Had a pretty good week it has to be said. I’d go as far as to give it a ‘green’ status 🙂

Monday was the latest phase of my plan to have Wikipedia integrate anywhere I work (see previous infiltration plans succeeding here). John Cummings  came in and gave a training session to a few members of staff – it was a pleasing mix of people from the statistical areas, Comms and my digital teams. The feedback suggests it was a real success and something I am looking to grow – maybe through some ‘wiki edit lunches’ or similar type activities where we make it more like a ‘club’ than a work chore. Also a nice thing that came out of it is that we are uploading a load of our infographics, charts and illustrations to WikiCommons and making them freely available (they always were but this makes it all much clearer.)

Tuesday was another day down in Titchfield – this is now a locked in weekly occurrence – certainly until the middle of next year. This week was a nice visit though as it was not overwhelmed with formal meetings and instead I could actually spend some time catching up with people down there – particularly our UX guy who I had a really useful and in depth conversation with which I found incredibly useful.

Delivery Board dominated Wednesdays proceedings. We seem to be getting in to a much better rhythm with these and even I, scourge of ‘governance’, am starting to find them valuable. I still find the reporting a chore but that is a cross I will have to bear 🙂

Thursday I gave a talk at the Social Media South West group hosted at Sift Digital in central Bristol (so a nice commute free day). The talk seemed to go pretty well, the slides and notes are over on Speakerdeck if anyone is interested. I did the talk in a personal capacity so took the day off and avoided much mention of the day job and instead just ranted a little in general about the way social media has evolved. I really enjoyed it but I felt horribly like some grizzled old veteran – not so much in age but in social media years. Nobody had heard of Cluetrain, or been on Friendster, or even really MySpace. Many of them didn’t remember a time before hashtags or mentions on Twitter. I’ve been doing this stuff too long! (Which is ironic given the theme of my talk was social media is still in its infancy!)

Friday was meeting-tastic. Can’t remember many times I got home after 7 on a Friday (but I am notoriously desperate to escape to the pub on Friday evenings!). We covered open data, recruitment, office moves, appraisals, quality assurance and probably a whole lot else! Was one of those days though when it felt that all the meetings had a real point to them so I didn’t begrudge any of them.

I also made the hugely important step of moving to an iPad Mini – if it is good enough for Jack Dorsey! Setting that up today.

Next week I am in London a couple of times – to visit GDS and also to give another talk to impressionable young statisticians about ‘digital dissemination’. I am also HUGELY looking forward to the Mozilla Festival. Be warned there might be a burst of blogging next weekend!