Dr Laura James's writings

It's been a week since my last weeknotes . It felt a long one, and by half way through I wondered if I already had more than enough notes for the week. Luckily a lot of what I thought I'd learned is already out of date; this is still quite long, but rest assured it's not all pandemic response here. Skip ahead if you want content about robots, AI and history instead. I hope I've been being somewhat useful this week; it feels like you should be useful now, if you can be. I've distributed parish council leaflets, because local mutual aid matters (or you can volunteer for the NHS or the national care force .)  I've also been working online, hopefully in areas where I have some useful experience and skills. https://twitter.com/ofthesparrows/status/1242383687926329351 It's such an incredible privilege to be able to stay home, to be able to volunteer to do anything, to be connected online, when so many others must work or care or struggle. People n

There was a lot of week in this one. For those working from home for the first time, it is not usually like this.  I saw many projects springing up and bringing people together. More on those below. It also feels like there are new divisions appearing. Those who can work from home (with or without this being deeply challenging for all kinds of reasons such as space, equipment, responsibilities, and adaptations) and those who can't. It must be very tough to be a supermarket worker, for instance - all those people, definitely within 2m of you, and a critical service. (Are they getting the support they need?) That's without thinking about the economic impact of businesses closing and lost jobs, reduced hours and pay, and so on. There's also a division between those who are trying hard to do the right thing, staying home, maintaining physical distance, and so on (in the face of often not very clear guidance), and those who are still out and about, doing their own thing. 

I started this week reading Cassie Robinson's write up of her recent talk , which was fascinating and nourishing and open (and also raising questions at the start about the nature of big keynote speeches). It covered quite a lot of ground, starting with Cassie's experiences in design: During this unconventional and varied set of experiences, I learnt too about the biases people have. How much people want to put you in boxes. How much people need a job title or an organisational association to assign value to you. How much people are afraid of you for not conforming, or because they don’t understand you. How much people can’t cope with just how much you do and how many different things you do. There's a great middle section looking at the Berkana Institute model for change, with the multitude of roles across the dominant and emergent systems, all needed for things to move on. I've seen this diagram before but the descriptions of all the different roles (and

It's International Women's Day. Again. I used to try to write blog posts about this, but now I just point to the sage words of others. Here's Rachel : https://twitter.com/rachelcoldicutt/status/1236577341851209728 and Alex: https://twitter.com/iotwatch/status/1236348967883071488 Via Martin Weller, a rant from Maren Deepwell about washing - open washing, equality washing, community washing. I am in a position of privilege in many ways, in that I am a white European woman in a leadership position, I am well educated and I have the knowledge, skills and connections to navigate life to name some examples. Some of this privilege I was born into, some is due to luck and some I have worked hard to achieve. I also experience a lot of prejudice and discrimination and inequality as a woman working in a tech related field and in a myriad of other ways. Both have helped motivate me to actively try to see more of how others experience the world, and to do what is in my pow

I updated my website . I'm on the lookout for my next main job, and in the meantime available for short term consultancy projects. (Many thanks to Ira Bolychevsky for some of the motivation to get that done, and Liminal people for ideas and feedback :) It was fascinating to get a sense of the corporate response to climate risks (especially those of finance and insurers) at the Business Risk from Climate Change event last week. There's more business readiness to respond than might be apparent from the outside. Banks, for instance, are now seeing climate change as a financial/operational risk, not just a matter of reputational risk and CSR.  I liked the idea of talking about "disruption days per year" as a different way of assessing climate risk than "once in a century floods." On the opposite end of the spectrum, I met the Cambridge Carbon Map team who are working at a grassroots level to create a public map of carbon emissions in the city. They are