Notes on week 9 of 2025: 


President and Vice President versus President

I started typing these notes on Friday, but stopped to watch the full video of the Trump-Zelenskyy fireside chat (on YouTube).


You can see President Zelenskyy is visibly disagreeing with things, but it isn’t until Vice President Vance goads him that it really kicks off. Then President Trump joins in and it goes from a fireside chat to a fucktastrophe.


Never seen anything like it 😔  


Top 3 notes:


UK Gov Camp grants

I did the UK Gov Camp finances earlier, and there’ll be £4,317.85 left for grants from March. Originally Steph, Vee & I decided among ourselves if prospective grants would be successful. But now Steph’s stepped down and Vee’s thinking of doing the same, I’ve made some changes. 


Applications are now published in #grant-fund channel of our Slack instance. Members then have a week to comment on and approve 👍 or reject 👎 them. After which I make the final decision if there’s a tie in the voting (which there hasn’t been so far). 


I still need to automate the whole process, but apart from that it seems to be working well. It’s good to see people getting involved and making suggestions. I wonder what else can be done this way?


One Team Gov reboot

The One Team Gov breakfast restarted this week, with Derek taking the reins for the first one. We had 10 people on camera at 1 point, with a 50/50 gender split and 1 person of colour. Good mix of conversations using Lean Coffee Table to source and manage them.


From next week it’ll be called the One Team Gov Wednesday meetup (virtual) and there’s already 30 people signed up. I’ve also invited everyone who was on the old invite list, plus shared it on the One Team Gov Slack and all the socials. 


Some fellow One Team Gov organisers and I met a few weeks ago, and talked about rebooting it, hence the resurgence. I’m hoping it leads to more events, but we’ll see. 


Midlands job search

Janet & I put our house on the market recently. This week we accepted an offer, which is good because we’ve made an offer on a house in Staffordshire (also accepted). 


I thought our nearest city would be Manchester, so started looking for work up there. Seen a few delivery manager (DM) roles come up on Civil Service Jobs, but nothing that’s really grabbed me so far. That typed, I know there’s some DWP DM roles coming up soon, who I’d love to work for again. 

by OpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109995356


However, turns out my nearest city is Stoke-on-Trent on the Crewe–Derby line, with Crewe and Derby also easily accessible, obviously. 


If I change train just once, I can also get to Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham in around an hour. 


So I’ve started looking for roles back in local government, including: 


In terms of aggregator sites, so far I've found:


Even tempted to start a delivery manager job mailing list, modelled on Jukesie’s excellent Internet of Public Service Jobs. 


So anyway, if you know of anything delivery or community wise in the Midlands, let me know.


Learnings

I have so much to learn about the middle and North of England.


In summary: 


Listening history