Some people living on a neighbouring street had arranged for it to be closed off last Sunday so that kids could play in the road. Our daughter’s recently become friends with a little girl living over there so we went and joined in with what turned out to be a wonderful event. It was probably partly the novelty, but the fact of the street closure drew loads of people out into the street and there was a great feel to the whole thing. Events like that are one of the things I’m really enjoying about living in our corner of Hackney.
Monday took me a fair way from Hackney as I headed down to Fareham with David and Aleks to learn more about the processes involved in the census and potential futures for it. Fascinating stuff. I was out of the GDS office again on Tuesday morning for the first couple of sessions of Think G-Cloud and on Wednesday catching up with colleagues at Ministry of Justice.
I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings at MOJ over the past few months and I’ve realised that if I’m going to help with their projects it’s important to just be there informally too, so I’m trying to find a morning each week to spend there. That’ll be much easier since Friday’s delivery of my MOJ pass which should significantly reduce the amount of time I spend hanging around in the reception at 102 Petty France.
Back in the office we had some good sessions with CESG organised by Gareth, digging into the intricaties of some of the problems we’re facing and then zooming out to talk more broadly about ways of approaching risk management. That’s a really important part of so much of our work - government has a range of shorthand terms that can be useful in conversations about managing risks, but it’s very easy to slip into a reductive approach where that shorthand takes the place of a proper conversation about risks and how we might mitigate them.
Add to that the first of our regular GDS developer catch-ups in a while, coffees to catch up with various members of the team, an interview with a developer who may come and join us soon, and a little plotting of the future of some of our internal search components with Mazz and David, and that was another full week.