2024 Weeknote 21 : Reloading…

May 20-26

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

I moved. Digitally.

I grew tired of the sprawling digital estate I’ve been maintaining personally, so I decided to collapse several digital properties into the one you see here. In fact, this is the first “native” post on the new site and domain name. All other content on this site was migrated from other platforms. This new digitalpolity.com site brings together:

My Medium presence, which I used for mixed essays. I really like Medium in terms of features, but I didn’t like how so much of Medium’s content is behind a paywall and they’re not innovating the platform very much.
A Substack site I created just for publishing #weeknotes. While I am aware of the “Substack supports hate speech” controversy, that’s not been my main concern. I’m more concerned, about Substack’s future simply because I want to publish for free, but they are moving fast to monetize and free users might get kicked to the curb. WordPress has been a more reliable and responsible player for a long, long time, so I trust Automattic, uh… automatically.
A WordPress-based photo blogging site that I like, but I just don’t want to maintain separate sites, so I’m integrating that one into this one.

The GX Foundry site will remain wholly separate and it will stay on Substack. That’s a more formal shared-authorship site and the limited features of Substack are a plus, not a minus. Maybe one day we’ll move to Ghost or even here to WordPress. But for now, Substack is fine. I mean, Jennifer Pahlka is there, so that’s something.

Finally… why WordPress? Several reasons.

I’ve used WordPress off and on for a couple decades now, so it’s familiar
They now charge real money for their features, which is a good sign — it tells me I’m their customer, not their product
There are tons of integrations, in case I need something that’s not there
They caught up with the newsletter trend, so it’s much easier to offer that option now
They play nice with the Fediverse

See you at #CfASummit

Had fun making this graphic to share on LinkedIn. We really are excited to attend the Code for America Summit for the first time. Wish it could be in DC, since that’s a lot closer, but the Bay Area should be fun, too.

Our team:

John Proffitt, Chief Digital Officer (yours truly)
Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager
Eric Nutt, GX Development Manager
Kristen Pietras, GX Product Owner

Local conferences need an upgrade

This past week I attended an “IT Leadership” conference and it was… meh. As I’ve told my boss and some colleagues, I am a bit of a conference snob, having worked in public media in the past. Go figure: people that run radio and TV stations know how to put on a show.

These days local conferences aren’t organized by professionals in your field, they are run as money-making operations by publications of one kind or another. And while they may have good intentions, it leads to less-than-optimal results because:

local professionals are busy and don’t have the time or energy (or sometimes the expertise) to prep national-quality presentations, and
the publications playing host are more focused on collecting and selling contact lists to sales folks in the industry.

I actually have some ideas for improving local conferences, and even some ideas for starting one from the grassroots level. Shoot, in early 2023 I created my own day-long in-house conference at #FCDC and it went pretty well. The key, as always, is focusing on the needs of the audience.

So until I have some meaningful direct input over the local events, I won’t be attending any more. It’s too much effort for too little payback. I’ll stick to national conferences or at least major regionals. And I’ll study the agendas closely before committing.

Miscellanea

Not much more to report this week, as there was an all-day meeting, an all-day conference, a day off on Friday (to make up for losing Memorial Day to travel for #CfASummit ), and the rest of the time was just keeping up with stuff. That said, I did complete my initial “listening tour” with the Delivery Services team, getting their thoughts on what beetn going well, what’s not been going well, and ideas for how we can improve.