I didn’t write up 2020. I drafted a few times, but I couldn’t finish the prose of it without feeling that I just needed to email it to a therapist rather than immortalise it on the internet.
With that said, I want to carry over a few things from last year in terms of thoughts and what I’m doing about them.
Continuing to try not to lose my shit at things. I have got a lot better at this. Age helps.
I missed out on a couple of jobs I really wanted last year and the feedback ranged around not being clear enough in my answers and being pipped to the post by someone with better experience. I’m still casting around for a good permanent job and I am taking the positive that my CV tweaking is getting better as I got more interviews last year than the one before. I just need to get better at interviews.
Following on from those two points I would like to re-iterate that I am not really feeling it for working in government at the moment. I continue to do contracting in government but each engagement leaves me feeling less generous about it.
There are a few reasons for this.
I started working in government around the time of the coalition. They had a lot of policies that I didn’t feel comfortable with, but were within my tolerance limit. I’ve often had to consider the fact that a lot of our system relies, essentially, on turns. I may not like it, but another policy direction will be along in a minute. But it’s been a decade of things getting slowly worse. Shredding norms, politics of consensus and rule of law are not things I want to even tacitly support.
I’ve been sitting on the Open Government Network’s civil society board for a while and the thing that ends up frustrating me with the movement is the assumption that the battles stay won. The government demonstrably does not care about “Open*”. Data, government, policy making, whatever. It is medium to long term planning stuff and that doesn’t fit with the mode of government right now.
I’ve been trying to write something about this for weeks (months), but the gist is: concepts like civic tech have a different constitution in different places. That’s fair enough obvs, but I have been organising a seminar on US civic tech and seeing a collaborative structure that spans across state, local, federal and non-profits makes me feel a bit tired of the single track of things here. If I worked (and I have) on a project in most major Whitehall departments, I’d put money on never seeing a local government bod or third sector delivery organisation except as user research participants. The idea of working in broad coalitions that extend beyond one individual organisation’s mandate feels impossible. I want that to change.
I should point out that plenty of people are trying to fix that, but it’s swimming against the tide a bit and even good work gets trampled.
I was ill for about 6 months of 2019 with one thing and another. 2020 made me feel utterly disposable in the way people talked about either sacrificing or locking up people with disabilities to save us or sacrifice us to the economy. It made me stop trusting in a lot of friendships because I felt so shocked by the attitude of a hierarchy of which lives are worthwhile. And coupled with the constant fear of dying, it’s been a bad patch and it isn’t helping.
I’m enjoying being a parent. The thing about the lockdown that I liked was that without a commute I could see the baby every day for hours and do actual stuff for her. It has also meant that I play my guitars every day to sing along with her, meaning that I actually practice.