We've published another essay over at FIELD STATION entitled Governance Is Not a Dashboard. This post is a TL;DR of it, explaining how applying the Viable System Model (VSM) is even more achievable in a world of AI agents.
…Team Belshaw is on holiday for a week. If you're still pretending to work, this is a great time for you to catch up on:
I'm really pleased at how this essay by Tom and me for FIELD STATION turned out. It's about decision making in the AI era, using some physics metaphors:
One of the first questions we ask new clients is "how do you make decisions?"
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I'm delighted to say that not only is TechFreedom now a project of FIELD STATION but that we've announced the dates for the next cohort:
TechFreedom is a three-session cohort programme that helps social purpose organisations see their technology dependencies clearly, assess hidden risks and dependencies, and build practical roadmaps towards greater sovereignty.
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For the past few months I've been following Nīkau, "a global platform, information and operations security consultancy in service to NGOs, impact-driven organisations and grassroots movements". In addition to security auditing, etc. they also run courses, such as Cloudbreak which is an intensive 6-hour session "[walking] participants through the process of building up and tightly securing powerful cloud infrastructure" to provide "alternatives to Google Docs & Drive, Zoom & more."
…A bigger announcement soon, but just to say that FIELD STATION, my new venture with Tom Watson, is now officially A Thing as we were incorporated at Companies House yesterday!
We're not making a big splash about it yet, but yesterday Tom and I met up to discuss FIELD STATION. Today we submitted documents to Companies House to incorporate.
In fact, yesterday was a strange day in that we finalised details for FIELD STATION, I had a bunch of admin to do for Dynamic Skillset, and I met up with Laura and John for the second-to-last WAO close-down meeting.
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