The second in the EDID9 series of workshops on digital identity was held before Easter at the London Knowledge Lab with support from the Eduserv Foundation. This was a smaller event than the first workshop in the series with a group of 18 participants, but this made it no less intensive on the day. We had some new faces who joined those people who had attended the first workshop. Our facilitators and design patterns experts were once again Mark, Jim, Yishay and myself. It was also good to have both Eduserv identity projects in attendance again – the ‘This is me’ project with Shirley Williams and Harry Halpin who is assisting the W3C in opening social networking data.

The second workshop deviated from the ‘standard’ Participatory Pattern Workshop format. Rather than focusing on developing and iterating the patterns identified during the first workshop we decided to tackle scenarios, in other words unsolved real-world problems around how we manage or use digital identities. From these scenarios we then worked with our patterns from the first workshop, applying them to create solutions, and in the process identified new case-stories and patterns as they arose.

Before the workshop we asked the participants to submit scenarios and we recorded nine separate entries on the Planet xWiki platform. These ranged from the use of micro-blogging tools like Twitter to using data portability technologies to solve the problem of digital identity aggregation.

The workshop itself broke down into to distinct phases:

Part 1: Mapping the forces within the scenarios. Here we asked each group to identify and map out the forces in tension within a particular scenario. These were the tensions that a pattern would need to resolve to produce a potentially successful solution.

Part 2: Designing solutions using patterns. Using the force map each group then looked through the pattern collection to see if any of the patterns developed so far could be applied. One of the major themes that had emerged from the earlier analysis of the scenarios was how to control who views our data. This was related to two dimensions of managing distributed digital identity data (i) aggregation versus compartmentalization and (ii) public versus private.

A solution was developed that addressed both of these tensions using the architectural metaphor of the house and the notion of progressive disclosure. This represented a simple but powerful idea whereby access to our digital identity is managed through the creation of differing spaces for intimacy. Megan Smith gives a deeper insight into the ways that this approach might work in a posting written for her blog.

What developed was a link to two patterns. The first from the Digital Identity pattern collection called ‘Facet Me’ and second, to one of Alexander’s patterns. As Jim pointed out this idea had resonance with number 127 ‘Intimacy Gradient’:

Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence that corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.
Resolution: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

Overall the format of this workshop worked well and produced two new candidate patterns with supporting case-stories:
Pattern 7: Purposeful delay
Pattern 8: Leaving trails

So what next? We want to build on the success of this workshop and hold a final session to complete the series, which we are planning for September 2009. Invites will be sent out shortly and we look forward to seeing you there.