September 16 – 22
My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.
[1] A bit of branding and awards
This week marked a couple of major milestones.
Our name in lights
First, we finally (FINALLY!) mounted our neon-style LED sign for the GX Foundry in our office. I bought the sign in late 2023 and we waited months for our facilities group to help us mount it. They failed to engage with us for over 9 months so we took care of it ourselves. The credit for the clean mounting really goes to Aaron Szabo, our designer, who has a lot of experience with building and mounting branding elements like signage, conference displays, and more. Aaron also developed the GX Foundry logo in 2022-2023.
Here’s a shot from inside my office, looking out into the dark central office (a lot of folks prefer to have most of the overhead lights off), with the “neon” sign lighting up the space:
And here’s a closer shot:
Mission (Patches) Accomplished
The stickers below the sign are the Mission Patches celebrating key 2023 initiatives. We will add more patches later this year. And that leads to the second major milestone passed this week. We formally launched the organization-wide Recognition Program this week, with an all-staff awards ceremony on Tue, 9/17.
We handed out nearly 70 mission patches across multiple teams for work done during 2023. (Yeah, we’re late, but this was our first time and we had to hash out a lot of elements to get this done, including a painful procurement process. We’ll be faster going forward.)
Below is a shot of the Enterprise Technology Mission Wall, with tons of 2023 mission patches to get them started. This grouping represents a bunch of teams that work in multiple infrastructure disciplines and support:
This org-wide program grew out of the mission patch program I launched at the start of the year just with the GX Foundry, with the idea taken from the UK’s Government Digital Service and other sources.
Mission patches may seem a little silly or overdone, but they’ve been really well-received by our teams and they give credit where it’s due. Our teams do a lot of work for our partners, but they also work hard on building positive cultures and practices. Celebrating that work is a great way to get more of the good stuff and say thanks for the dedication.
Mission Patch Technical Details
- Patch designs are developed within a hexagon shape so they can fit together immediately and over time as patch collections grow
- Patch graphics are developed in Adobe Express or Canva, at pixel densities to enable high-res printing at up to 8″ in height (generally a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel image)
- Graphics are sent to a print-on-demand service, with enough 3″ patches for each project participant and one 8″ patch for mounting on the team’s Mission Wall
- All mission patches are custom-printed on vinyl
Our next round of awards are expected before the end of 2024 (celebrating the first half of the year), and then another batch in early 2025 (celebrating the second half of 2024). So we’re catching up fast. We expect to continue the pattern every 6 months, building out our Mission Walls and our personal collections.
[2] Miscellanea
- Saw an excellent AI piece this week: Challenging The Myths of Generative AI, which included a lot of smart quotes, but a key thing I wish everyone understood is this:
- …a Large Language Model is a statistical model of the language contained within pre-selected training data. The model is a result of that training. As such, it does not ‘learn’ but is created through data analysis.
- We’re building a tabletop exercise to explore the “hand off” between our partner relationship managers (what would be sales reps or account managers in the private sector) and our business analysts. I’ve never built a tabletop exercise before, so… this should be interesting! We hold it next week.
- We had session 6 of our Hack Your Bureaucracy book club this week. Still going strong.
- We completed a whiteboarding / discovery session with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) team this week (yes, they work on what you think they do, and it’s super-sensitive). We’ll be working with them to improve their technology, which will speed up their work dramatically. When you’re routinely pushing 20-30TB around your PC or around the secure network, you need some speed.
- We had session 2 of our Digital Services Academy with Granicus, and started to dig in on some truly awful forms we present to the public. It’s kinda stomach-churning to realize just how far we are from meeting the public where they are, especially when they are coming to us for help. If you think the IRS’ 1040 form is bad, try applying for public assistance anywhere in Ohio. At least Michigan had Civilla to help them along.
- I’m struggling with a resource management / client management problem that has been building for over 2 years and is now reaching a breaking point. There’s no easy or obvious answer and I can’t find a win-win-win solution. Best I can do is win-win-lose (kinda like the iron triangle of project management, I suppose).
- We’re less than a week from making an offer to an Application Developer candidate, to join our GX Foundry team. Very excited to see the culture shifted a little with a new hire.
[3] Watch This
This week saw the public release of new software at all layers of the Apple ecosystem, including iOS 18. There are tons of videos out there to walk through new features, but one of the most accessible to a general audience is just about anything Joanna Stern publishes.
[4] Internet Funnies
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