Notes from the Launch
What we learned launching Field Station, and where we go from here.
Field Station began, as these things often do, with a conversation that neither of us expected to lead anywhere. Tom and I had been talking for months about the same handful of problems — the quiet consolidation of public digital infrastructure into a few private hands, the absence of serious alternatives, the gap between what communities need and what the market supplies. At some point the conversation stopped being about what someone should do and became about what we could do. That was the pivot.
We launched Field Station in March 2026 as an action lab on the future of work, technology and society. The term "action lab" matters. We did not want to build another think tank. There are enough reports. What interested us was the space between analysis and implementation: the experiments, the prototypes, the organising work that turns a diagnosis into a direction of travel.
The launch itself was quiet, deliberately so. A short note to people we knew, a handful of posts, a website. We expected a trickle of interest. Instead we heard from councillors, civil servants, community organisers, and technologists working inside large institutions who recognised the problems we described and wanted to talk about what to do. Several had been working on their own projects — local-first tools for planning departments, mutual data trusts for health research, open procurement frameworks — and were looking for company.
The demand is not for more analysis. It is for infrastructure that people can actually use and control.
A few patterns emerged from those early conversations. First, there is far more activity than public visibility suggests. People are building civic technology in local government, in universities, in co-operatives, and in community groups, often in isolation and often without the language to describe what they are doing as part of a bigger shift. Second, the bottleneck is rarely technical. It is institutional. Procurement rules, funding structures, and the risk appetite of public bodies make it harder to adopt a community-built tool than to renew a contract with a large vendor. Third, people working on these problems want peers more than they want platform. They are not looking for a conference. They want a network.
We are still in the early stages of working out what Field Station becomes. We are running experiments, publishing briefings, building connections. We are based in North East England because place matters — the best civic technology is rooted somewhere specific, even when its ambition is general. The coming months will test whether the appetite we saw at launch translates into sustained collaboration. The early signs suggest it will.