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The Hague, Day 5: RWOT Begins
Sep. 27th, 2022 06:16 pmThe Hague Day 5: RWOT Begins
The RWOT conference started last night at 7pm.
This is why I'm actually in the Netherlands: Rebooting the Web of Trust. It's our 10th or 11th workshop on decentralized identity on the internet. (We did nine conferences from 2015-2019, then our 10th workshop, which was scheduled for Buenos Aires in March 2020 was cancelled, but only after people had produced advance readings, and at least a few of them had traveled to Buenos Aires. This is then the next one.)
Last night was the poster night. This was the first time we tried that. Traditionally, we've spent the first day exchanging ideas from our advance readings, but it's always been tricky figuring out how to give all of the ideas the opportunity to percolate into the community. And, that's been even trickier for our last two workshops, both in Europe and both drawing 80-100 participants. (This time around we seem to be at about 70, even after a three-year gap due to COVID.) So, the poster night was our newest answer. Some people prepared posters, most just had the first page of their reading blown up. Then we divided everyone into four groups, and when it was your group's turn you stood by your poster and people could come talk to you.
Good theory, a fair amount of chaos in the implementation. One thing that we quickly learned was that the posters had to be numbered by groups, else the milling mobs couldn't even tell which were active. It also didn't draw out introverts like most of our activities do (says the introvert). I was fine when I talked about our Blockchain Commons poster, on Collaborative Seed Recovery, but at total loose ends when we were supposed to interact with people we didn't know.
(I ducked out of the event after the four rounds, even though people were still talking.)
The poster session was also our COVID policy at its worst. We're supposed to be doing testing before each day of work, but most people got their tests that evening, and so we went straight into the poster session with testing saved for the next day. Meanwhile, we started the enforcement of our masking policy, but a shocking number of people didn't know how to wear their masks right (or didn't care), a small minority just pretended there wasn't a policy, and a fair number of people were eating and drinking because there was food and drink out!?! So between a third and a fourth of the people at the poster session were unmasked at any time, as they moved around between different people in very tight quarters.
(Overall, the reaction to the [strict] COVID policies has been extremely disappointing. We've had one person leave due to the masking policy which has been hinted at for months and solidly in place for a week and a half and a few other people have been very unhappy. As I noted, we've had a few people mostly ignore it too. And the policy has been changed to only require the masks in the plenaries, not the small groups, which pretty much makes it worthless. But I suspect that poster session last night did too. Hopefully people are actually testing like they're supposed to. Because in a group of 70 right now, someone probably has COVID.)
--
The workshop proper began today. The day began with icebreaker events, not just to introduce people to each other, but also to get everyone thinking about decentralized identity and the other topics we might discuss. This session was facilitated and so went much more smoothly. We introduced ourselves and our interests to individuals, then we had some rotating group sessions where we answered some questions about the topics at hand. We finally wrote up what we were interested in seeing and doing and then turned that into potential group projects. We ended up gathering into 13 or 14 groups.
(The gathering was neat because our facilitator had it done physically. We wrote up potential topics on sheets of paper, dropped them on the floor, milled around and looked at them, and eventually stood by the ones we wanted.)
My group this time around is on identity threats. I like the people I'm working with, but we're melding somewhat disparate ideas, so we'll see if we can produce a paper out of it. We wrote an abstract today and the idea is to knock out all the threats we want to include tomorrow.
Today was also my first full day at the venue, which is the The Hague University of Applied Science (De Haagse Hogeschool). It's a huge, beautiful building with a marvelous open area in the middle and some connecting buildings. It's just _jammed_ with students and activity going on, pretty much unlike any venue we've had before. There was salsa dancing in that interior courtyard during lunch! Perhaps not the best venue in the middle of COVID, but still an exciting one that's so different from the staid corporate venues of most past years.
The RWOT conference started last night at 7pm.
This is why I'm actually in the Netherlands: Rebooting the Web of Trust. It's our 10th or 11th workshop on decentralized identity on the internet. (We did nine conferences from 2015-2019, then our 10th workshop, which was scheduled for Buenos Aires in March 2020 was cancelled, but only after people had produced advance readings, and at least a few of them had traveled to Buenos Aires. This is then the next one.)
Last night was the poster night. This was the first time we tried that. Traditionally, we've spent the first day exchanging ideas from our advance readings, but it's always been tricky figuring out how to give all of the ideas the opportunity to percolate into the community. And, that's been even trickier for our last two workshops, both in Europe and both drawing 80-100 participants. (This time around we seem to be at about 70, even after a three-year gap due to COVID.) So, the poster night was our newest answer. Some people prepared posters, most just had the first page of their reading blown up. Then we divided everyone into four groups, and when it was your group's turn you stood by your poster and people could come talk to you.
Good theory, a fair amount of chaos in the implementation. One thing that we quickly learned was that the posters had to be numbered by groups, else the milling mobs couldn't even tell which were active. It also didn't draw out introverts like most of our activities do (says the introvert). I was fine when I talked about our Blockchain Commons poster, on Collaborative Seed Recovery, but at total loose ends when we were supposed to interact with people we didn't know.
(I ducked out of the event after the four rounds, even though people were still talking.)
The poster session was also our COVID policy at its worst. We're supposed to be doing testing before each day of work, but most people got their tests that evening, and so we went straight into the poster session with testing saved for the next day. Meanwhile, we started the enforcement of our masking policy, but a shocking number of people didn't know how to wear their masks right (or didn't care), a small minority just pretended there wasn't a policy, and a fair number of people were eating and drinking because there was food and drink out!?! So between a third and a fourth of the people at the poster session were unmasked at any time, as they moved around between different people in very tight quarters.
(Overall, the reaction to the [strict] COVID policies has been extremely disappointing. We've had one person leave due to the masking policy which has been hinted at for months and solidly in place for a week and a half and a few other people have been very unhappy. As I noted, we've had a few people mostly ignore it too. And the policy has been changed to only require the masks in the plenaries, not the small groups, which pretty much makes it worthless. But I suspect that poster session last night did too. Hopefully people are actually testing like they're supposed to. Because in a group of 70 right now, someone probably has COVID.)
--
The workshop proper began today. The day began with icebreaker events, not just to introduce people to each other, but also to get everyone thinking about decentralized identity and the other topics we might discuss. This session was facilitated and so went much more smoothly. We introduced ourselves and our interests to individuals, then we had some rotating group sessions where we answered some questions about the topics at hand. We finally wrote up what we were interested in seeing and doing and then turned that into potential group projects. We ended up gathering into 13 or 14 groups.
(The gathering was neat because our facilitator had it done physically. We wrote up potential topics on sheets of paper, dropped them on the floor, milled around and looked at them, and eventually stood by the ones we wanted.)
My group this time around is on identity threats. I like the people I'm working with, but we're melding somewhat disparate ideas, so we'll see if we can produce a paper out of it. We wrote an abstract today and the idea is to knock out all the threats we want to include tomorrow.
Today was also my first full day at the venue, which is the The Hague University of Applied Science (De Haagse Hogeschool). It's a huge, beautiful building with a marvelous open area in the middle and some connecting buildings. It's just _jammed_ with students and activity going on, pretty much unlike any venue we've had before. There was salsa dancing in that interior courtyard during lunch! Perhaps not the best venue in the middle of COVID, but still an exciting one that's so different from the staid corporate venues of most past years.