Four day week which was just as well as I was starting to fray around the edges a bit by Thursday and it is probably too early to have a total meltdown at this job. I usually wait six months for those.

This week seemed to revolve around ‘papers’ – reading them, meeting about them, writing them. The worrying thing is that I am pretty good at this sort of thing these days. Is that what I have become? A civil service paper making machine? 🙂

I was pretty pleased with the way the search paper I helped work on turned out – though maybe that had something to do with the extent to which I edited it so that it resembled what I would have written if it had been a solo job! It was useful to get it all down on paper actually as lots of stuff is being planned and I am not sure I realised previously just how ambitious (in a good way) we were being. It is what inspired me to pitch to the J.Boye conference to do a search talk. It is an interesting topic I am really enjoying digging in to – the technical, editorial and marketing elements have all been fun to learn more about – I think if I had my time over I would consider specialising in this and the analytics stuff.

The other big paper was something of an update on the activity of the Programme for the ‘powers that be’. This was done under quite a bit of pressure and wasn’t straightforward but it was a bit of a morale boost as once we wrote down everything we were in the process of doing it looked pretty darn impressive and left me feeling pretty happy with my lot (if exhausted)

[as an aside I still can’t get my head around Lotus Notes – I seem to be getting to grips with the email/calendaring but any understanding of the document creation & filing stuff still completely eludes me. This led to me writing papers in Word and asking colleagues to format them in the correct templates. That is going to get old quickly.]

Open data is a growing topic in the office and I attended a couple of meetings about it this week. There is a different take on the topic than I am used to elsewhere – certainly the ‘linked data’ element is pretty absent though there is much talk of APIs and ‘dirty data’. It is a pretty major departure for a ‘data’ organisation of a very specific type like the ONS and it is going to be an interesting space in the next year or so.

The recruitment stuff was pretty time consuming again – have a look at the jobs here if you haven’t already (which seems unlikely given my blanket bombing of social media!). I really think there are a couple of great jobs there.