Derek’s Goals for Q1–2024

Weeknote: Jan 5, 2024

Happy 2024, everyone! As we step into the season of New Year Resolutions, I’m excited to revive my practice of Weeknotes. Every Friday, I’ll carve out an hour to reflect on the week’s learnings, the ideas igniting my imagination, and the challenges I’m pondering.

A little forewarning: these notes might be unrefined and messy, but I aim to make them engaging and insightful.

This week, being shorter and quieter on the meeting front, allowed me to concentrate on strategizing and setting goals for the upcoming quarter. Among my objectives are to enhance organization (navigating through my ADHD-induced whirlwinds — squirrel) and to harness tools that elevate my productivity.

So, here’s a snapshot of my current priorities for the quarter, though they might evolve:

Canada Business Development

While I’m not in sales but I believe that Apolitical can help those working to improve government (that’s why I am here). Canada, being our second-largest community after the UK, holds an important place in our hearts. I’m exploring ways to bolster support and fortify our ties with local organizations and departments. It’s thrilling, especially since this is a way I can help make a real difference in my home country. Projects that particularly excite me include:

• AI Survey: Collaborating with TBS and CSPS-Digital Academy, we’ve crafted a comprehensive survey to gauge how Canadian public servants are utilizing AI and where they need more support. The next step is to get this survey into the water supply.
• Open-Source Repository: Developing a public, open-source repository showcasing Canadian case studies in digital government transformation and public sector innovation.

Communities

December marked the beta launch of Apolitical’s latest feature, Communities. It’s a social platform geared towards fostering global communities of practice. With the platform now live, we’re inviting groups to join us in shaping these communities. We launched our first, AI in Government, just before the holiday and are looking to launch 19 more around themes like Policy Innovation in the coming months.

I’ve penned a strategy piece over the holidays to guide this initiative. I’d love your feedback.

Many of us have been clamouring for something like this for a while, now we need your help to figure out how to make it sing.

Insights

As the Community Insights Lead, insights are at the heart of what I do. My goal for Q1 is to refine my approach. This involves two aspects: inputs and outputs.

• Inputs: Reading articles (newsletters, blogs and social media), attending events (aiming for one each week), and conducting 3–5 interviews weekly. Additionally, I plan to spend a few days monthly in different organizations’ offices (if you are based in London and open to hosting me for a day let me know). I need to find a way to systematise all of this to make it easy.
• Outputs: Currently, this will mainly be these weeknotes, but…

My Q1 dream is to develop an Insights Engine. Ideally, I’ll create (or acquire) a Large Language Model (LLM) that feeds on the plethora of newsletters, blogs, social media content, and Apolitical’s rich resources. Achieving this would be a monumental success for Q1.

Public Sector Strategy Network

Apolitical is helping organise a global invite-only retreat for senior public sector leaders in London this May. My role involves helping curate the guest list (suggestions are welcome!) and shaping the agenda, including organizing a site visit in London that showcases exemplary foresight in policy and service delivery (let me know if you have ideas).

Tool Mastery

In terms of tools, my goal is to master and integrate the following:

• Asana — our go-to platform for task management
• Hubspot — CRM to manage all our relationships
• Evernote — for note-taking on the fly
• Otter AI — personal assistant and note-taker

This is on top of the tools I already use: Slack, Notion and Google stuff. Are there tools that you use that you would recommend? In particular, I am keen to explore AI tools I can leverage to turbocharge my capacity.

Spent a solid 30 minutes on this… Now, let’s see what a touch of ChatGPT magic can add…

And voilà!

Ok, it needed some final edits to make sure it kept my voice but not bad.