Weeknotes 2
My second attempt! In which I get to leave the house, I think about succession planning, and share a poem I found that summarises my desire to hide my despair at the world from those who might make it better for us.
My week:
A highlight of the week was being in a room — in person! — in the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) with brilliant experts, policy makers and activists for a session for TDs (MPs) with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. It was great to reconnect with the diverse and effective tech accountability community we have in Ireland — mobilisers UpLift, the highly respected Irish Council of Civil Liberties, the new Far Right Observatory, and UCD’s Digital Policy school. But it also reminded me how small we are; that most of us can fit in the one small room, along side and among key decision makers.
The session coincided with both Global Witnesses revelations of ongoing failures by Meta to deal with anti-Rohingya content, and a crucial step in the OECD accountability process that refugees are taking against the company through the Irish Government (see coverage by RTE). Ireland may be small, but as Ms Haugen reminded us, when it comes to tech policy we are a Superpower, even if we haven’t fully realised it yet. As Irish Rohingya activist Mohamed Rafique said in his remarks in the Oireachtas this week, this is a chance for the State to really take its responsibility as the home of tech companies seriously. We should find out the results of the case, led by Victims Advocates International, in a few weeks.
Much of the rest of my week was spent in ongoing scoping with our new Head of Campaigns. The whole team will be together in London next week for 3 days, so we are “heads down” doing lots of research to be ready to answer the big questions about what is next.
I also got to work on a funding application (something that I weirdly actually enjoy), digest the team’s feedback from our “Pulse” survey, and some groundwork for on-boarding our incoming Head of Operations.
Question on my mind: succession planning!
This week I started looking at a set of questions around organisational succession planning.
I am not going anywhere yet! But being a founder / ED is a strange position to hold. My goal with Digital Action has always been to build an organisation with its own identity, not one that is tied up with its current leadership. Yet to build something, you necessarily do have to give it a lot of yourself. I have never been especially good at work / life boundaries, both in terms of my mental and emotional energy, but also when it comes to my identity. Leading a team and building something through a pandemic has been tough. Becoming a parent has challenged my old (bad!) ways of working. I am working it out, learning a lot, and so so proud of this amazing group of people I have brought together and get to work with everyday.
But I am also finding comfort in being reminded that this thing I have built is separate from me, and that part of my job is to make sure it is strong without me. I have been able to access a brilliant thought partner in Ingrid Benedict, a coach who specialises in this area, and one of the many affirming things she said in our first conversation this week was “it is unrealistic for you, or anyone, to expect you to do this job forever”.
Things I appreciated this week:
This good news from the Digital Services Act process — this is something that the People Vs Big Tech community we are a part of has been pushing for.
This nice piece of work by ISD’s Ciaran O’Connor on TikTok — a stark reminder that we really have very little insight into what is going on.
And this Poem, by Maggie Smith, that hit home.
