Doing 35 posts in 32 days has rather wiped out my blogging mojo — the tank is empty at the moment.

That said it has been an exciting week one way or another so I wanted to quickly capture things just so I don’t lose track.

Some things that happened

We (our company — well our ‘group’) floated on the Stock Exchange. We are now a PLC and it seems it went well. We raised all the money we sought and people seem happy.

Honestly I don’t really understand it all but importantly it does mean we can fully move to the next phase of our plans for the ‘lean software and data’ practice. This is going to mean some hiring first up and looking beyond the public sector for clients as well. I really didn’t expect to find myself so involved in the business strategy of the company when I signed up at the start of the year and it’s a great experience.

On the subject of ‘going public’ I bought a few shares of Monzo this week. They raised 20 million quid in a couple of hours — and I think this was all via their very slick app? It is amazing really — also it’s strange seeing it becoming such a success when I know people there — some very senior!

The biggest news for Notbinary though was that we have splurged on the paid version of Slack! For a remote first organisation this is wonderful news and as ‘Junior Slack Officer’ I have a bunch of little projects I’ll be implementing in the weeks to come based on cool stuff I’ve seen elsewhere. I particularly am looking at some of the induction stuff 18F did — I think there is something we can usefully do to help our contractors understand our ways of working (and things like our Code of Conduct) using Slack as it is the one common system really we use across the company.

We did another pitch today — we only got informed Monday afternoon, needed to supply a proposal Wednesday and presented today. For a small company like us this was a bit of a strain but it went ok I think — I’d love us to get the work as it’s interesting but am not getting my hopes up. The deck was really good I thought this time but we didn’t have time for a proper run through in advance so it was a bit clunky at times. Still we kept to time and hit our points.

In Taunton it was ceremony-centric as I invited myself to a bunch of team meetings as well as a continuing series of 1–2–1s. I’m worried I’m becoming as much counsellor as consultant but maybe that isn’t a bad thing. It is an organisation facing a huge amount of change so I’ll help wherever I can.

One of the things I hadn’t realised about becoming a PLC is that it comes with its own set of concerns and obligations about how open and transparent you can be — with social media as ever being the main battle ground. I’m going to take a run at rewriting our communications guidelines into something a bit more in line with my/our values while applying an appropriate amount of oversight in the right context. Monzo released theirs this week helpfully so I’ll start there and look elsewhere. Don’t be like ‘Elon Musk’ is probably not sufficient.

I have got a designer (the amazing Martin) to do my sticker artwork so I should hopefully have them in time for UK Govcamp..

..which I’ve arranged for us to sponsor. At least if we have a stand I’ll have somewhere official to loiter instead of corridors.

I am deep into my Christmas movie advent adventure — I’m not sure I can see this one through. It’s a lot of schmaltz even for somebody as sentimental as me!

Watched Creed 2 last weekend — basically it’s a Rocky mashup of moments from all the original movies but it is nicely done top to bottom. Basically it’s like a ‘Best of..’ compilation of boxing movie moments!

Got my Spotify Unwrapped playlist of the year…I have linked it below for the curious. Unless you are into a particularly brand of slightly melancholic rap music I suspect you won’t be a fan!

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Off to Swansea next week for my first Christmas do (and some meetings of course) and generally I’m looking forward to the end of the year but pretty impressed I still have a bit of a spring in my step!

Onwards.