With close to 35 people attending there was a lot of pressure on everyone, not least our facilitators Yishay, Jim, Mark and myself, to work hard. We started off with a quick paper and pen warm-up activity called the ‘faces of identity’. We asked everyone to draw three facets of their identity on three pre-drawn heads and then turn to their group and describe (i) what these identities represented and (ii) which they promoted and which they kept hidden in online settings. This was a powerful exercise and created some intense discussion that ran over the allotted 10 minutes for the exercise. Comments on this activity (including the rest of the day) can be found over on Margarita’s blog.

There were 19 case-stories in total and we split participants into seven discreet groups each led by a starting case-story. Stories were shared, discussed, questioned and argued over. With some gentle, and not so gentle, pushing and prodding from our facilitators a series of seed patterns were eventually documented. Identifying patterns can be a tricky process and articulating a common problem is more challenging than describing the solution. To scaffold this process and help the participants to move successfully from case-stories to patterns we employed two active approaches:
1) Three Hats Pattern- to share and interrogate stories in a small group setting
2) Table Top Concept Mapping – to draw out the key issues and tensions within case-stories

The full outputs from the day, including the six patterns that were established, are summarised here on the Planet design patterns repository page: http://purl.org/planet/Groups.DigitalIdentities/outputs.

Pattern 1: Others first
Pattern 2: Digital Identity panic
Pattern 3: Whats my name
Pattern 4: Space for lurking
Pattern 5: Facet me
Pattern 6: Permissioned aggregation of identity information

The power of the patterns approach is one of stripping out the specifics to produce transferable solutions that address common problems. But sometimes it can feel that by losing some aspects of the context and moving to a more generic instantiation of the core issues that we lose something of its’ [the case-story] vitality – perhaps this is particularly noticeable when we analyse our [digital] identities and are guilty  of stripping away certain subject positions – such as class, race and gender. Yet I would still argue that producing a solution that can be applied in multiple places is a powerful and revealing process. This issue came up in a case-story that started with motherhood and the uploading of family pictures to a photo-sharing site. This case eventually formed part of a pattern called ‘Others First‘ about parental responsibility towards the digital identity of dependents – particularly children. In this pattern the subject position of motherhood seemed to come under erasure. My thoughts are that this does not necessarily detract from the value of the pattern – it does not erase motherhood, rather in the use of the pattern in solving particular scenarios motherhood will become [re]surfaced as one of a number of [possible] subject positions. The case-stories also remain linked as part of the underlying evidence that supports the patterns. I think in this case there is more than one pattern, particularly surrounding the complications of motherhood and gender in relation to building professional representations of the self. This is not a new issue, where work and motherhood compete, but one that raises new problems when we make choices about how we portray ourselves online. One of the issues with running the workshop over a single day is dealing with the constraints on time that limit the amount of work that can be done to pull out of these related patterns. Many of the groups realised they were dealing with case-stories that held multiple patterns that could have been addressed through developing complimentary patterns.

1.    Desk research based on a review of the existing and heterogeneous literature surrounding online identities and their deployment in the spheres of education and research aiming to:

• Unify research in online identities from the technical aspects relating to authentication and data security through to aspects related to the discursive and contextual nature of digital personas;
• Address the lack of critical analysis surrounding the complex technological landscape of major identity players, for example transactional identity services, where the goals and information handling methods do not always match ethical, functional or usability standards;
• Understand how these services operate given different technologies, environment and user needs;
• Address legal and ethical issues through consultation with the TELOS research group at King’s College London.

2.    A collection and discursive analysis of narrative case studies of online identity deployment in education and research aimed at teasing out user needs, user behaviours, opportunities, challenges and trends. This will be based on a storytelling methodology (Kubler Labosky 2002, Andrews et al. 2008) as an approach for capturing meaningful personal stories to provide insights into individual experiences and perceptions of online identity. This will be driven by two key research questions:

a.    How people manage their own understanding of digital identity in online environments (personal, corporate and administrative) and how identity operates within different contexts?
b.    What kinds of [digital] literacies are needed to support and manage online identity development?

A validated template will be used to collect individual narratives from an identified set of actors in the educational field. The stories will be analysed to create themes and then opened to the community for discussion and commentary to discover patterns and similarities and followed by a final round of analysis. This activity will be supported by two workshop sessions. As documents of contextualised practice the stories will be used as a baseline for identifying and building a framework for good practice providing evidence for patterns of activity that are both successful and problematic.

3.    A scenario building (van der Heijden, 2003) exercise will be used to as a basis for road mapping possible futures in the sphere of online identity. This will be organised online and supported by a roundtable workshop with identified stakeholders who will include decision makers, experts and creative thinkers. Exploratory scenarios will be developed (Schwartz 1996, Ringland 2002) with the aim of fostering the exchange of ideas, identification of challenges and the barriers to the deployment of an online identity research agenda, as well as development and implementation roadmaps in the UK.

4.    The outputs from the above activities will be synthesised to form the basis for the conceptual framework leading to a position paper that will address practical, social and political issues that stem from the research. The paper will be validated by a consultation process involving semi-structured interviews and open comment through a consensus building process with the key stakeholders and main players across the landscape of digital identity production.

5.    Development work on an Open Source software solution will run in parallel and be informed by the outputs from the story and scenario research. This phase of the project will be focussed on the enhancement of a plug-in for the Open Source WordPress blogging tool (http://www.wordpress.org) and involve design techniques based on user needs analyses and phased testing of the sotware.