Prague Day Five, In Which I Cannot Nap
Sep. 4th, 2019 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aFour years (and nine RWOTs) later, Rebooting the Web of Trust has become a gathering of friends that I only see once or twice a year. Oh, we always have plenty of new faces. I think Barcelona, this spring, was actually about two-thirds new people (which accounted for its huge size of 90 participants). This time around, the number of newcomers is slightly below half, which is still a lot.
But along with that I see lots of people that I've seen at one or more previous events, some of which I feel a personal kinship toward, because we've worked together on a paper or just because we connected when we talked. So, it's nice to see these folks, at such widely scattered places across the world.
Today was in my head our writing day. But it was less writing than I realized when I first looked at the schedule a few weeks ago. We wrote a little. Then we let people hold individual seminars on topics near and dear to them. Then we lunched. Then we wrote a little more. Then it was suddenly time to report out for the day. Which was early because we were taking a break and going back to demos in the evening.
Whew. Not a lot of time for writing after all.
Fortunately, I'm not bothered. At most other RWOTs, I've been involved in a traditional paper that we started at the workshop and did our best to finish by the end.
But, there's increasingly a new breed of paper: papers that people want to write before they get here, that they build off of their topic paper, and continue for the next 3-4 days. And that's what I joined on to, with Joe's Rubrics for Decentralization of DID Methods.
So, it started before the workshop. It'll continue after the workshop. And Joe methodically moves through work at a thoughtful pace that allows him to evaluate and consider everything.
All that means that I can put in my absolute best effort for four days and give him as much opinion, insight, and verbiage as I can, but I'm not stressing over hitting our deadline.
One thing I don't like about Prague, which I notice every time I walk to and from our venue, and also in the alley we're doing some of our work in, beside the venue: the smoking. Stats I've seen say that 11-12% of people smoke in the Bay Area, depending on county. And we're brutally marginalizing it in outdoors areas where you poison other people. That's compared to 17% in the US as a whole. In the Czech Republic ... it's 38%. Wow! No wonder it seems like every third person smokes.
Anywho, we ended early tonight because there were demos. We've traditionally held them during the workshop (since Boston, at least, which was the first time the decentralized identity field actually had matured enough to have things to demo). But that can be really draining to have an endless series of show-and-tells right in the middle of a day of work. So this year we had an early evening break followed by the demos at 8pm.
Chris actually multiple times called it an opportunity to go nap before the demos, but there was no way this American was going to do that, because that'd wreck my sleep schedule. I'm 9 hours off home, and though I've been entirely awake and active during the workshops I've also been crashing pretty early in the evening, and have slumped off into bed sometime between 9pm and 10.15pm every day.
So, I couldn't let myself nap. And in fact the demos was scheduled right through the 9pm timeframe when I went to sleep last night.
Meanwhile, the big question was whether people would return ...
Spoiler: yeah, pretty much
We got to see demonstrations of increasingly mature software packages (some of which we'd seen in less mature forms at previous RWOTs). We saw airgapped wallets, seed recovery, secure distributed storage, a few identity apps from the Dutch government, and more.
And that was Day #2 of RWOT, and my fourth full day in Prague. Halfway done!
(And then I can get back home to packing and preparing to sell our house and move.)
But along with that I see lots of people that I've seen at one or more previous events, some of which I feel a personal kinship toward, because we've worked together on a paper or just because we connected when we talked. So, it's nice to see these folks, at such widely scattered places across the world.
Today was in my head our writing day. But it was less writing than I realized when I first looked at the schedule a few weeks ago. We wrote a little. Then we let people hold individual seminars on topics near and dear to them. Then we lunched. Then we wrote a little more. Then it was suddenly time to report out for the day. Which was early because we were taking a break and going back to demos in the evening.
Whew. Not a lot of time for writing after all.
Fortunately, I'm not bothered. At most other RWOTs, I've been involved in a traditional paper that we started at the workshop and did our best to finish by the end.
But, there's increasingly a new breed of paper: papers that people want to write before they get here, that they build off of their topic paper, and continue for the next 3-4 days. And that's what I joined on to, with Joe's Rubrics for Decentralization of DID Methods.
So, it started before the workshop. It'll continue after the workshop. And Joe methodically moves through work at a thoughtful pace that allows him to evaluate and consider everything.
All that means that I can put in my absolute best effort for four days and give him as much opinion, insight, and verbiage as I can, but I'm not stressing over hitting our deadline.
One thing I don't like about Prague, which I notice every time I walk to and from our venue, and also in the alley we're doing some of our work in, beside the venue: the smoking. Stats I've seen say that 11-12% of people smoke in the Bay Area, depending on county. And we're brutally marginalizing it in outdoors areas where you poison other people. That's compared to 17% in the US as a whole. In the Czech Republic ... it's 38%. Wow! No wonder it seems like every third person smokes.
Anywho, we ended early tonight because there were demos. We've traditionally held them during the workshop (since Boston, at least, which was the first time the decentralized identity field actually had matured enough to have things to demo). But that can be really draining to have an endless series of show-and-tells right in the middle of a day of work. So this year we had an early evening break followed by the demos at 8pm.
Chris actually multiple times called it an opportunity to go nap before the demos, but there was no way this American was going to do that, because that'd wreck my sleep schedule. I'm 9 hours off home, and though I've been entirely awake and active during the workshops I've also been crashing pretty early in the evening, and have slumped off into bed sometime between 9pm and 10.15pm every day.
So, I couldn't let myself nap. And in fact the demos was scheduled right through the 9pm timeframe when I went to sleep last night.
Meanwhile, the big question was whether people would return ...
Spoiler: yeah, pretty much
We got to see demonstrations of increasingly mature software packages (some of which we'd seen in less mature forms at previous RWOTs). We saw airgapped wallets, seed recovery, secure distributed storage, a few identity apps from the Dutch government, and more.
And that was Day #2 of RWOT, and my fourth full day in Prague. Halfway done!
(And then I can get back home to packing and preparing to sell our house and move.)