I just want my data to mean something

Er… hello?

This is a blog of openly licensed thinkery. They are doodles, thoughts and ideas of Bryan Mathers – little curious tidbits which have emerged from juicy conversations. Also, this is a dumping ground for abandoned artwork. But one man’s dump is another’s treasure trove – amirite?

You can include artwork from this site under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND licence.

  • Service Recipe

    Service Recipe

    Is it – A) – Our context is totally unique, therefore the solution required will be bespoke or B) Another organisation has had a similar problem, and figured out an effective solution. If only somebody out there was collecting these service “recipes” so others can remix them. Oh, they already are for the charity sector?…

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  • Reaching our User

    Reaching our User

    It’s one thing to contact users who are using your product. But how do you contact those that should be using it, but for some reason aren’t? And what’s the reason they aren’t? This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.

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  • Open Working

    Open Working

    Surprisingly, the concept of working openly is new for some people. Maybe it’s because we were told at school to cover our work – don’t let others peek. Or maybe it’s the shame of failure dictates that we should only share perfect outcomes that progressed according to plan (which makes for a very boring story).…

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  • Falling out of the process

    Falling out of the process

    Universal Credit: 25% of applicable people don’t apply. Or rather – a lot of those people started the process of applying, but never made it to the end. So why were they falling out of the process? You can read more about a discovery project to address this. This Thinkery was captured live during a…

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  • Face Mute

    Face Mute

    “My bandwidth isn’t great today so I’m going to face mute…” This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.

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  • Confidence

    Confidence

    Where do you get your confidence from? Practice? An inbuilt sense? Reassurance from others? And what leaks your confidence? I watched the highlights of a tennis match yesterday, and saw a young upstart blow away their mature opponent, but still need 6 match points just to get over the line. Don’t overthink it – you’ve…

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  • How do we reach our users?

    How do we reach our users?

    Thinking again about communications, it’s easy to forget that your audience may only be open to certain modes of communication. So it’s probably a good idea to survey them and see which channels they prefer. This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.

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  • Our communications

    Our communications

    There are two sides to every communication. And one of those sides is usually pretty ropey. In tricky circumstances, I’ve been amazed at email’s ability to remove any trace of human soul. The result leaves the communication open to the addition of any, and every, piece of baggage that the reader is carrying. At least…

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  • Make your website work harder

    Make your website work harder

    Who isn’t guilty of putting up a website and then completely forgetting about it. It takes so much effort to get a decent web presence over the line and usually it comes down to the creation of relevant, punchy content (or lack thereof). It’s easy to be completely oblivious to the fact that parts of…

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  • The story of a journey

    The story of a journey

    If in doubt, tell a story. Even better – visualise the story. When I try to think through how to tell a story, I always take to paper first and sketch each bit out as my brain jumps around from wrong turns at the start of the journey, to reflections from the summit. And oh,…

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  • Spinning wheel of destiny

    Spinning wheel of destiny

    At the end of the 10 week product definition course run by We Are Open co-op, it became time for each charity to create a wrap-up deck of all they had been learnt along the way (with lots of live drawn images to bedazzle the audience too!). And of course, in order to decide the…

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  • So frustrating…

    So frustrating…

    Isn’t it so frustrating to be taken outside your digital comfort zone? Luckily, all the questions you’ll ever need to ask have already been asked before – on the Internet. Now, if only you knew what the questions were and how to phrase them in order to search for that missing knowledge. Each software package…

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