2000
The Royal Signals
Analogue encryption keys: on, off, drop it and the message is gone. Secure links from headquarters out to the units. One of a few chosen to test Cormorant, the Army’s new mobile network, and to show it at St James’s Park.
The fourth place.
At seventeen and a half the British Army handed me encryption keys. I’ve been inside networks ever since, and I’ve been doing the same thing all along. I take a technology into a room of people and make it work for the people in the room. What I care about is how little has to stand in anyone’s way.
Twenty-six years of rooms.
2000
Analogue encryption keys: on, off, drop it and the message is gone. Secure links from headquarters out to the units. One of a few chosen to test Cormorant, the Army’s new mobile network, and to show it at St James’s Park.
2004
Data communications engineer. Production monitoring networks across the UK, Europe and the USA, so the people running a line could see what it was doing. I trained whoever had to use them and advised whoever ran the place.
2008
When the council didn’t renew the lease, I led the campaign to save the gallery, and the way we used social media to do it was new for its time.
2010
I start working with David, a mathematician with an idea about how people find each other. We’ve been at it, one way and another, ever since: Sqale, a social platform for collaborating, then Ecosquared, and now Pscale.
2011
People living with brain injury and severe mental health conditions. I was lead researcher on a physical activity technology project, asking whether wearing a tri-axial monitor helps people change what they do for their health, and I ran the wellbeing programme that went with it.
2014
I led the project that digitised Northamptonshire’s archaeological history and moved it to the cloud, so that researchers anywhere in the world could read it.
2016
A Northampton company taken through a rebrand and onto one software system, with its directors coached through the change. Then BlindMatrix, helping business owners take up new technology, with colleagues in Chennai, through COVID, on fifteen-hour days.
2020
People living with bipolar, finding each other across time zones. A weekly podcast with Mike Lardi, and a peer support community of close to a thousand.
2022
A health tech app for mental fitness, with Dr Nick Prior. As Head of Partnerships I took it to employers, charities, healthcare providers, a school and a community of start-up founders. Then I coached the people using it.
2022
In my therapeutic coaching I use digital tools to develop therapeutic stories with the people I work with.
2024
People would come to a community of practice and talk, and things would get written down. Then they’d go, and weeks later an email would arrive saying what had happened. So I brought in tools that let people join in as it happened. Their insights were captured digitally and reflected back during the session, there to think about straight away.
2025
Staff and community members developing lived experience stories with each other. I gave them tools so they could be more present with each other. AI did the listening while they talked. Other AI, with guardrails, did the story development.
“Great IT skills including with AI to achieve outcomes of two ‘normal’ people.”
“Technically savvy and forward thinking, Matthew is also deeply compassionate.”
Pscale is David Pinto’s invention. It’s a way of writing things down so that meaning has an address. A block is a small file, arranged from its broadest thought down to its finest detail, so a person or an AI can walk straight to what they need and leave the rest. People and AIs can read each other’s blocks, write to one another through them, and each keep their own account of their own life. It’s an open commons, in the lineage of Wikipedia and open source.
People walk and talk. AI and Pscale do the rest. David built the ground. He calls me the pilot.
One day the sea will be the internet.
Apps and tools for different people, made with AI, in evenings and at weekends.
An app on my Pixel, with a small model of its own and Pscale blocks of its own. You talk, it keeps your day with you, and nothing leaves the phone. The dial follows the real sun.
A website and an app for a lived-experience-led recovery community, co-produced with its leaders, with privacy first.
An offer to Lived Experience Recovery Organisations across the country. A member keeps their own days, and with their yes those days become their organisation’s evidence.
Calm, community-minded preparation for an emergency.
A family of agents I keep on Pscale, moving like birds on the tideline: Ada, Dorylus, sandpiper, tidewright and the others. They have their own rooms. They leave each other notes.
Films about what this is, the Arcade’s one-move games, and pages that read their words from blocks, including this site.
Anyone can read what’s left here. Nobody watches it as it comes in, so it’s not the place for an emergency. Finding support is there for that.