shannon_a | Entries tagged with rwot

We are done. I will be doing some traveling on Saturday, then all traveling on Sunday, so it pretty much feels like I'm on the way home.

I feel like the workshop ended well. Due to the bifurcation of one group, we ended up with eight papers in process, and everyone was still making enough progress that they were able to upload a current draft of their paper at the end of the day (https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot12-cologne/blob/main/draft-documents/README.md). I think we're going to end up with some papers interesting & important for the continued evolution of decentralized identity on the internet. We had some issues with some groups being too small (including a group that ended up singleton) and some not having enough varied presence, which was ultimately a result of the workshop being smaller than our other recent endeavors, but I did my best to encourage even the small groups to take advantage of the larger community of experts we had available at the workshop, so I hope it will come out right.

Our goal is 3-5 papers (or other artifacts) minimum from any workshop, and our recent completion rate has been 50%. Given the challenges, I think 4 will be about right for this workshop, but it'd be lovely to see 5. (I mean it'd be lovely to see 8, even though I have to edit them all, but that's of course much less likely.)

We closed out at about 3.30 or so this afternoon, and I stuck around to get some final pictures and files in place. Since I opted to just keep my editor-in-chief hat on this year, I spent extra time trying to make our record of the event the best ever. I think I'll record that as a success and seriously consider maintaining this new focus in the future. I always supported a paper at previous workshops because it gave me sometime to do, but if I spend 60% of that time instead giving extra support to the workshop, it's just to the workshop's benefit, and I have soooo much of my own work going on that it's easy to fill the other 40%. (I edited one chapter of the Traveller manuscript and cleaned up the two maps associated with us, which will tell you how much free time I had after I'd done all the supportive work I wanted — which is to say a few hours.)

==

I know I spoke a number of times about how horrible the internet was in Köln (and Hürth), but I'm not sure I ever expressed the ubiquity of that horribleness.

I mean obviously I have scarcely any internet at my AirBnB. I'm lucky to be able to upload these text journals.

But that was true for everyone I talked to. Every hotel and AirBnB seemed to have at the least very slow internet. (I don't think most others were as entirely non-functional as mine.)

The facility that was kind enough to lend us (GREAT!) space for the workshop also had very slow internet, at least on their "GAST" network. Several times I set a handful of pictures to upload to our repo, and then walked away for 5 minutes.

And the data on the cell network was horrible too. It was often slow, to the point where pages (and maps!) wouldn't load. A few times I couldn't even buy train tickets through their app.

When that big conference was going on midweek, things were even worse!

I have no idea how a whole modern European city could universally have such awful internet, but that really seemed to be the case here in Köln. I'm hoping things will be better in Frankfurt, and at my hotel there tomorrow, just to bring the frustration to an end.

(F., my friend in Frankfurt, says it'll be just as bad there because it's a German problem, but that the hotel should be fine since it's "airport people".)

==

After the workshop I as usual got a train that only went to Köln Sud (because Köln's currently broken railway network isn't running trains from Hürth to Köln West during the day for at least this week).

But I had a new destination: A GAME STORE

The walk there was great. I started to have some aching tendons or something yesterday, but I hit them with anti-inflammatories and they were 80% better today and so I enjoyed a walk through new neighborhoods, which included some nice old buildings and a big walking arcade caleld the Schildergasse. I was thrilled to see this district, so different from what I'd visited before.

The store is called "Brave New World", and it's a pretty great store. Two floors of board games (and a tiny room of RPGs), all stored with spine out and carefully alphabetized. The store is just slightly labyrinthine and the end result is an amazing amount of gaming. I don't think I've ever seen a board game store so well stocked (though I've visited some in other European countries that were close).

They had a lot of stuff in their RPG section that was pretty old, and perhaps I should have browsed longer there. But what I really wanted was a fun board game to remember this trip, so I picked up Iello's _Little Town_ and its _Artisans_ expansion. Not quite as unique as what I got in The Hague last year, but hopefully a fun game!

(I didn't pick it up entirely blind; it was a SdJ recommendation n 2020.)

==

And that was about it for the day.

Tomorrow my travel begins. I'm going to head out at 9am to catch a 10.15 train (and have enough time to walk to the Central Station if the trains aren't running from West, which now seems like an option after a week here). That should have me dropping off my luggage around 11.30 and into the city center of Frankfurt by 12.30 or so. I think I've figured out my train ticketing there (a little easier after a week in Köln), so I should be able to just go. I have plans to meet an old friend at a coffee shop at 16.00, and afterward head back to the hotel to see how early I can get to sleep for my 7am flight on Sunday. That should allow me 3 or 4 hours to see a bit of central Frankfurt, which is terrific.

Feeling more positive today.

To start with the working groups at RWOT generally seemed to regain their momentum today. Not being in a group this time around, I'd forgotten that the workshops kind of work like that. It could be a three-act structure, and our protagonists are at their lowest ebb between Days Two and Three, right at the middle of our plot structure, and then fight their way back to success at the end.

We've still got some challenges with groups being too small and not intermixing people sufficiently, which are results of the whole workshop being smaller this time around, but I'm hopeful we can accommodate that all and get some good papers out.

The other good news is that we're crossing our fingers that the COVID concern yesterday was a false alarm. The person in question, who had had two different lightly positive rapid antigen tests took a much more reliable PCR test and that came back negative, and then another RAT test, and that came back negative too.

Now two false positives seem pretty unlikely, unless there was some problem with the whole batch of tests. But *that* does seem possible. Since we give each of our participants five sets of tests, it suggests to me that we should mix our entire collection of tests together beforehand, so that people are less likely to have multiple tests with potentially the exact same problems.

And it also suggests that we need to think more about what our policies should be if we continue to have COVID policies. Does a PCR override a RAT? How many negative RATS override a positive RAT? Etc.

We also had demo night tonight, though it got turned into demo afternoon because we'd come to the conclusion that sending everyone out for dinner first, as we usually do, wasn't really going to work because everyone was likely to run to Köln for dinner, and then we might get a limited number of people returning to Hürth. (I was thrilled, because I was *not* looking forward to heading home at 10pm when the trains are running less often when I need to be up at 6.30 or 7 tomorrow morning.)

Oh, and speaking of trains, something I learned today: there are currently NO trains that go from Hürth to Köln West where I'm staying until 8pm!!!!! That's why I caught one the first night, when we had our Poster kickoff, but not since. So, this was a really subpar week to be staying in Köln West and commuting to Hürth. (I also learned a bit more about the current problems with the trains, which are apparently in part due to a total software breakdown in the recent weeks, which is why the trains have been getting later and later, totally separate from the construction problems this week only. So we're really workshopping here in Köln and Hürth at the best of all times.)

Back in Köln, there are still techbros, but much fewer, as their conference ended today, and meanwhile the long-promised rain has finally started drizzling down, driving the remnants indoors.

Tomorrow, the exciting finale.

And then things become a whirlwind as I head to Frankfurt on Saturday and then to Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and hopefully Lihue on Sunday.

TPAC 2023 occurred in Seville a week ago. It's a W3C meeting, which means that people are working closely together to advance projects, somewhat like we do here. There were more than a dozen cases of COVID that came out of it, including two of our planned workshop attendees, who couldn't attend as a result.

We talked about that a bit at the start of RWOT12, and someone asked, "What protocols did they have to stop the spread of COVID?" The response: pretty much the same as ours, which means that masks were not required or even encouraged, but that all attendees were sent home with testing kits to test at the beginning of each day (and not come in if they tested positive). The "pretty much the same as ours" should have been the warning sign. (In fact, the TPAC website actually claims they require masking, which is at odds with what I heard, but if that's true, they had much more stringent restrictions than we did, which would've been even more of a warning sign.)

So Monday I stayed masked up for the Poster Night opening ceremony of RWOT. I was literally the only one, but I knew that people had just been through a bunch of airports and train stations and that most of them hadn't taken COVID tests yet, so it seemed prudent.

But Tuesday I decided to trust the process. I mean, this is literally the rest of our lives. And if I was going to stay and eat our group dinner that night (and I did), then it would be ridiculous to mask the rest of the day. So, with no positive tests overnight, I trusted the process and worked without mask all day.

We had a positive test result this morning, so that seems a bit more foolish today. I mean, seriously, we can't stay masked up forever. I mask on public transit, which seems the most high-danger spot, and I masked on Monday when it seemed like there was more danger, but ...

Simultaneously there are virulent new variants out there (again!), COVID _has_ been surging, and I haven't had a booster in more than a year, with the new one just out in the last few days (weeks too late for this trip). But I'm still not sure how we live with this long-term, though I have a suspicion that there will be a younger generation that just shrugs their shoulders at it, which is apparently a prevalent attitude in Europe right now.

Anyway, the positive test result was apparently "weak", so hopefully that means we didn't have spread yesterday, not just because I don't want to see these people I've met and like get sick (or me!), but also because it'd be incredibly disruptive to a working conference to have more of our members go missing.

==

This morning, the trains were a mess when I got up to take the train in to Hürth for RWOT. My whole 10 minutes away by train plan has in fact been a bit more troublesome than I expected.

The first problem seems to be that for whatever reasons, German trains have gotten to be a mess over the last few years. So almost every train I've taken has been delayed a few minutes, but this morning that train I took in to Hürth was delayed 15 minutes.

The second problem seems to be that there's lost of construction going on, our local friends say both in response to the increasing problems with the trains and causing more of them. As a result of that, when I made my plans for this trip, I chose this apartment because there were three train lines running between Köln West and Hürth. Now one of the lines is skipping Köln West entirely, for (this is the best part) a detour that's scheduled for this week only.

But, not a big problem this morning, because I actually got the _previous_ train, which was a different line, but still one that took me to Hürth, so I was just a few minutes late. I'd have mostly missed breakfast if I had to wait for my train.

==

This was one of the main work days at the workshop, with everyone scribing hard on their papers. For a variety of reasons we didn't have any of our original board members there, but we fortunately did have producer Z., who is also one of our newer board members, so she led morning plenary and I helped out with some advice on where papers should be today.

And then I spent the day working on our media and our plenary records.

It felt like everyone was having a good day's work at the time, other than some natural concern when the COVID result got announced. But at the afternoon check-out we had I think two of our six groups saying they were having problems with their momentum and one that we'd expected to dissolve yesterday had mostly dissolved.

So tomorrow I need to see if any of the groups might be served with problem-solving (it'll depend on whether they want it or not).

==

The evening was supposed to be our "Mandatory Fun", where we go do stuff as a group. But, organization on it had already been wanting. We'd played around with an Eventbrite for a while, but ultimately just decided to do casual signups and even those were delayed.

This was our third "Mandatory Fun" and it's been hit-and-miss all three times. We try to give people choices what to do, but then some people just prefer to kick back (and giving people a break in the middle of a tough conference is part of the point), and it's hard to get commitments, and ... Some of the events inevitably dissolve at the last minutes, and this time it felt like many of them did. I think a city tour turned into a pub crawl and likely the river cruise happened and maybe the climbing did. But I'm not entirely sure because _everything_ sort of dissolved and there was no way to track the other groups.

I'd settled on the Chocolate Museum tour that we'd added at the last minute, but the other people interested in doing it wanted to do it as an adjunct to something else (mostly the river cruise, but also the city tour), and I was convinced that timing wouldn't work well.

So I ultimately decided to just do the Chocolate Museum on my own. Yeah, I probably should have hung out with people from the workshop, but most of them were doing lunch before their events, and I was even less enthused with that because of the COVID floating around, so a solo-evening it was.

==

I actually followed in the occasional footsteps of my beloved wife by saying, "If the train actually takes me home, maybe I'll just get home, but if I get one of those detour trains that skips Köln West" I'll go to the chocolate museum.

So I ended up taking a train that blew right by Köln West for no apparent reason and landed in Köln HBF, and from there I had a nice walk along the river to the Chocolate Museum.

==

The Chocolate Museum was fun.

It had a lot of stuff about how chocolate is actually made and what cocoa is and all that, which was terrific.

It had some pretty pointed discussion of poor earnings for cocoa farmers and discussion of sustainability, which surprised me in what I had thought would be a pure tourist museum.

(Overall, I don't understand how chocolate is as cheap as it is, given its narrow region of viability and how little cocoa is produced per tree.)

It had some great histories including more pointed discussions of the attacks on native civilizations in America, but also including long discussions of how it was served as a drink before the point where they could extract cocoa butter, and that there were ... I forget it they were called chocolate bars or chocolate houses or what ... but places that mainly served chocolate drinks back in the day. It felt like something out of an Alan Moore story, not reality.

There were also Lindt chocolate samples at the start and end of the tour, plus a world-famous chocolate fountain.

And a pretty terrific chocolate store at the end. Thank goodness there's nothing like that where I live.

Anyway, fun and I'm glad I did it.

==

Basically, when I'm coming home by train from RWOT I have three choices.

* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud to Köln West, which is what I did on Monday, by luck.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and get off at Köln Sud and walk, which is what I did yesterday, but I didn't love the early neighborhoods.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and continue on to Köln HBf, and then switch to another train to loop back to Köln West, which is sort of what I did today, with a few hour detour out to the Chocolate Museum.

And I won't be doing that last one again, because the Köln HBF was a horrific mess. SOOO crowded with people (thank goodness I was wearing an N95). And just crazy masses of trains all delayed.

There were two different trains back to Köln West, one delayed by 20 minutes and then the next one by 5 or 10. So I ended up on the next one. Except two or three minutes before it was due, they suddenly changed the platform and so we all had to race down the stairs from the platform and up to another and race out to the train.

And we got in and it sat for another five minutes.

Remembering how bad the Amsterdam airport was when we were there last year, I'm suspecting the Köln HBF is the equivalent for a train station. Definitely no more transferring there. I'll either walk from Sud or just wait for a train that's not detoured.

==

When I got off the train at Köln West and headed back to my street, I found it absolutely JAMMED with techbros in suits. I remembered people had been talking about sky-high prices for hotel rooms on Wednesday only. (Meanwhile, other conference attendees were reporting it almost impossible to find tables at bars in central Köln.)

It's apparently all due to DMEXCO, the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference, which is today and tomorrow.

I literally had to push my way through techbro marketers to get into my apartment building.

(Masked once I saw the milling crowds blocking the sidewalks.)

And the bar downstairs is blasting the loudest it has the whole visit, not even fully drowned by the previously soundproof windows. And shaking the building.

Hoping this is a one-night bacchanal

==

Halfway there.

I've continued to be somewhat low momentum, so this morning I decided to meander, to try and get to know the local neighborhood that I get lost in. I headed west and found, as so often seems to be the case, that the neighborhood deteriorated as it neared the train tracks. Then I crossed over, and soon was back in that ring of parks. Past them I found a business district and then looping back, across the main road from where my apartment is, I found another residential neighborhood, except where our residential neighborhood has commercial businesses in most of the ground floors, this one was pure residential. It seemed much nicer. It even had its own park, heavy with trees.

I returned home with a sandwich and after eating that was ready to head out again. This time, I had a goal: THE TIERGARTEN. And it was a GARTEN that really honestly had TIER.

It was in a park called the Stadtwald which was a few miles west. Which meant back to the bikes.

So I again took the opportunity to meander. I went back to that ring of parks and this time began to head counterclockwise (on bike). A few blocks on (and up another slight hill that was tough on the heavy Call a Bike), I passed by the university. It was less amazing than I'd hoped: pretty modern buildings overall, albeit with lots of open glades (and sports fields). Past it I swung west and biked through more neighborhoods. Past the university hospital, there were some nice suburban looking tree-filled neighborhoods, but then it was back to urban storefronts, which I ran along until I got to the Stadtwald.

The Stadtwald was totally worth visiting. It's the most foresty park that I've seen since I got here, with lots of tree-lined trails. The Tiergarten was fun too. They advertised having some hundreds of animals, but that almost entirely meant goats and geese. But the goats seemed nice and there was actually quite a variety of geese, a few of which were quite beautiful and didn't look entirely evil like most geese. There were also two highland cattle, which were one of the things I really wanted to see. They didn't get as close as I'd like, but were pretty cool.

So, trip to the foresty and animal-filled park totally successful.

Dinner was sushi at a local Vietnamese restaurant(!) that I'd spotted on my first trip out to my AirB&B. Then, it was the train into Hürth.

I'd fortunately spent part of my time at home this morning figuring out train tickets. I discovered that a weekly (_wochen_) pass between Köln and Hürth was cheaper than the six round trips I'm likely to take. Better, it takes the stress off of constantly having to buy tickets just in time and making sure I hit the right train. And, I also got my train ticket back to Frankfurt for Saturday, and it turns out it was half the price of last week's ticket when I got it in advance, there's just big price gouging if you get it same day (but that was the only reasonable thing to do after coming off of a trans-Atlantic plane on Friday.)

Anyway, the main event in Hürth:

Rebooting the Web of Trust (RWOT) started tonight. That's of course my reason for being here in Germany. Tonight was Poster Night, which is our current methodology for everyone to introduce their topics. It was done a bit different this year (that's often the case from workshop to workshop, until we eventually settle on something that we think really works).

This time around, Erica led off with our rules, making the Poster Night a much more coherent part of the overall workshop, and then we did a warm-up exercise where we gathered into groups of six and each talked about what brought us here and/or our paper and other issues. Afterward, everyone wandered around and read all the posters (mostly abstracts printed up from the papers).

It felt pretty successful to me because the warm-up exercise got the communication going and so the poster session effortlessly moved into conversation about the posters (well, hopefully, but even more likely it was conversation on topics of use to the conference).

It looks like we've got about two dozen people, which is our smallest in quite a while, but hopefully it can be an advantage and let us be more focused.

I just barely caught a train back to Köln, which is good because they're pretty irregular in the later evening, with a sequence of three trains around the top of the hour, and then a gap of 30 minutes at the bottom.

And I fortunately figured out where the switches are to turn on the lights in the hallway of the apartment building (spoiler: their everywhere, it's just the idea of having to turn on the hallway lights is totally alien to me), which is good because otherwise it literally would have been pitch-black.

Tomorrow, the real work begins, and I'm experimenting with a new role for myself of itinerant writer and editor during the event, giving all the groups a boost (rather than supporting as a participant).

But I still can't get my apartment cool even though the temperature dropped to the mid-70s today. It's a heat sink. Hopefully by the time I get to bed because last night I was up at 5am because I was hot.

I had to look up my past entries to figure out what day of the trip it was. It's my 8th day in Holland (but the 10th day of my trip since I layed-over in San Jose after the first 6 hours of air flight). It's increasingly a blur since it's been constantly busy days without any of my usual week markers.

Anyway, we finished RWOT today! Yay! Three years later, we finally held a new event. My group finished perhaps 80% of its paper draft. Today, we split up the writing of four more identity-focused threats among our four team members and each went at it using the model of the threat we wrote together yesterday. It worked out to be a pretty good process, as I thought it would be. Some of us finished, some not quite, and we still need a conclusion, but I'm pretty sure we'll be able to work it out. (We roughed out what still needs to be done, and Kate, who came up with the idea originally, will be leading on that in the coming weeks.)

Today was also the day when I make the rounds to figure out what everyone's paper is and how to contact them after the event, since I'm the editor-in-chief who gets everything finalized from here on out. We have 15 pieces I believe. Based on the last two events, we'll have 7-8 complete. But this year felt like things had progressed more than usual and that we'll have a higher percentage as a result. (I always think we'll have a higher percentage based on peoples' feeling on the last day, but I swear it's different this time, in large part because we _finally_ managed to get people to work in smaller groups, and I think that meant more progress.)

(Today was probably also my day of greatest potential COVID exposure, because almost 4 days after the poster session, we're spot-on at the average incubation period of the current strains of COVID. Meanwhile, when I met people in their personal writing groups, most of them were unmasked, though I was not.)

We did some final group discussions about RWOT after pencils-down at noon, including plans for the future. It looks (fingers crossed) like we're back on schedule for semiyearly workshops, which was always a part of my own plans after we moved to Hawaii, to help give some balance to our more rural urban life, so yay. (And yay to see this design workshop, which offers people creative and progressive work in the identity space unlike anything we know, is going again, irrespective of how it impacts me personally!)

If you wonder what I've been going on about, here's links to the rough, unfinished drafts of papers, as they exist today:
https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot11-the-hague/blob/master/draft-documents/README.md

Neither Chris nor I felt comfortable going to a final dinner tonight, because of COVID concerns. We'll have to see how we can change that in the future, because COVID isn't going away. Perhaps after the bivalent shot?

But we had a good little dinner together at a vegetarian burger place that was quite tasty. Nice to be able to spend time with him while here, as we're now an ocean away.

And so RWOT11 is over!

I have tomorrow scheduled for a fun day, my reward for working through the workshop. Kinda wish I was going home, as it's been a long while away. I'm wanting to see my cats, my Kimberly, and my Taco Bell. But I don't know that I'll be in the Netherlands again, so I'll enjoy that and then head to the airport (too) early on Sunday.

Today, I visited Holland in miniature at Madurodam.

That's because it was mandatory fun morning at RWOT. In previous years, RWOT was a three-day event, but at Prague (I think) in 2019 we expanded it to four days, but with the morning of day three taken up by fun group expeditions (or if attendees prefer, sleeping in). The idea was to give people a break from the hard work of the first two days, so that they could come back refreshed for the last day and a half of work.

Somehow, this year's events didn't get well advertised on our Eventbrite, which in turn means they weren't well attended. The canal tour that I'd previously signed up for didn't happen, but I decided to go to Madurodam instead, which is a park containing miniature diaromas of buildings (and people) across the Netherlands, all in a big outdoor park. It'd been on my list of things to maybe see while I was in the Hague, so I was happy to get to.

The entrance to the park was a little shocking. It was a movie about George Maduro, which was full of modern-day reenactments that I found humorous. He was a Jewish war hero. He personally led a charge across a bridge to oust Nazi paratroopers who were advancing on The Hague. He was captured. He was freed. He became a member of the resistance. He was imprisoned again. Teh prison was bombed by the Allies. Instead of escaping, he helped fellow prisoners hurt int he attack. He was captured again.

and-then-he-was-shipped-off-to-the-concentration-camp-at-Dachau-where-he-died-weeks-before-it-was-liberated.

Yeah, not where I thought that story was going. And also my first sign that the Dutch don't hide the hard facts of life (and history) from their kids, many of whom visit Madurodam. (Go them.)

Anyway, the park was created by his parents as a memorial.

It was a very neat park, full of little miniature buildings (1:25 scale, so still pretty big). Many of them are real buildings in the Netherlands, some of which I've seen in reality such as the Binnenhof, the Rijksmuseum, and the Schiphol Airport. There were also miniature people all over, many of them seeming to play out their own little stories, such as the guy by the canals holding up his arms in celebration. And finally there were moving bits, mostly vehicles such as cars and boats. But also a little carnival and other things here and there (such as the truck that delivers you a miniature Mars bar, the air raid siren, etc).

The park advertises that you can see the Netherlands in one hour. We were there an hour and a half and could have spent at least that much time again.

Also of note: the gift shop had banana Haribo which I've never seen before (Haribo selection is much more limited in the US), but which were delicious!

--

Anyway, back to RWOT.

Last night was demo night. It went very well, but long. We saw 15 demos (I think) of self-sovereign identity and related technologies. Thrilling, as always to see these ideas made real, and it was really well organized to keep things moving (even if the number of presentations made things run late).

The actual work today at RWOT was mainly two afternoon sessions focused on getting our "artifact" created. We worked on our paper, reviewing all of our threats to allow the whole group to contribute ideas, then we jointly wrote out one of the threats. Everyone seemed to think it came out really well. The idea for tomorrow is that we each write out one additional threat from our list, and then we have most of a paper.

Tomorrow is also the day I really step forward as editor-in-chief and make sure I have all the contacts to help everyone bring their papers to completion. So, it'll be a busy day when I wear a few hats (but I expect I can knock out my own threat faster than my other group members, since we've done the preliminary work and writing is my specialty, so I think I'll get my work done).

The Hague, Day 6: The Middle of RWOT

Today was the second day of RWOT, and it continued as it normally does.

Our group on identity attacks went quite well. We spent the morning researching DID (decentralized identifier) methods so that we could identify attacks that they were vulnerable to and attacks that they were proofing against. This gave us a solid foundation.

Then we spent the afternoon talking about those DID methods and attacks and eventually settled on five that we want to write about. We also outlined a format.

The goal is to as a group write up one of those tomorrow, and then jointly write three or four more. (And then we polish everything in our little bit of time Friday and voila we're done ... except I suspect that we won't quite get there as I'm going to also have to meet with all the groups to collect contact info going forward.)

The work has been nice because identity and identifiers are something that Blockchain Commons hasn't really been able to work on, but it's part of what got us into this space. So it's nice to dip a toe in again for something that I haven't seen much for three years (since the last RWOT, pre-COVID).

We also had a "Choose Your Own Adventure" break in the middle of the day where different people led conversations on different topics based on their expertise and/or open questions they had. One person was interested in NFC Tags & Cards, and I dove right into that because we've been experimenting with writing to NFCs at Blockchain Commons, so I've done lots of QAing of it. It was a good talk, with lots of discussion of the future of NFCs, with embedded chips that can do signatures and even embedded screens. The future is here!

That was pretty much it for the day because we broke early because tonight is demo night. This was super-exciting the first time we did it, I think in Boston, because it was people turning out ideas from RWOT into real products. It's still exciting now. But oh I wish it wasn't in the evening. It's supposed to run to 10pm, has already been overscheduled to 10.11pm, and will likely run later which means it's going to push back my sleep schedule (I was asleep around 10 last night), just when I need to start thinking about waking up early for the very long trip home.

The 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.)

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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.