As part of the support for the EduServ Foundation funded project This Is Me, EduServ offered to run an event with us and the other two projects: Steven Warbuton's Rhizome and Harry Halpin's project which is working with the W3C on opening social networking data. I was very keen that the event should be something constructive: a workshop where people actually worked together rather than a seminar where a few people talked. Steven is also working on the PLANET project and suggested we could use there approach to run pattern based workshops. The plan for the workshop is described by Steven, although he does seem to have forgotten that the other two projects contributed to the organisation.

The workshop happened yesterday and I think it was a great success with the only real problem seeming to be a hurried finish. We had invited 40 people to participate from across the contacts of the 3 projects who we thought had something to contribute on Digital Identity. A number of people from Reading are involved in This Is Me, and this meant we were able to get to participate in a number of the groups who spent the day working through case studies and trying to derive patterns. I'll let the others tell the story of their group, here I'll talk about the group I joined which were seeded with a case called "Am I the sum of others", which was Andrew Eglinton's musing on why people chose to follow him on Twitter. Others in the group were Ian Truelove and Graham Hibbert, from Leeds Met. We also had Mark Childs (Coventry) and Ed Barker (EduServ) with us for some of the time.

We spent a lot of time reflecting on our own experiences of Twitter and the roles of Followers and Following, we compared with other social networking sites, like Facebook were Friendship is a 2 party agreement, and Flickr were you can have Fans. We collected our thoughts via string and post its – see http://www.flickr.com/photos/yish/3180326547/; We came up with the idea of an online and offline me http://www.flickr.com/photos/yish/3181117718/ and the idea that we are a superset of our online communities http://www.flickr.com/photos/yish/3180279791/. We eventually came up with a pattern, but unfortunately having saved it the xwiki system will not let me edit it – so it is incomplete, I've asked for this to be changed – but no success so far! One thing that we lost in creating the pattern was the relationship with fiends/ followers etc, and I do want to revisit that as I believe that an awareness of who is following you and why is a significant part of most people's Digital Identity.

There was lots more to the day than I have recorded here, I had lots of great conversations before the event, during the breaks, and afterwards.