time, but if you’re new to some or all of the technologies here the whole process of setting up a Jekyll blog might take some effort. However, there’s a lot to be said for using static files for simple sites. Plus Git, Jekyll, Markdown and Sass (and the command line if you choose to go down that route) are all good things to get to grips with. So, yes, it might not be the easiest way to get a blog up and running but it’s definitely worth a go.</p>
Principles and Architecture2015-07-23T02:59:04+00:00http://mistergough.com//2015/07/23/principles-and-architecture<p>How do we build design principles into the deepest architecture of things, into the algorithms and mechanisms?</p>
<p>It goes deeper than an ethos or mission. Those things change, get re-evaluated. Good intent can be reduced to a veneer while the core values are dismantled and exploited. </p>
<p>But what if something couldn't exist at all without the complete set of design principles? Like a human body, every system present and functioning or no life at all. </p>
<p>What are the means by which the architecture and the principles become inseparable? More importantly, how does this inseparability transcend enforcement and become a fundamental aspect of existence? </p>
Open Data Camp2015-02-23T10:09:27+00:00http://mistergough.com//2015/02/23/open-data-camp<p>Last weekend I attended Open Data Camp in Winchester; my first ever "Camp". As someone who works primarily in design, attending designey events for designers, I'm not used to taking part in the more tech/data end of the events spectrum so I wanted to get my thoughts down.</p>
<p>I'm not going to go into the format or general organisation of the weekend. To me it seemed to go pretty smoothly. I knew where to be, when, and I got plenty to eat. We never ran out of coffee. I'd like to make particular mention of one of the brilliant organisers, Lucy Knight, not least because I'm lucky enough to work with her.</p>
<p>I attended a pretty diverse range of sessions: democracy, food, design, and mapping the benefits of open data. I enjoyed them all, although I repeatedly found that the conversation just started as the session ended. From past experience it's usually the case. As the first Open Data Camp it's probably more expected than in other, established events like GovCamp, but it's no bad thing; it helps to plot the course.</p>
<p>So, general experiences aside, a few things that stood out for me.</p>
<h3>Public Sector Focus</h3>
<p>It's inevitable that there will be a strong focus on the public sector in an event like Open Data Camp. Most discussion in the UK around Open Data is still heavily connected with the public sector. And to be honest, if the public sector didn't push on the open data thing who knows how far we'd have got by now.</p>
<p>My concern is around where we go next. For me, some of the most useful data, the most vital, is going to come from outside the public sector. Finding ways to get corporates to open up what they have is a difficult but worthwhile challenge and I feel like this needs to be pursued as aggressively, if not more so, as open data advocates are pursuing the public sector.</p>
<p>How can events like Open Data Camp help here? Is there a danger that the public sector focus makes it easier for private entities to slip the net? What are the routes in to these silos?</p>
<p>The other issues for me around the public sector focus is the potential for us to accept the public sector as it is. I was thinking about this in the session on democracy. With all the technology and data available to us is it enough to engage with machinations of democracy as they currently stand? How can technology, data (and design) help us to advance democracy at its most fundamental level?</p>
<h3>Design and Data</h3>
<p>I'm particularly interested in how to get data into the hands of designers and in fact I ran a session on this. It was a difficult one. The first thing I realised was that my definition of designer might not have been shared with everyone in the room. When we talk about data and design the natural common ground is web/app development. In this context it doesn't seem too much to expect designers to learn a bit of code and help bridge the gap that way.</p>
<p>But many designers are a long way from this. I have to remind myself that my interest in coding says more about me (geek) than the design profession as a whole and that the real common ground comes from creative ways to translate the essence of what each field is about. To this end I think I saw a card game in one of the sessions. We need more things like this. It would be remiss of me not to mention <a href="http://redfront.co.uk/blog/the-data-loop/" target="_blank">Redfront's own Data Loop</a> too.</p>
<h3>Benefits</h3>
<p>Martin Howitt ran a session on identifying the benefits of open data for different stakeholder groups. Bias aside (it appeals to my designer tendencies but I'm also lucky enough work with Martin as well) this seems to me to be a vital undertaking. If we're going to unlock the real potential of open data then we need more people to understand it, make use of it, demand it.</p>
<p>If you're interested in contributing to the benefits mapping of open data you can help by adding your comments <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RmAm9YTwsdiz25Fju_-RTFN4LG7SzZKhmNKm_HoAFJ4/edit#gid=0" target="_blank">to this spreadsheet</a>.</p>
<h3>Hacking Together</h3>
<p>One of the sessions I was in made me realise just how much work there is to be done in translating open data into useful things. There are some clever people out there doing clever things with data. There are challenges and hackathons that produce fascinating new applications. And yet the propagation, evolution and adoption of the outputs seems negligible in comparison.</p>
<p>From a biased designer's point of view I might say that the problem could lie in a missing human element. Are we successfully engaging and designing for the people who really need or want these apps? Could we do more to bring humanity into the process? As I talked about above, I'm passionate about the design component of open data, and as the technology landscape introduces new platforms and devices we need to be even surer that we're embarking on its exploration as a diverse groups of makers and users.</p>
Think Piece2015-01-15T11:18:24+00:00http://mistergough.com//2015/01/15/think-piece<p>Blog commenting systems have evolved very little since their inception. One of the more interesting examples of some kind of evolution was Branch's inline commenting system; part of the platform's attempt to encourage thoughts-in-progress rather than finished pieces. </p>
<p>Medium has similar functionality at the paragraph level but it fails to realise the potential due to its focus on polished editorial, and so the nearest thing we have to an unfinished ideas platform is Twitter. But still we rarely see the level of vulnerability and open thinking necessary to make it work there. </p>
<p>The ability to share half-formed ideas is a vital thing. Face-to-face conversations are built on these foundations. Without them we'd just be trading a series of pre-prepared monologues. And yet the internet still doesn't seem to effectively support this fundamental behaviour.</p>
<p>One of my favourite ideas development approaches is World Café. Its primary focus is to promote conversation, half-formed thoughts, as a means of drawing out the good stuff. To do that it encourages us to huddle together, relax, be human. </p>
<p>But World Café isn't about just talking. It's designed to get our thoughts down, make them visible. And very little on the Internet comes close to this kind of all-in talking and doing.</p>
<p>The power of conversation in the right context is huge. Early conversations where ideas are hazy provide the true substance of individual and collective originality. They are the earliest prototypes of everything we do and they can take form with remarkable speed. </p>
<p>But where are the digital enablers for what we instinctively know? Why are we building more and more platforms for fully-formed thoughts when we should be tackling the barriers to unguarded originality?</p>
<p>Is it that the business models for the internet are built around content? Do they require finished think-pieces to effectively commoditise our thoughts? Is it a technological failing? Or is it a fear of sharing our flimsiest, most fleeting thoughts that stops us from realising the value of collective uncertainty?</p>
Group Love2014-11-23T10:20:16+00:00http://mistergough.com//2014/11/23/group-love<p>Facebook's recent release of a standalone Group app and its less recent Messaging app are indicators of something important in the way we use social networks.</p>
<p>One of my least favourite things about social media is the way in which all new platforms perpetuate the follower or friend model; one of the obvious criticisms of something like Ello is that its architecture requires us to scale our connections. It wants to replicate Twitter or Facebook. Just without the ads. </p>
<p>All new apps seem to want to replicate the fundamental dynamics of Twitter or Facebook. The thing is, the longer Twitter and Facebook go unchallenged, the harder it gets to compete with a platform that embeds itself more into our lives the longer we use it. </p>
<p>So, one of the reasons Ello might not last is because few people want to rebuild what they already have on other platforms. We'll happily stare at a few ads to avoid the work of starting again. </p>
<p>But Facebook's unbundling of its core functions, and purchase of companies like Whatsapp, are symptoms of an interesting paradox in the pervasive social network architecture. We're unwilling to throw away the hard-won networks of Facebook and Twitter but at the same time we don't find them terribly useful. </p>
<p>So, apps that allow us to message individuals and groups, or create fluid groups based on interest, are popular because they make social networks genuinely useful. And they sit uneasily alongside the disengaged, Liking and Faving sprawl of the networks' core business. Until they get unbundled. </p>
<p>It's no surprise that Facebook paid what it did for Whatsapp. It works, and its backbone is as lightweight as our mobile phone numbers can be.</p>
<p>Real competition for Facebook and Twitter isn't going to come from platforms like Ello, who insist on attacking the parts of the business that few people care enough about to reimagine. It'll come from things even better than Whatsapp, platforms that abandon the follower/friend model altogether and focus on meaningful usability and experience.</p>
<p>At some point, caring about how many friends and followers we have will be the preserve of the self-obsessed and the corporate. What really matters is what we can do; how we can embrace the fluidity of the web as a living stream, and make the most of it.</p>
Learning Muscles2014-09-25T11:26:19+00:00http://mistergough.com//2014/09/25/learning-muscles<p>Weight training works by pushing muscles to breaking point and then allowing them to recover, and grow. Formal education doesn't work this way. It supports and guides, providing children with a safe environment to acquire knowledge.</p>
<p>We already exerience information overload, so it seems pretty likely that a couple of key skills for our future society will be the ability to learn and the ability to filter.</p>
<p>So, how do we prepare children for this reality? Do we guide them through a supporting learning experience or do we throw them into chaos?</p>
<p>As my children flit from one project to the other, from one interest to the next, I've begun to realise that what they're learning isn't the topic itself but something more meta. They're exercising their learning muscles, learning to learn, learning to filter.</p>
<p>I'm understanding that I can't teach them what they want to know; instead they're developing the parts of their brains that help them to do that for themselves. And my role becomes much more about getting out of the way, much more about connecting them with the chaos.</p>
Common Sense2014-08-14T09:29:04+00:00http://mistergough.com//2014/08/14/common-sense-2<p>When I was growing up the adults in my life often judged me on the basis of something they called common sense. For them it was some sort of unquestionable constant.</p>
<p>Its values helped them to assert their dominance over young people, children, me. Suffice to say, I lacked it. And the constant reminder that I lacked it contributed in no small part in my growth from an awkward, unsure child to an awkward, unsure teenager.</p>
<p>Common sense is all about the basics. Or at least the basics from the perspective of the adults I grew up with. Does this young person know how to sweep a driveway? Do they know how to hold a hammer? In other cultures theses things might not matter too much. In my circles they were the cornerstones.</p>
<p>And so, every time I swept a driveway, or held a hammer I felt eyes on me. Could I do the most basic jobs of humanity? I felt a heightened awareness of my inadequacy. I felt inferior, awkward. I couldn't even do the simple things. I most certainly lacked common sense.</p>
<p>Common sense is a great way to keep a hold over people. It gives you the capability high ground. Whatever else that person could do, from playing musical instruments to programming computers, if they lacked common sense then, well, what use were they?</p>
<p>Clinging to an idea of common sense is a brilliant defensive position. You can use it anywhere. See that clever person on the news? The scientist with the breakthrough? Probably not an ounce of common sense. And through that defence nobody can be better than you.</p>
<p>But common sense as a protective strategy is not what this post is about. It's what got me thinking about it: that sense of awkwardness, the constant thread of inadequacy it instills, and how it lingers. But then I realised that there's a wider issue.</p>
<p>The real issue is that we believe in a core set of knowledge at all. After all, beyond being able to survive, and reproduce (ironically one of the common sense things we prefer not to educate young people about), what actually is common sense?</p>
<p>And yet we build our whole society on a single body of knowledge. By a certain age there are things we must know. If our children don't know those things then they'll "fall behind". But the question is, "fall behind what?"</p>
<p>If the survival of the human species is dependent on everyone knowing solid arithmetic then we’re in luck. But I suspect that what we really need is people who couldn't care less about times tables; people who have no idea how to hold a hammer; people obsessed with honey bees, photons, the way sea currents manipulate the sea bed.</p>
<p>We need people with a complete lack of common sense.</p>
Economic Thinking2014-07-17T05:28:07+00:00http://mistergough.com//2014/07/17/economic-thinking<p>It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that most of the world's problems are directly caused by either:</p>
<p>A. A misunderstanding of economics <br />B. A misuse of economics</p>
<p>And yet, an understanding of economics seems to be incredibly rare, whether it's a general understanding we all share or the deep understanding we expect from those in charge.</p>
<p>Academia probably has a lot to do with the poor state of economics. Certainly when I was studying the progression routes seemed to be either further academic obscurity or working for a bank; academic fame versus making money from money.</p>
<p>And yet, what we really need economists for is to bring an interconnected logic to the world; to use an understanding of scarcity, cause and effect, equilibrium for a more worthwhile purpose than making money for other people or looking clever. </p>
<p>And most importantly it would be great if some of that understanding became embedded in our culture, so that when we're told a story about something in the press we can put it into context, maybe seek out the right information, relate it to other things. </p>
<p>How many of the worst periods in our history have exploited a lack of economic thinking? When we believe that the arrival of a few immigrants signals the collapse of our economy then something has gone very wrong.</p>
<p>I personally believe that economics is one of the best critical thinking subjects out there, and yet schools so often teach it as facts and figures, names and dates. We need people to come out of school able to take on the biggest issues we face, but we don't seem to be doing much to make that happen.</p>