It is Saturday afternoon a couple of days after my talk at Camp Digital and now the Lions game is no longer distracting me, honestly, I am feeling a bit bereft. A not inconsiderable part of my brain has been grinding away at that talk for months…and before that I was preoccupied with my (related) ‘I thought a lot about’ essay. Oh and the Bristol, London and Birmingham stops on the Product for the People roadshow. 

The second half of 2025 looks a bit…well…empty. I’m doing a couple of days in Edinburgh for SDinGov but with zero responsibilities and in November I’ll be doing a little InterRail trip down to Barcelona for the Mozilla Festival – but again just to mooch around with zero expectations.

Once I mail out these last few I am getting out of the sticker game, I have no meetup or community of practice talks lined up, no deadlines to write for anyone who cares about such things.

Also I kind of feel like the era of my jobs newsletter might be creeping to a close – the recent changes to LinkedIn jobs and the upcoming version of Civil Service Jobs are game changers (in a negative way) to my process and I think it might just need one more domino to fall and I’ll have to walk away for my sanity.

I do have a job for the rest of the year of course so it isn’t like I am doing nothing. Interim Head of Product for MHCLG (really it is a Lead Product Manager role with some additional coaching) until Christmas-ish will keep me occupied but I do feel like I might need to find a fresh side hustle just to keep the voices in my head busy.

The book writing continues to be an itch that won’t stay scratched and I do think I worked out how to take everything I wrote for the talk and extend and expand it into something sort of (short) book shaped – Make Things Open – the book…but I’m not sure whether there is any point. I could just write all of that as a series of blogposts and just as many people would read it (and by just as many I mean hardly anyone 😅).

The other significant remaining itch is – run a conference in Bristol. 

Either;

 ‘Web of Words’, a conference about personal blogging, weeknotes, newsletters, podcasts and maybe even video (i.e. TikTok!) – nothing commercial, just people who do it for fun and niche audiences and to work in the open.

‘Internet of Public Service – the conference’. An event that embraces the broad church of public service I try to cover in the newsletter – Govs central and local, HE, NHS, libraries, charities, GLAM etc and their journey embracing digital ways of working.

I’m going to shut my brain off now and watch a movie with John Cena and Idris Elba playing the President and PM…I’m sure that’ll be a classic.