Case Story: 1st digital identities workshop

Summary	Workshop commisioned by Eduserv to support 3 projects on digital identity
Group / workshop	Digital Identities	Status	seed
Project details...	Group space

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Eduserv had recently funded three projects on digital identity as a result of their 2008 grants call. These projects are:

• Rhizome Project - Steven Warburton, King’s College London.
• Creating a W3C standard for opening social networking data: Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh.
• This is me - Shirley Williams, University of Reading

Andy Powell, the project officer for these projects, wanted to hold a common kick-off event, and Steven Warburton suggested that we arrange this as a pattern workshop.

The workshop was conducted at the British Library conference centre, on Thursday, 8 Jan 2009. We had 35-40 participants. We were given a large seminar room for plenaries and 3 small classes for groupwork. The workshop was scheduled to start at 9:40 and end at 17:00.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Observations from Jim:

Here are some reflections about our workshop methodology arising from the Digital Identities workshop in London last week. There were 7 groups made up of from 4 – 6 people each, with an initial case story allocated to each. Yishay did a 15 minute presentation on patterns and the attendees had a guide to work to. Yishay, Steve, Mark and I acted as facilitators, with Mark and I spending some time with groups, and Yishay and Steve roving generally.

I deliberately tried to be as unobtrusive as possible in my groups, in order to get an idea of how people would work independently. The discussions in all the groups I attended was at a very high level, with many ideas on a variety of issues thrown up. This was also a problem, as groups tended to diverge from their case story and lose track of time. From previous experience of workshops, a group of 2 to 4 is probably optimum and works well with the 3 hats technique. Larger numbers tend to make it difficult, especially if there are several people with a lot to say. The value of having someone with patterns experience in a group is certainly significant, and we were a little too thinly stretched. Mark found he spent the whole morning with a single group. I deliberately spent some time with each of the 4 groups in the room I was in. Having a way of reminding people of what they should have done according to the schedule from time to time is important. Yishay played a very useful role visiting groups briefly as the “bad cop” making sure people were sticking to time. Having someone like this not part of the individual discussions also was useful in getting people to have to summarise where they had got to, as it concentrated minds. Perhaps a display which everyone could see, highlighting what was supposed to be happening at any time would have been useful, as people did get absorbed in what they were discussing.

All the techniques employed seemed to work, but perhaps need some flexibility in application. The concept mapping exercise was good in getting people to write down key concepts, solutions etc., but in the time available, interconnecting terms using ribbons and creating a map was probably too ambitious. Because the groups were larger than normal, restricting them to considering 2 case stories was seen as too limiting by some of the groups. Perhaps this process has to be applied flexibly depending on group size and topic. What was very noticeable was that people came up with more potential patterns then they could deal with, and with too much information on each. This is a difficult balance to establish, because the lack of time available necessitated limiting the discussion, but this also led to some great potential patterns getting lost. For instance the “Sara Jones’s Diary” case story raises the fascinating concept of “creating” and manipulating identities and raised different issues to the normal ones of individual-centric digital identity, but the group discussing this picked another (very important) pattern to work on. Perhaps we need ways to pick up on these by having ways for groups to at least easily flag other potential patterns. Similarly, when discussing an individual pattern, concentrating on the pattern structure categories we use is important, but there probably is a need for a rationale and catch-all section to reflect some of the great ideas and observations that came up but didn’t fit the template and thus weren’t recorded.

I spent the whole afternoon session with the group that generated some of the discussion that has already been on the blog. I had intended to cover the 3 groups I hadn’t visited in the morning, but couldn’t tear myself away because it was so interesting. Basically, as I know happened in other groups but perhaps to a lesser extent, the group had come up with what were probably 4 interlocking potential patterns. A lot of time was taken up in trying to unravel this, with a level of perception of group participants I found breathtaking, meanwhile raising a host of questions about the nature of patterns. In the end what worked seemed to be the simple adage (and key pattern), “don’t talk about it – just do it.” Just trying to put down one pattern quickly resolved what had seemed to be previously intractable issues about the role of gender etc., but then of course raised the question of the other patterns which there wasn’t time to develop.

I tried to note down some of the issues and misconceptions that came up during the workshop. People didn’t tend to understand the importance of drawing patterns from actual experience, rather than from what people wanted to happen hypothetically. However, there is obviously a need to allow people to be able to put down these ideas, which obviously can be used in other stages of the patterns process. Similarly, it needed a way for people to flag up problems and questions to which they had no solution, but which could prompt the search for case stories and patterns in particular areas. One of the issues which also arose goes back to something I remember Janet and I discussing with Steve at the first coming together of the Emerge Community. This is that patterns don’t make sense without being part of a language, and people, even when they begin to get the hang of patterns, tend to think that an individual pattern must solve all of the parts of a problem they are considering. This partly of course comes from people’s enthusiasm, and I don’t know of an easy way of explaining this to people, except of course by showing them how this works in practice, which is difficult to do in a single session and needs our 3 workshop approach. Because of the logistics of the organisation of the day, we were short of time at the end for reflection and discussion, but we should obviously try to allow as much time for this as possible. Even in the brief time available at the end, you could just sense the aha! moments, when people saw how the patterns collected could come together.

What a totally absorbing day! The frustrating thing, which all of us I think felt at the end, was that the participants had figured out a lot about patterns by that time, and could have whipped through the process and probably generated loads of potential patterns if we had had another day available. I tried to persuade as many people as possible to send in more case stories and work on some of the patterns on the Wiki if they could. I don’t think we have still figured out how to maintain the enthusiasm and interest that comes out of workshops in the cases where the group will not come together again – but there is a lot of untapped potential here.

Cheers,

Jim

From Martin Jones:

I think I came up with the idea of me being a provoking presence because I felt a slight frustration with the group for (as I saw it) resisting the idea of turning their contributions into anything that I would recognise as a story. They seemed much more interested in discussing the issues raised by the

contributions in an open ended way. This I interpreted as evading the call to form a story because doing so would exclude all other ‘interesting’ avenues of discussion. I felt the call to form a story was the point of the workshop, not debating solutions. I didn’t express this directly, but attempted to ‘retell’ one of the contributions as a story such as one might see in a movie. This caused a slight pause among the participants, and they then returned to the discursive. No one picked this up by attempting to retell the story from their own imagination and experience, and I didn’t attempt this again (though I harboured the feeling that it would have been useful I had).

I quite quickly started to imagine the workshop as an online community

• potentially anyone could have walked in and joined in. People formed

and reformed into little discussion groups. Everyone was very open with their opinions. I guess they were professional opinion-formers.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

Licensing

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