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"Designers, you have eight hours and $0 to create a white paper or a spec. Make it work."
Which is to say that I now know what the Project Runway designer sings.
Yesterday at Christopher's Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, I did my help any groups that I thought could use an outside eye or ear.
Today, I instead focused on a single group that that had gotten stuck with the definition of what the Web of Trust really was, and joined them to write a short white paper with them. The result was a Project Runway experience — and it was the Project Runway experience where you didn't get anything done on your outfit on the first day, and come back, and then have to power through the whole thing.
It was a fun experience, if a tiring one. We produced a paper, "Rebranding the Web of Trust". It's got good content, but it's not what I'd call a first draft. Too much mess in the organization. But that can be cleaned up (and cleaning up papers is precisely what's on my TODO list for next week, so it's only fair to include the one I co-authored.)
Here's another weird correlation to Project Runway: on the show, the designers always hate working in groups. They despise it. They bitch, they whine, they cry. I've always felt for them because I hated groups in college, to the point that I made up an imaginary lab partner for one of my lower-division CS classes.
But the folks at Rebooting the Web of Trust seemed to really excel in the group environment. Oh sure, sometimes the work fell out when discussions within a large group got too deep. But generally there was real, solid collaboration going on, full of people respecting each others' ideas and building on them. I think one group managed a 14-page paper thanks to really good organization of the group allowing collaboration in separate parts. Heck, there was even good intergroup fertilization. At one point a group working on reputation asked the Rebranding group I was with for some feedback on what we were doing with our definition of Trust, which resulted in them getting some (great?) insight and us refining the model we were working on. Win win.
Two personal addendum to that:
Brian, the superb facilitator, early on today said that we should try and positively reinforce discussions by saying "Yes and ..." rather than "Yes but ..." I constantly fought to think about it when considering other peoples' contributions. At one point I responded to something that someone suggested with a "Yes but ..." and got a negative response to my addition. I then said about the same thing again, but said "Yes and ..." and this time I got acceptance. Huh.
Overall, I was sufficiently humbled by the excellent cooperation that I saw around me that I tried to emulate it. In general I'm fine at cooperation in certain environments like roleplaying and tabletop gaming. But I've never been that good at co-op work. So again and again I had to work hard to accept other peoples' contributions and go with the flow. Or to argue to a point where we could compromise to include everything in the same model. And I'm quite sure it was to the benefit of what we were working on.
So that was Christopher's Rebooting the Web of Trust designshop. The individual collaborative groups generally have the next few days to work on their papers. I, meanwhile, am putting it aside for a few days so that I can catch up on other things that need work. And then I get to work on Editing the Web of Trust for much of next week ...
Which is to say that I now know what the Project Runway designer sings.
Yesterday at Christopher's Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, I did my help any groups that I thought could use an outside eye or ear.
Today, I instead focused on a single group that that had gotten stuck with the definition of what the Web of Trust really was, and joined them to write a short white paper with them. The result was a Project Runway experience — and it was the Project Runway experience where you didn't get anything done on your outfit on the first day, and come back, and then have to power through the whole thing.
It was a fun experience, if a tiring one. We produced a paper, "Rebranding the Web of Trust". It's got good content, but it's not what I'd call a first draft. Too much mess in the organization. But that can be cleaned up (and cleaning up papers is precisely what's on my TODO list for next week, so it's only fair to include the one I co-authored.)
Here's another weird correlation to Project Runway: on the show, the designers always hate working in groups. They despise it. They bitch, they whine, they cry. I've always felt for them because I hated groups in college, to the point that I made up an imaginary lab partner for one of my lower-division CS classes.
But the folks at Rebooting the Web of Trust seemed to really excel in the group environment. Oh sure, sometimes the work fell out when discussions within a large group got too deep. But generally there was real, solid collaboration going on, full of people respecting each others' ideas and building on them. I think one group managed a 14-page paper thanks to really good organization of the group allowing collaboration in separate parts. Heck, there was even good intergroup fertilization. At one point a group working on reputation asked the Rebranding group I was with for some feedback on what we were doing with our definition of Trust, which resulted in them getting some (great?) insight and us refining the model we were working on. Win win.
Two personal addendum to that:
Brian, the superb facilitator, early on today said that we should try and positively reinforce discussions by saying "Yes and ..." rather than "Yes but ..." I constantly fought to think about it when considering other peoples' contributions. At one point I responded to something that someone suggested with a "Yes but ..." and got a negative response to my addition. I then said about the same thing again, but said "Yes and ..." and this time I got acceptance. Huh.
Overall, I was sufficiently humbled by the excellent cooperation that I saw around me that I tried to emulate it. In general I'm fine at cooperation in certain environments like roleplaying and tabletop gaming. But I've never been that good at co-op work. So again and again I had to work hard to accept other peoples' contributions and go with the flow. Or to argue to a point where we could compromise to include everything in the same model. And I'm quite sure it was to the benefit of what we were working on.
So that was Christopher's Rebooting the Web of Trust designshop. The individual collaborative groups generally have the next few days to work on their papers. I, meanwhile, am putting it aside for a few days so that I can catch up on other things that need work. And then I get to work on Editing the Web of Trust for much of next week ...