This week we decided to start doing weeknotes, a quick overview of the things we’ve actually done this week.  Weeknotes seem to have been started by Matt Webb at what is now BERG and they’ve got a following of acolytes doing the same thing, aggregated on Bryan Boyer’s weeknotes site.

So what week to start on?  Rattle is formally Rattle Research Ltd. and this company was previously called James Croft Ltd., a company formed by my father  back in 1986 and which was more-or-less wound up in the mid noughties and which I used as a off-the-peg registered business when starting Rattle in 2007 with Rob.  With hindsight this was probably a bad idea as the off-the-peg business had lots of legacy issues that needed sorting, but once we started we continued with it. This brings me to the week number.  James Croft Ltd., was formed on 28th February 1986 which makes this week, week number 1189.  It feels quite nice to start high, like a lot’s been done already so this is where we’re starting our weeknotes :)

This is our first full week back at work after Christmas.  We’ve been tying up lots of old projects and migrating or deleting databases that have become obsolete.  We’ve also killed off any remaining legacy sites running on Radiant and migrated the Folksy blog to WordPress from Mephisto (wooo!).  On a more productive note Rob’s been researching text mining and has been refining Muddy and updating the supporting documentation around term extraction.  We’ve decided to have a business review of Muddy to determine how best to proceed with it.  That work will start next week.  As a team we’ve also created a “new business” strategy, a way for us to get good problems to solve that we can charge for.  Strategy may be too grand a name for it as it rests on some pretty obvious stuff like telling better stories about our work, in a frequency we can support and in a format which is consistent and engaging.  Talking at more conferences is part of this.  I’ve been confirmed to speak at We Love Technology this year, which will be my first gig for over 7 months.  The last piece of our new business ‘strategy’ will be dedicating one day a month to doing something ‘interesting’ and then talking about it.  We like the idea of seeing what we can collectively do in a day that others will find interesting and (sometimes) useful and once a month seems feasible.

NESTA’s Amplified City project has taken up some time as we’re the Learning Partner on that project and it’s coming to a critical point in its life cycle where we need to start defining a framework for innovation at a city-wide scale.  Another project for East Midlands Renaissance is taking shape, with Frankie now leading on an idea around psychogeography and more specifically creating object narratives which interpret their environment.  I’m fascinated by non-human agency and psychogeography so I’m chipping in.

I’ve also been drawing up a couple of contracts for two new members of staff, one replacement administrator, Christine, and another a designer who you may already know, Andrew Pendrick.  Andrew is joining as Design Lead and is someone we’ve wanted to have on the team for ages as he’s brilliant at thinking through design solutions, seeing design as a process as opposed to a photoshop skillset.

Lastly, we’ve commissioned a big new office desk for us all to work on from the same guy who made this.  It’s going to be upcycled from old joists and scaffolding timber apparently.