This is the the unabridged version of the script for my Camp Digital talk in Manchester on 03/07/2025 – including all the stuff I had to cut to keep to time!

The slides are here.

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The Power, Peril and Privilege of Working in the Open

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This was all an accident. 

Honestly this whole thing was an accident. Not doing this talk. The fault for that is a combination of a couple of wines in the bar after last year’s conference and Shaun having a better memory than I expected.

Be careful out there.

No – this whole working (and living) in the open thing.

It was never the plan. It certainly wasn’t how I was raised and honestly by the time I really realised just how open I had become online – and that a handful of people were actually noticing – it was already a practice I just couldn’t shake.

This Talk is a Retcon

There is this literary device that is popular in my beloved superhero comics – the retcon. Retroactive continuity – weaving a new narrative to make sense of the various contradictory and unconnected storylines and choices of the past in order to make some sense in the present.

That is what I am about to do here. Weave a tale that makes some sense of how a chronically shy and insecure guy from the Mild, Mild West ended up on this stage today in front of all of you.

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”

Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude (a book I have owned more than once but only ever lied about having read) said: “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”

In the spirit of Lean Product I appear to have simplified my life down to just Public and Secret.

…and this is the story of that Public life and how being so open about so much of it has helped and, on more than one occasion, hindered my career. 

Thankfully there are plenty of other talks here today that you can learn from and justify your attendance to managers when you log back in to Teams because I guarantee none of that….but I am going to be as open as I can about my working in the open.

My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style

Look if you know you know 🙂

My Definition of Working in the Open

For me working in the open boils down to doing your thinking out loud and being as authentic as possible. Anything less is – in my experience – counter productive. It isn’t about creating the perfect Instagram grid – it is about making sense of the world of work and maybe – occasionally – being a cry for help or a kind of group therapy.

I write for Future Matt. Any additional audience I’ve gained is a privilege but never the focus – if you write for likes it is harder to be authentic – or at least to be as authentically sloppy as I am.

“Blogging isn’t writing, it’s a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes.”
Tom Critchlow

I’ve Been Called…

Narcissistic, annoying, dangerous AND brave, inspiring, generous.

Some people HATE it…including some people who I think otherwise quite like me.

Radical Candor vs Radical Openness

This gets muddled up in people’s heads sometimes – I believe in being uncomfortably open for sure but the Radical Candor is quite different. Openness is about self reflection Radical Candor is almost always about judgement. The movement is a particularly popular thing with Tech Bros and Silicon Valley sycophants – I bet Musk loves it. I feel the same way about Radical Candor as Robert Pattinson feels about Method acting –

“I always say, you only ever see people doing method (acting) when they’re playing an asshole. You never see someone just being lovely to everyone going, I’m really deep in character.”

Milestones

Okay I am cheating a bit with the blogging – that first year I was blogging on Blogspot about the terrible Sunday morning football team that I had founded with friends that year – it was 2006 before I started blogging about work.

But these milestones over that decade had a MASSIVE impact on me and how I operate:

• 08/2005 – Started blogging*
• 07/2007 – Joined Twitter
• 08/2009 – Discover weeknotes via BERG
• 02/2010 – My first weeknote
• 09/2010 – Volunteer with Mozilla
• 04/2012 – GDS Design Principles
• 04/2013 – Start at the ONS
• 05/2014 – First conference talk
• 06/2015 – Being open at OpenTech

Twitter

If you can put aside the heartbreaking travesty that it became under Musk – or even the final few years with Jack at the helm – the truth is that none of this working in the open thing would have stuck without Twitter. Twitter provided connections and community and content and controversy – it made shouting into the void fun (for a while) when people started shouting back.

BERG

BERG – and one of its founders Matt Webb – did cool, fun projects that seemed to embrace a slightly quirky British version of the internet, related to but separate from Silicon Valley…even though I think they were partially responsible for ‘Silicon Roundabout’. They did things like School-o-Scope and Little Printer and they wrote about things like…well…School-o-scope and Little Printer – and about the ups and downs of running the studio.

It provided a template for a particular type of openness and it is a format that stuck. Weeknotes.

https://interconnected.org/home/2018/07/24/weeknotes

Mozilla

In 2010 I started volunteering with the Mozilla Foundation where I met Matt ‘openmatt’ Thompson who was leading the work to make the Mozilla community open beyond open source. So much of what I think of as working in the open was/is defined by what I learned from this period. In 2011 he published a blogpost on the topic which included what I suggest remains the best +/- definition of working in the open.

The goal of open is:

• participation. rocket fuel for smart collaboration.
• agility. speed. flexibility. getting shit done.
• momentum. communities want to push boulders that are already rolling.
• testing and rapid prototyping. iterating and refining as we go.
• leverage. getting greater bang from limited resources. punching above our weight.

The goal of open is NOT:

• public performance. creating the fake appearance of consultation.
• endless opinion-sharing. never-ending “feedback.” bike-shedding.
• magic “crowd-sourcing.” crowds aren’t smart — communities of peers are.

GDS Design Principles

GDS publish the original, official Design Principles (there might have been an unofficial AlphaGov principles with the notorious Fuck IE6 addition) and in at No10 was ‘make things open, it makes things better’ – work in the open, code in the open, open data – for a brief shining moment GDS empowered us to be open.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2011/04/28/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules/

An open evolution

…but why did I start down this path? Like (as I discovered in writing this talk) Hemingway did NOT say – “…it happened slowly and then all at once.”

Lack of Imagination

…but there is a real argument to be made that a lot of my decisions just came down to a distinct lack of imagination.

Frustrated Writer

I was, and am, a frustrated writer. I love to write and I admire writers. I think great written communication is a super power which is why I have so much love for content design.

It turned out there were a couple of things preventing me from becoming a writer though – the first was lack of talent (though that doesn’t stop everybody – certainly not a lot of chaps who look like me) and the other was I just didn’t know what to write about. That pesky lack of imagination.

So what did I do? I started to write about what I spent most of my time doing – my work.

Failed Teacher

I was already a failed teacher. If you can fail before you really get started. It was always my expectation that after University I would become a teacher. I love the feeling of helping someone understand something I care about – seeing that lightbulb go off when it clicks for them…unfortunately it turned out I wasn’t such a fan of kids!

Former Librarian

…and briefly, before I was snared in the World Wide Web, I was a librarian – a job I chose because I read it was the least stressful of professions, but also because I’d LOVED libraries growing up but also before I really enjoyed the process of helping people find information, and sharing it, cataloguing, curating it and creating lists (as you’ll see).

Perfect Recipe for an Open Worker

It turned out though that these elements made for a great open worker recipe – wanting to communicate, to educate, to share gave me the tools that I needed to pursue this approach.

The Open, Social Web

…and those early days of the open, social web – full of blogs, social media, RSS, APIs and ideas before all the walled gardens and addictive algorithms  – provided me a platform to do it on with no need to write code or swear at Github or whatever. I just got to get online and…well…be open.

Giles Turnbull said;

“A blog is your brain, over time, on the internet.”

…and after a while this became, and remains, true for me.

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The ONS Era

The ONS is going through it again but a decade ago it was also having a rough run – and it was focused on the website. The criticism was brutal:

“..it [the ONS website] is also the world’s worst website.” – Simon Rogers, Facts are Sacred

“the ONS website is a national embarrassment.” – Tim Harford, The Financial Times

“..the ONS website is virtually unnavigable.” – Peter Wilby, The Guardian

“the ONS website – aaaargh” – Chris Giles, The Financial Times

“The Office for National Statistics website makes figures hard to find and statistics are often presented in a confusing way..” – Public Administration Select Committee

Which meant I joined at an interesting time.

Change the Narrative, Build Trust

Now obviously the primary goal was to design and build a new website and data platform that met expectations but there were a couple of things we had to do to create the space and time to do that….we had to change the narrative – people believed the ONS could not be trusted with technology and we had to build trust because we couldn’t spend all of our time defending our choices and approach when we had so much to do.

Make Things Open, It Makes Things Better

So with the help of my boss Laura and Tom Loosemore from the nascent GDS I convinced the powers that be to support a pretty open approach…well I eventually convinced them but I’d already launched an ONS Digital blog – on wordpress.com using my own credit card and started our own Github…and an @onsdigital Twitter…and started accepted invitations to anywhere that wanted to hear about our plans.

Hopefully

It was all a bit of a punt. GDS had been really open from the get go and other teams had embraced it somewhat but we went big, early and often. We felt we had little to lose but it was a risk and lots of internal folks were far less supportive than those external.

Eventually

…but it started to work, slowly but surely. Previous critics endorsed our approach and ambitions. The team grew in confidence. We continued to share our ups and downs (and to be fair the downs continued) and I spent two years as much a Publicist as Product Manager (and ended up burning myself out as a result) but it worked.

Being open was our superpower. We influenced and were influenced by teams all around the world – feedback was always forthcoming and constructive. People volunteered to get involved.

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Top 3 Unexpected ‘Hits’

Quick timeout from the main presentation – here are my Top 5, totally unexpectedly popular moments of openness – I never, ever know what will be popular – apart from it will not be anything I sweated over.

3. Pret Problems

2020  – August was the first, how many attempts by now, go at a campaign to get people back to the office and I bashed out a less than thoughtful rant about why that was a mistake and it mainly seemed to be about saving Prets from closure. It got a few likes on Twitter and I moved on – I was just shouting into the void. Then a couple of days later my mentions went boom, the traffic on my blog exploded and for a couple of days I found myself at the centre of a bit of storm around the topic – basically because a couple of content farms had pulled a quote from my poorly written rant for their poorly written, but widely shared, articles. It was…interesting!

2. Dog Day Afternoon

When I was working from a WeWork in London they allowed dogs in the office. I know many of you will like this. I hate it. I am not comfortable around dogs. I know this identifies me as a sociopath or something but it is what it is.

Anyway after being jumped up on for the second time by a friendly enough pooch I shot out a frustrated and grumpy tweet and then went to a workshop for the rest of the afternoon.

When I checked my phone a couple of hours later the tweet had 1000s of likes, 100s of RTs and I was at least in the main cast if not the main character on Twitter for a moment. I got responses from all over the world and received a surprising amount of support…and then it was gone. Forgotten. Over.

1. Career Crises

The one thing I can guarantee is that I am openly having a career crisis – especially my on again / off again toxic relationship with consultancy (with a big C) it will be a crowdpleaser. People love to read about me second guessing my decisions and pondering life as a penniless bookseller rather than trying to care about margins or forecasts!

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But Really, Why Work in the Open?

It Allowed Me to Find My People

I’m a bit of a weird dude. I mean we all are to some extent and the power of the internet to make it easier to ‘find your people’ is well established but for me nothing helped me with this more than working in the open. Opening myself in this open way—talking about the ups and downs of my working week has always been useful for me. I wrote about it previously. The amazing thing that has happened over time though is this amazing community that has built up amongst the other like minded folks—it is an amazingly helpful, generous, supportive group and I’m proud to have been involved.

“A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people.”
Henrik Karlsson

Being Open Begets Openness

Being open encourages others to follow suit – to share, support and contribute to network of open thought and opinion that becomes safer and more useful as it grows.

It Gave Me a Platform That Gave Me a Career*

Okay I already had something resembling a career – and not a bad one. I was several years in and already led a few notable projects in my corner of the Internet but when I embraced working open some many more doors were open, so many exciting opportunities presented themselves – it allowed me to have the kind of career I could otherwise only have dreamed of.

It Provides a Reason to Write

Someone once suggested I only work (and travel) so I have something to write about. I suspect there is an inkling of truth in that statement. I find writing therapeutic and fun in a way that little else provides me.

Magic Extrovert Elixir

I’ve said it before but people tend not to believe it. I am SHY. Like the idea of a solitary life of letters is a long held dream…and once societal morals meant having a crafty shot from your desk whiskey was no longer appropriate I needed to find another way to cope with modern work – so I constructed an entire alter-ego through the medium of working in the open. A more confident, opinionated, funnier version of myself where people primarily encountered me online and made allowances for the bumbling, clumsy version they met in person. Over time the gap between the two became smaller but it is still there…

Short Circuits Small Talk

…but one of the big successes has always been the fact that if people know you from your open presence on the web it makes the nightmare of networking and small talk that much easier…in theory anyway.

As part of the prep for this talk I, like any good product person, decided to test that hypothesis. How well do people actually know me?

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Survey Results

I wanted to do this Family Fortunes style – but I forgot to limit the survey so it was actually 159!

The results showed that:

• 59% thought I sounded like a farmer (vs 41% pirate)
• 3% of people said I was from Bath – these are my enemies
• 88% knew I was a product person (though 6% thought I was a Service Designer which nobody wants)
• People were duped by DWP and the NHS but otherwise it was on the money
• People see me as much more tolerant than I am with 66% believing I tolerate Miro/Mural tools (I actually hate them)
• But people do get me. The vast majority going ‘soul destroying’ or adjacent when asked about my consultancy experience
• 60% knew NYC was my most visited international city
• Given how often I bring it up I was surprised 24% of people thought I’d spoken at SXSW

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Top 3 Problematic Interactions

It isn’t all rainbows and unicorns – sometimes working in the open has consequences…well in theory. They couldn’t have been that bad because here I am.

3. Client and Colleague concerns

Regardless of whether it is intentional, colleagues and clients will see themselves reflected in your openness. On multiple occasions I have been directly asked whether something I’ve shared was about them by upset or at least concerned colleagues – this is rarely the case – I try to stick to the Retro Prime directive https://easyretro.io/retrospective-prime-directive/ in all my open writing and am only hard on myself – or occasionally national figures! Twice people bypassed me entirely and made formal complaints (once was at least a little justified) and I know there have been entire backchannels discussing my weeknotes in particular in times past.

Similar to colleagues, clients can also sometimes read between the lines or just take 2 + 2 and come up with 17. On a couple of occasions when I was in consultancy clients stared so hard at my blog and social media it became like one of those Magic Eye posters and they started to see a picture emerge from it all – unfortunately for me it wasn’t any picture I intended (or could even really identify) but even if the customer is not always right they do need to be listened to and placated – especially when there is a lot of money on the line. On the worst of the two experiences lawyers were picking over my blogposts seeking hidden meaning (hidden also from me) and the whole thing was an exhausting and expensive waste of time.

2. Civil Service Coded

There was a period around 2015 when Civil Servants below a certain level were forbidden from speaking to the press – especially us dodgy digital folks. Which should have been fine because it was not like I was out hanging with the media between commuting to Newport every day.

However I did follow and was followed by quite a few ‘data’ journalists – some of whom were rising in prominence byline rise at the time…and when on a couple of occasions things I said in my blog and/or Twitter found themselves into articles in national media as attributed quotes from me (with no warning) I got in a bit of hot water. Luckily I had a lot of top cover willing to speak on my behalf but the Director of Comms never forgave me and things looked precarious for a while!

1. Unhappy Weirdos and Misfits

Now I am still not sure whether this is really true – it is a tale of second and third hand gossip, anonymous feedback and subtweets…but …for a couple of years between 2019 and 2020 there was a particularly powerful Government Advisor to Boris who like Voldemort I will refrain from naming. Anyway he likes to think out loud himself and he’d put a call out from a new kind of Government worker – weirdos and misfits with odd skills. I responded – more than once – and not exactly supportively but thought nothing of it. Honestly I was playing to my little crowd and was just ranting a little.

However one of the posts was shared by someone on Twitter who was a bit closer to the Advisor in questions circle and then it was shared by someone in his inner circle and then I started getting DMs suggesting I should delete the posts from quite senior acquaintances and then it was suggested I would no longer be considered for a role I was up for because “I was exactly the sort of idiot he wanted to get rid of in the Civil Service”…now all of this was backchannel and informal and the world blew up soon after. I have no idea if he even saw my posts let alone gave a shit but for a brief moment it really felt like I had fucked up.

Though I never deleted the blogposts.

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Open Privilege

…but let us be clear, I am wrapped in a lot of privilege that protects me from the worst of the internet.

Male, Pale, Stale

I’m a middle aged (and was already in my 30s when I started), middle class-ish, straight, white bloke. I have no children or caring responsibilities. My health is pretty suboptimal but otherwise I’m very aware of how lucky I am.

Would things have gone as well if I was a woman or a person of colour? Or god forbid a woman who was a person of colour? We all know the answer to that ~ the responses would have been very very different.

Early Adopter

There is privilege in being early to the party as well…I am not a surprise…at this point me being open about things is background noise. People in positions of power have professionally grown up with me doing this.

Strong Opinions, Loosely Held

Also while I am always opinionated I try to not be close minded – apart when it comes to crypto.

I am not living that XKCD 386 life https://xkcd.com/386/ – I don’t care if people are wrong on the internet…or if they think I am wrong.

Like JAY Z said “A wise man told me don’t argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can’t tell who is who.”

Uncontroversial Controversies

Also I am just really basic. Boring. I don’t stray out of my lane often and like I said earlier my biggest stress really was dogs in the office…but also I like my bubble. I’m not looking to burst it.

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Top 3 Open Opportunities

3. Keep Portland Weird

A few years ago I was in Portland as part of a big of a West Coast ramble – and I was blogging/tweeting about my trip – as I am prone to do and got a DM from Dan Hon out of the blue. If you don’t know Dan is an amazing writer and speaker with a great newsletter, a formerly wild Twitter account, previous Chair of the Code for America Summit, Product leader for the Gov of California, video games company founder, Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy for Facebook, Sony, Nike…anyway he is a big deal in my corner of the internet and we had never met and he saw I was in town and invited me to breakfast – where I spent a couple of hours having an amazing conversation with an inspiring guy and there is no chance that could have happened without my being so open.

2. Kiwi Conversations

In 2016 I went to New Zealand to be part of the wedding party for a friend who had landed up there. I’d already developed a relationship with StatsNZ in Wellington so had been in touch to arrange a pop in but I found myself invited to spend an extra week in Wellington – with multiple talks across the city – including meeting Ministers amongst all the digital teams. I’ve never felt more like a celebrity! I gave 7 talks in 5 days – including one that was a total surprise where I walked into a room expecting an informal chat with a couple of people to find over 100 people in a theatre with a LOT of questions – all of who read my blog!

1. Start-up Surprise

Way back in 2008 I wrote a couple of blogposts about the Bristol ‘start-up’ scene – I was reading TechCrunch a lot back then and I thought I was cool. Anyway one of the start-ups I had stumbled upon and written about saw the post and commented (back when people still did that!) And we had a bit of a conversation in said comments…and then email…and a day or two later I was in the 7 Stars pub getting very drunk with the founders (who it turned out had gone to the same notorious school as me a few years previous to me)…and the next day I awoke to a voicemail saying welcome to the company and an email confirming I was starting the next day.

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Commitment to the Cause

How can you not love a community when someone makes you a theme song..

..or where stickers are currency (see me in the pub if you want these!)

..but I probably went a bit overboard.

Humans.txt

None of it is possible alone though – working in the open is a team sport. These are just a few of the people who have inspired, supported, influenced, amused and annoyed me over the years with their own willingness to do things in the open. Thank you all and all the people I missed.

matt thompson laura dewis matt webb rachel coldicutt anil dash coco chan dan barrett dan hon russell davies melody kramer martin weller sam villis tom loosemore audree fletcher ann kempster giles turnbull emily webber jeni tennison matt edgar steve messer james higgott laura hilliger james cattell janet hughes stefan czerniawski louise cato doug belshaw sarah prag james herbert hillary hartley neil williams ella fitzsimmons terence eden anna shipman will myddelton honey dacanay richard pope steph gray alice bartlett simon wilson cyd harrell ian ames lou downe sarah drummond jeremy gould elizabeth ayer dave briggs kelsey gee vicky teinaki

Some of the first feedback I got regarding this talk was;

“Not sure if the lesson was to work in the open or to avoid it at all cost though 😬.”

Adrian Ortega

…and the honest answer is nor me – 20 years later and I’m just not sure…but I’m going to keep at it…in the open.

Peace out.