Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • Rookie (or a year of mentoring)

    Rookie (or a year of mentoring)

    For the past few years I have volunteered as a mentor for the 1 Million Mentors programme, a national initiative that provides free career focused mentoring for 16-25 year olds. This week another year of mentoring comes to an end, and so I want to reflect on how it went and what I take away from the experience.

    Confidence and Perspective, the image featuring in this post created by Bryan Mathers / Visual Thinkery, relates very well to how I felt as a mentor and at times when putting myself in the shoes of my mentee.

    Rookie year

    This was my first time mentoring a final year undergraduate. As my previous experience as a volunteer mentor was with mentees looking to move into post-16 education or training and my professional coaching clients are mostly in employment already, you might call it a ‘Rookie’ year for me. It was all about finding my way in the very fast moving, competitive undergraduate recruitment market.

    That is my first take away from this year: it was a new challenge that kept me on my toes, and that is always a good thing.

    AI and recruitment

    Both in my work with clients and in my own experience I have come up against how far and how deeply AI-powered tools and platforms are changing recruitment. However, I found the practices we encountered through our mentoring work even more stark and opaque. Entry-level, science-based jobs lend themselves well, it seems, to automation, and that can make the process of applying for opportunities difficult and disheartening (at all stages of one’s career, but especially, I would say, at the beginning).

    That brings me to my next take-away: authenticity is key to making any part of the recruitment process meaningful. Any practice that doesn’t allow for that deters good candidates.

    Connecting in safety

    Much of my work happens on the open web and I am an advocate for open practices, including open leadership practice. That said, this year’s mentoring experience really made me question how well we are doing in Higher Education to help students gain not only skills but also the confidence to connect in a way that feels safe to them.

    Kudos to the mentoring programme, which provides excellent training on safeguarding and sharing information. But beyond the confines of institutional provision, the open web, especially social media platforms like LinkedIn, soon became problematic or felt unsafe.

    My take away here is that there is a palpable pressure to optimise yourself and your online identity which is in conflict with the aforementioned desire for authenticity and finding meaningful work connections and opportunities.

    Students welcome, but…

    One of the sessions that made me reflect the most was a day when we looked at professional bodies and industry organisations that were explicitly trying to welcome students and recent graduates.

    As soon as we dug a little deeper, the friendly welcome turned into incomprehensible next steps. There was little to go on for a student looking to learn more about a specific career path or connect with professionals in their chosen field.

    Having worked in this space for much of my career I was disappointed to see just how hard to navigate this was – and just how much confidence was needed to take that first step into a new profession.

    This resonates closely with my coaching work, in which building confidence is a theme for both emerging and established leaders – particularly when connecting or collaborating online.

    Home and work

    Lastly, and this made me reflect a lot on how to build confidence and find perspective, is the role of home study and home working in all this. In my research for my new book I’ve come across data that indicates strong disparities between how established and new employees experience virtual work, and this affects early career workers still more.

    Food for thought for me and my research, and a highly complex challenge for leaders and their institutions.

    Thank you!

    I am deeply grateful to my mentee and to the programme for a highly rewarding experience, and I am already looking forward to volunteering again next year.

  • The Radio (Summer Camp) Returns

    The Radio (Summer Camp) Returns

    It’s been an eventful summer already, and the next big event is just around the corner: on 18th August the DS106 Radio Summer Camp returns! YES!

    Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of all things audio and especially radio. So for the past few years it’s been a real pleasure for me to be working with folks who share my enthusiasm and are game to have radio based events, too. Two years ago we ran our first full-radio online event which turned out to be a real success and ever since we have been experimenting with the format.

    This month we are running a 1 day event on the DS106 Radio airwaves, 12 hours of radio to listen to, join in with and blog along to. It’s online conferencing without a screen. All you need to do us tune in – and I very much hope you will as it’s promising to be a very fun day indeed.

    There’s a mix of music, chat and interviews with special guests, a game session and campfire socials, too (check out the schedule).

    One of the things I love about radio-based events like this is that it encourages different types of conversations, and allows for more informal, impromptu encounters and thinking out loud, that listening to someone go through a Powerpoint presentation just doesn’t.

    Another great benefit is that folk who are listening don’t have to be at their desk or stare at a screen to participate. Instead, you can listen in live (and we usually make recordings available afterwards so you can catch up with session you’ve missed).

    Having had the privilege of attending some conferences in person earlier in the summer, I feel this is the next best way to connect with colleagues at a distance, and because it’s free and on the radio, there’s no Zoom link to find or webinar software to make work.

    Come along and join in the DS106 Radio Summer Camp.

  • Newsletter, August 2026

    Newsletter, August 2026

    Welcome to the Summer Edition

    It’s summer holiday season and I am sitting at my desk, working (with a blissfully quiet inbox). If you are reading this, you might be working, too, so here’s a friendly wave from me to you.

    My main focus for work over the summer is research (a brand new case study for Reclaim is in the works), course development (working on a new leadership postgrad module) and evaluation (for a new vocational education programme).

    Meanwhile, pro bono work also continues: mentoring through the national 1 Million Mentors programme has concluded for another year, and with my executive coaching also taking a break over the summer, I’ve volunteered as a Member of the Conference Committee for ALT’s Conference which is coming to Cardiff in October!

    With Megan Kime and Simon Thompson as a truly fab Co-Chair team and really interesting, timely themes, this should be a wonderful event (and the CfP is still open for a few more days).

    The photo featured in this newsletter is from my long run last Sunday, down the Taff Trail along the river, making the most of a temporary reprieve in the heatwaves.

    Catch up on podcast episodes

    The podcast is enjoying its usual summer break and we’ll be back with fresh episodes in September. Catch up on the podcast on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Castsor via RSS Feed .

    Recent blog posts

    This year is truly flying past, and I can’t quite fathom how the next edition of the newsletter will be the September one already. For me, that means it’s time to head outside with the dogs (who are looking at me full of hopeful expectation), and make the most of summer.

    Thank you for reading!

  • My home on the open web.

    My home on the open web.

    Blogging about blogging. Again.

    Hello again. As you might have noticed, the blog has had a revamp. It’s a new theme (WordPress 2025) and a streamlined presence. It’s part of my summer project on digital sustainability (I’ve blogged about this in two separate posts, linked below) and part mid-year revamp.

    It’s also been a good time for some blog maintenance as it’s felt a little quiet on the blogs I follow and read regularly as even bloggers need a summer holiday once in a while (not all of them, I hasten to add). Even as I write this, I can hear the (mostly) cheery chatter and laughs of the kids of my neighbourhood playing outside, running from one house to the other, making the most of their summer break.

    Anyway, the other day I was talking about things that are characteristic of who I am, and “I blog” was the first thing I said.

    Blogging has been part of my life since art school, through my postgrad and PhD years, into the early years of my career, into my tenure as a CEO and now my business owner era (already 3 years going on 4! How time flies 🙂 ).

    And I still love it. Quite often I wake up in the morning and think about what I’d like to blog about today. Or I compose blog posts in my head when I am out running. Or first thing in the morning when I sit down at my desk to start work.

    If that sounds a little odd or too idyllic, then rest assured that I have plenty of mornings when my focus is drawn by something far more pragmatic than blogging… and yet, blogging is an extremely pragmatic activity for me.

    Yes, yes, I know, I have already written about my love for blogging, for reflective writing, journalling and so forth at length, but as time (and technology) move on, I think it’s a point worth making afresh. Not only because our attention is now more valuable than ever before, but also because there are now countless ways to automate any kind of reflective activity. Just follow a prompt, or enter one, and it’s done.

    I am fully aware that publishing anything on the open web nowadays is not without risks or pitfalls, and not without environmental impact either. I certainly am very intentional about what I publish nowadays. And I have always tried to be.

    That said, having a blog, and more specifically, the process of blogging, remain important enough to me so that I intend to keep at it. I continue to blog, as often as I feel like it, and I have no intention of stopping.

    Because for me blogging is…

    • making my home on the open web.
    • getting my thoughts in order.
    • building an archive of my work that I own.
    • weaving a narrative of my work and career.
    • a way of expressing myself.
    • leading by example.
    • sharing what I love.
    • advocating for what I stand for.
    • making a small corner of the web how I like it.
    • celebrating what inspires me.
    • charting my experiences, both good and bad.
    • a strategy to help me articulate my thoughts.
    • engaging in dialogue.
    • sharing my practice.
    • giving back to the communities I am part of.
    • paying tribute and thanks.
    • documenting my professional practice and development.
    • reflecting on just about everything.
    • building a network.
    • connecting with like minded people.

    Thank you for reading. I would keep blogging even if no one read my blog, and indeed there are many posts that only me and maybe a family member have read (“Hallo, Mami! Danke, daß Du hier immer mit dabei bist!”).

    I hope whatever prompts you to read blogs and (hopefully) motivates you to keep blogging yourself is still going strong. Long may we keep blogging. #4life.

    Previous posts in Digital Sustainability

    • From wildfires to websites

    • Digital Sustainability Part 2

  • Digital Sustainability Part 2

    Digital Sustainability Part 2

    In my last post I described how I have started to think about how to make my work more environmentally sustainable, and described the practical steps I am taking to achieve this, starting with decreasing my digital footprint. Thanks to everyone who got in touch with comments and tips digital sustainability (I’ve updated the original post now to include these).

    This is part 2, in which I want to talk about the material, physical stuff and how I am tackling that. As before, I found this post really inspiring and I have taken some of the tips to foster digital sustainability and applied them to my own context.

    Reducing digital waste

    This is probably the aspect of digital sustainability that I find the easiest to implement. Having worked for most of my career in the for sector has accustomed me to purchasing technology with longevity in mind, and my current laptop is a Chromebook that is nearly ten years old and still going strong. Likewise, my last phone was 9 years old when I replaced it. I like living with my devices and I have translated that ethos straight into my own business. Like many families we share older devices amongst older and younger users, extending the lifespan of each before it gets recycled.

    I also find my analogue tech, like a watch or a record player for instance, contribute to the longevity of using technologies, and wherever possible I tend to buy things like digital games, books or music outright or borrow them from the public library so that I am not reliant on subscription services as much. That applies to work-related digital content, too.

    In general, I try to follow the “reduce, re-use, recycle” approach familiar from general recycling and apply the same logic to digital waste and consumption.

    A note on purchasing

    As I have written about previously, I try to make good decisions about where I spend money, for example by doing less shopping online and switching how and where I get (audio)books from. When it comes to work-related purchasing, I try to choose independent hosting companies or purchase open source software that supports community development such as Fission and AudioHijack. Small choices, that ultimately add up to much of my purchasing over the course of the year. It’s not always possible to find alternatives to mainstream or big tech products, but more and more often it is.

    Energy Efficiency

    Energy efficiency was next on my radar. As I have explained in part 1, I have worked hard to reduce my digital footprint and space in the cloud already, and that helps to minimise needless energy required for hosting and storage. I also found other tips such as using energy saving modes or switching off devices when appropriate, helpful. I use less energy and since last year we have solar panels on the roof, which helps enormously. We are lucky that this is an option for us, and I am grateful that it is especially in times when energy provision and pricing is so volatile.

    I also continue to stick to my audio-first preference over video, in most of my work and for my podcast. Although many podcasts have moved over to video and there is a huge push in that direction, I am not planning to do so. I prefer audio as a format in any case, but it is also much more digitally sustainable from the production process to promotion and distribution. I don’t want folk listening to my podcast to have to download or stream 30-60 min of video each time. It’s to my detriment in terms of listener numbers as many podcast platforms push video podcasts more than audio only, but I feel it’s a trade-off I am willing to make. My podcast is a passion project without a commercial angle, and I want its digital footprint to be as light as possible whilst making the most of the medium.

    In a similar way as I prefer audio to video, I have turned off AI-powered search by default, enabling me to search on the web without utilising an unnecessary amount of energy. It’s a tiny gesture in the larger lifecycle of AI tools or agents but it is a relatively easy step to take (and nearly all of my search queries work perfectly well with traditional search).

    Just add -AI to any search query removes AI-generated overviews and reverts to a more traditional set of results. It works across Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo and removes the need to install a specific plug-in or browser extension (thanks to this AI report  for the tip!).

    I also found this https://huggingface.co/spaces/AIEnergyScore/Leaderboard a very helpful starting point for comparing different models in terms of energy consumption.

    Overall, how are things going when it comes to reducing digital waste and increasing energy efficiency? Progress score: 6/10 (by which I mean I feel I have done about 60% of the things I am aware of and able to do).

    Next up on my journey to greater sustainability is not what I do, but how I work, and adopting more digitally sustainable working habits. More on those in the next post.

  • From wildfires to websites

    From wildfires to websites

    Yesterday evening after work we drove to the coast, where I took the photo that features on this post. It’s a view of Southerndown Beach, on the south western coast near Cardiff. One of my favourite spots near us and absolutely stunning all year round. The sea breeze and fresh, salty air were a world away from the reality we had woken up to at 3am that morning, smoke and smell of acrid burning filling the house, making me worry for a few minutes that something was on fire. It wasn’t, everyone was safe. Or rather, we were safe. The smoke and smells came from wildfires which are still burning, consuming hundreds of hectares. Not on the scale of the fires in Southern Europe or elsewhere in the world, but enough. It’s only added to the summer of prolonged hot and dry weather, still unusual in Wales, where rain used to be the order of the day, and water shortages.

    All of this goes to say that my focus on sustainability and the environment has only deepened, and extended from what we can do at home and locally, to how I work online. I am also teaching and coaching on digital sustainability in education in the next academic year, and this has inspired my to test a few of the approaches for myself. In this post I share a few of the things I tried and how I got on.

    Tech and the environment

    The environmental impact of tech, for example the natural resources used by large scale data centres, have gained a lot of visibility in the news across the world. Similarly, there is a lot of information available here in the UK about digital sustainability, specifically for Higher Ed, for AI and for the tech sector in general, most of which is focused on what sectors and/or large organisations can and should do.

    Whilst really informative, high level reports are hard to apply to one’s professional practice, and so I started with this toolkit https://datadetoxkit.org/en/environment/internet . Some of the resources it links to are a few years old now, but I found it a useful starting point and it’s key recommended actions align closely with those I came across in this blog post which in turn inspired me to come up with my own three broad categories to work on.

    1 Decreasing my digital footprint

    At the start of last year I reviewed my digital tech stack and looking back at these posts makes it clear how much progress I have made in streamlining my online platforms and services and declutter my digital domains.

    Blog

    This blog, my home on the web, continues its happy life on Reclaim Hosting, where it’s been for more than a decade. Over the past few months I have however streamlined it considerably, and retired and deleted many old pages and old content that has become obsolete. Not blog posts, I hasten to add, as I wish to keep them, but still content that is no longer needed and which just takes up space and energy. I have also stopped sending out my newsletter via the blog, for which I had set up several services like Mailgun and Mailpoet. Instead, I have simplified it into a monthly post that is publicly available without a subscription and I also send it out via LinkedIn.

    Business website

    My business website quickly ballooned once I started working for myself on a full-time basis. Within a year it grew to host several online courses, resources, a dedicated coaching blog and plenty of other content. Whilst it was useful at the time, I was keen to move it away from Squarespace (originally chosen for its course building functionality) and simplify GDPR compliance and so forth, so a very paired back version of the site has now moved to an independent UK-solution that runs on renewable energy. The rest has been deleted, and I have just kept the bits I want to re-use at a future point.

    Emails and documents

    One of the last items on my list to tackle was the VERY long tail of emails and documents accumulated. Martin recently blogged about unsubscribing from things, and I have likewise undertaken a great cull of emails and documents. I’ve deleted tens of thousands of emails and cleared out document storage across several accounts. Depending on where you keep your mail, that can be quite tricky, as platforms such as Outlook only archive things instead of actually deleting them unless you make the effort to go in and specifically delete them. By comparison, Gmail is quite good at offering bulk deletion options, but still takes time to actually do it.

    Meanwhile my archive of digital documents also had a clear out. 5 copies of the same invoice from 2014? Deleted. Ten versions of an article I published in 2019? Deleted. Notes from PhD interviews from 2003? Deleted. It takes a lot of time to sift and select what to retain and what to delete, but it’s intensely satisfying, practically helpful and has reduced my storage needs for documents by around 70%.

    Photos and videos are next, although I must admit I haven’t yet tackled them because I struggle to manage competing platforms from various stages of my life. At the moment I try to make physical albums, books and prints periodically just in case the digital versions all get lost at some point, and I try to keep only my favourite versions of photos rather than ALL the attempts taken. But that is definitely work in progress.

    Thanks to Karen Howie, who in response to this post shared a tool tip for managing images with me: digiKam is a free and open-source image organizer and tag editor.

    Productivity

    Some of the other tools I reviewed last year I have stopped using all together: Canva, for example, I stopped using, once its AI integrations became more of a hindrance than was worth it for me. Instead, I bought Procreate which I use to create visuals using my own artwork and photos. Similarly, I’ve stopped using Asana as a planning tool for myself, and instead simplified my internal ways of working back to a spreadsheet and a simple to do list. As I have gotten more and more busy I want to spend less time seeing little animations of unicorns every time I complete a task and for a business of one the AI-enhancements are simply annoying.

    Zoom is on its way out, even though I still haven’t found a really good alternative to it, but I’ve been able to drop down several subscription levels, and I have cleared out historic recordings no longer needed. Good business practice and good for decreasing my digital footprint as well as costs.

    Google Workspace meanwhile, long my favourite digital workspace, is slowly turning from super productive to less than ideal, and that I am sad about. By trying to be smarter for large organisations the things I want to be able to do are becoming not only more convoluted and difficult, but also disrupted by endless marketing presented as system messages. I am not impressed. And yet, I am not quite ready to swap it for an alternative as at the moment its affordances are still greater than what is annoying.

    Overall, how are things going when it comes to decreasing my digital footprint? Progress score: 7/10 (this is an arbitrary score, by which I mean I feel I have done about 70% of the things I am aware of and able to do).

    Next up on my journey to greater sustainability are tackling the ways in which I work and managing the material, the physical side of things. More on those in the next post.