The early thinking toward what helps a subculture thrive was based on the idea of seeking subversion, of subverting the norm. This is a powerful emotional driver, but many other concepts and systems of positive and negative feedback act as cultural attractors in the same manner. A metaphor I use here is one from maths and science, specifically the idea that given a dynamic and ‘chaotic’ system, in which there is a complex interplay between all actors and aspects within, there can exist things called ‘attractors’. The dynamic parts of the system gravitate around these attractor sets, the ‘empty’ central areas that the paths curve around.

Culture vs subculture

I find it hard to understand that there is a culture, in which subcultures exists, subverting the norms. Rather, I picture a very large space of ideas and concepts, through which we all make our own paths. We interact with each other and with the ideas themselves, moving differently as a consequence. The attractors are how trends and fashions show up in the system, causing many of us to swing around these points together, reinforcing the attractor by doing so.

Fifty years ago, it was hard to quickly traverse this space of ideas – you would need to make effort to find ideas you wouldn’t ordinarily be aware of, let alone know about. Word of mouth could only reach so far, and at a slow speed. Mainstream media provided well-controlled sources of information, forming powerful attractors in the space, pulling everything round with it. Small pockets of the aforementioned subversive culture sprang up, mini-galaxies of people rotating counter to the larger galaxy of culture around them.

Nowadays, this space is trivial not just to move through, but also to navigate due to the embedded nature of the internet in many people’s lives. People are being limited by their own personal, biological bandwidth limits rather than the limits of their communication channels; there is a limit on the amount of information you can consume and create in one lifetime that has nothing to do with technology. Word of mouth is now an incredibly powerful tool and can spread as idea to all the corners of the internet in minutes. It is easier to find people who are taking similar paths through this idea space and so, it is easier to be affected by them and they by you. People can pass many more cultural attractors in their lives, and subjectively, may choose to move around different ones to the mainstream. The act of living online is an attractor in of itself, and is pulling more people away from the predictable movement around the older, mainstream attractors.

What might be seen as being a fragmentation of culture, a ‘loss of traditional values’, is the adoption of differing cultural vocabularies and ideas, different to those tropes and other norms of behaviour that they are meant to participate in. I do not see this as a bad thing. People adopt a culture because of many reasons: obligation, tradition, apathy, passion, belief, exposure through peers and so on. However, of those, the people who change culture do so for much more active reasons, mainly in the belief that they will be happier because of it.

Juggalos and Straight-edgers

A cultural attractor that has fascinated me is the Juggalo: “Juggalo or Juggalette (the latter being feminine) is a name given to fans of Insane Clown Posse or any other Psychopathic Records hip hop group. (wikipedia)”

What may have started as a collection of like-minded fans has certainly grown into a culture of its own. In the documentary – see below – the concept of family was repeated many times and intimately linked with the idea of what it means to be a Juaggalo. Many of those who responded said explicitly that their juggalo friends around them meant more and did more for them than their own blood families, that they felt part of a community. It’s unfair and a mistake to call ‘Juggalos’ a gang, as the FBI has, as I hope you’ll see from the documentary below.

An apparent trend in the way that established media reports on these new cultures is to focus on how they are more uncivilised, more uncouth – simply, worse – than ‘we’ are. With the Juggalos, it’s easy to focus on their hedonism and loud, brash mannerisms and ignore their human sides. One culture that arguably peaked some years ago is Straight-edge, which is based around the ideas of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, tobacco, to respect your body, and to not be promiscuous, unified by a number of straight-edge bands, in a similar manner to the Juggalos above.

Even though the ideals are good, a tiny number of people self-identified themselves as straight-edgers and were reportedly violent to people who they disagreed with. Of course, this was the story that the movement became associated with in the wider media. Compare the following documentary of some straight-edge people talking about themselves and their beliefs, with the National Geographic documentary after it (it is poor quality and in several parts, I’m afraid. Click through to the Youtube pages to find the other parts, if you are interested.)

Is there a mainstream any more?

From the perspective of many internet communities, it can be hard even to know where mainstream is anymore, as some of the older groups have built-up a radically different cultural vocabulary which they share with each other, but very little of which is broadcast over the wider channels such as TV, newspapers and radio. However, the truth of it is that the mainstream still has many orders of magnitude more impact on the majority of the population than it would appear to those outside of it. The internet has allowed a few groups to establish themselves and grow strong enough to exist without the support or even acknowledgement of the normal channels. The geek culture that has grown over the past ten years or so is one that I readily ascribe to, as the use of the word (online at least) is more akin to a passion for something than anything negative or unpleasant.

I am very pleased to see that some of these communities are strong enough to interact with the mainstream and perhaps, change it for the better. I have a real soft spot for these incursions, whether they are flash mobs, large gatherings or, as is the case with ‘Bats Day‘ at Disneyland, a community sharing a holiday together. Bat’s day at the Fun Park is a simple idea – a date is picked and goths are encouraged to visit, as they will be among like-minded people and can dress naturally. Here’s a little video scanning the crowd as they line up for the signature group photo of the day:

My point?

What we call the mainstream is going to have less and less power to drive fashions and trends. People will no longer encounter ideas as they are metered out by these sources, instead, discovering and re-discovering ideas at many different points. What looks like social fragmentation is really the drive for community reasserting itself, bringing together people that are near each other in mindset, if not geographically.

I’ll finish this post with a few socially angled documentaries that I’ve enjoyed recently in the hope that you may enjoy them too:

“Winters of My Life is a portrait of Howard Weamer. For the past 35 years he has spent his winters as a hutkeeper in Yosemite’s backcountry. He fills his days writing, reading, photographing, and being an ambassador to mountain culture. This is a brief look into his world and why he chooses to stay.

“ALBERTO MIELGO is a Spanish painter. This short documentary follows two different artistic world[s] for an unexpected combination.” – nudity warning.

“A rogue with an eye for salvage – and the ladies – Ray: A Life Underwater is an affectionate portrait of one man’s deep sea diving career, told through his extraordinary collection of marine artefacts.

Like a modern-day pirate, 75-year-old Ray Ives has been scouring the seabed for treasure his whole life.”

“Paul Mawhinney was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the years he has amassed what has become the world’s largest record collection. Due to health issues and a struggling record industry Paul is being forced to sell his collection.

This is the story of a man and his records. I hope you enjoy it.” (by Sean Dunne, the same film-maker as ‘American Juggalos’ above.)

“At The Barbershop in Drexel, NC, the atmosphere is laid back, the conversation free, and the music a cut above the rest. Emmy® nominee, Official Selection of over 60 film festivals, and Best Documentary Short Film winner at the Florida Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival.”

“The story of the last glass eye maker in Britain.”

Lightning talks should provide enough information, presented concisely, to interest, inform, bootstrap and otherwise start people talking about something. A 3 to 5 minute talk with or without slides and props is more than sufficient for this.

A lightning talk should not do the job of the internet. Give an overview of something, and share the URL. Don’t seek to talk through all the text on the site.

It can be many things, such as:

•  A way to better kickstart someone’s exploration of a topic, project or tool,
• A foundation to a discussion that you want to have, either at the event or online,
• A ‘mini-workshop’ to illustrate a technical point that is often confused or that has confusing documentation,
• a ‘one-liner‘ that you’ve found saved you years of time,
• or a taster of something that you feel passionately about.

Straightforward. But this only considers it in one direction. What about the audience?

The audience needs to be given the mental space and time to digest, note and take in the information presented, especially for these short, dense talks. I think this is key.

Information Whiplash

In my own limited experience, I have found too many events that use lightning talks as a means to cram in as many talks in as possible. I tend to remember one, maybe two of these and even rarely remember the URLs I’ve been given. I just didn’t feel I had the time to make good notes or good decisions about whether or not this information was actually useful to me. The URLs would remain as tabs on my browser for a while, until I forgot even why I had them open.

Let’s work in some space into the schedule then, where nothing happens. Nothing formal, anyhow. You’ll have time to talk, ask questions of one another, talk to one of the speakers or, give yourself a break and do absolutely nothing. Not everyone can ‘sprint’ through information and take it in at the same time.

The other strands of the event are mostly portioned into blocks of an hour in length, so it makes sense to organise the talks in a similar fashion. It’s not a sensible idea to join a workshop halfway through for example, unless the workshop has been built around that idea.

Consider some example schemes:

Scheme A: (10 talks/hr) This is the scheme I have most experience enduring (the ‘sardine’ scheme of talk arrangements) but with a little prescribed Q&A/relaxation time added in. What typically happens here is that one or more of the first talks overruns, and the last talk is squeezed in and oops, there goes the Q&A time as we have to start the next series of talks. By the time a sanctioned break happens, that inspiration, that spark of an idea you had because of a talk is often gone and you can’t remember what precisely it was that you wanted to investigate further. I am not a fan of scheme A

Scheme B: (8 talks/hr) Same as A but with more leeway given. 4 talks and then a large break, which due to human factors won’t be 12 minutes in reality, but should be at least 5 minutes in length. Getting better, but how about if we split the talks up a little more.

Scheme C: (still 8 talks/hr) scheme B split into paired talks. 4 sets per hour, with two talks per set. (It would be interesting for the topics of the paired talks to complement each other in this scheme) It provides a good spacing of talks, leaving the gaps required for people to be comfortable sitting, processing what they have just heard.

Scheme D: (6 longer talks/hr) Essentially, scheme B with 5 minute talks. More space to talk through a topic or idea, but might also give enough time to be responsive to audience queries or directions.

There is also a scheme E - ”Normal talk series” – 4 x 13 minute, 3 x 18 min or 2 x 28 minute talks. These I didn’t think I’d have to illustrate.

What’s the plan then?

(Comments on this very welcome, as this is just my opinion.)

During the first period of the day (‘Core Skills‘) -> Scheme D: 3 five minute talks per 30 minutes, shifting to 2 talks (skipping the middle talk) per 30 minutes if that makes more sense. This is because I expect that people won’t be so talkative at this point in the day, and more prone to sitting and taking in information.

During Lunchtime and ‘Emerging Technologies‘ period, scheme C: 2 three minute talks per 15 minute blocks.

During the final part of the day, ‘Pushing Ideas Further’, this will be flexible, but allocation will begin in the scheme D pattern.

Pre-planned talks will happen earlier in the day, with more open spots appearing later on that is available to anyone who wants to talk on the day. This will mirror the theme of the conference as a whole; starting with our guess of what might be useful to you and ending with your choice of talks and conversations that are useful to you.

Please, add comments below if you agree, disagree, hate, or just don’t care.

“Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree.” Janet Murray – guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 January 2012

And on blogs:

“According to the general teaching council of the 28,000 who became teachers in 2010, only THREE had a computing related degree.“

“From @mberry: @benosteen I know that in that year KCL had 18 computing graduates out of 28 ICT/Computing PGCE trainees. 18>3″ (11 Jan 12)

So what was going on here? I wrote to the GTC to find out, as a few quotes attributed this statistic to them. Helpfully, they got back to me to clarify this data point (emphasis my own):

“Dear Ben

The GTC generated the data you refer to, in response to a request from NESTA to assist in the compilation of their report http://www.nesta.org.uk/events/assets/features/next_gen (on pg 39 of that report).

This data showed the number of teachers who qualified in 2010 who listed computing or computing science as their initial teacher training (ITT) qualification subject – in other words, their main area / subject of specialism.

It is accurate to say that of the 28767 teachers who were awarded qualified teacher status (QTS) in 2010, and registered with the GTCE, three gained QTS with computing or computing science as their main teaching specialism.

This compares with 750 teachers, in that 28767, who qualified with a specialism in ICT and were registered with the GTCE. Please note that the GTC will be closing at the end of March 2012 and we now no longer have the resources to respond to totally new data requests that cannot be fulfilled from previous recent data analysis work.

Regards Roger [Roger Greenway, Systems Manager, GTC]

So, now you know. The statistic was about registered teachers who had computing or computing science as their main teaching specialism, not about CS grads entering teaching.

Global Rules for Dev8D:

• Discussions rather than presentations.
• Collaborative workshops rather than presentations.
• ‘Doing‘ is hugely preferred to ‘Looking’.
• Specific points, URLs, topics and/or code preferred to powerpoint slides.
• A session ends when you want it to end. †
• If you feel a tech discussion is broadly applicable/important/interesting/funny to others, make sure to add it to the schedule to involve more people.
• “Don’t be a Dick” applies to all spaces and processes (see this.)
• Related to above rule, everyone at Dev8D is allowed and expected to ask naive questions. Encouraged even. But if all you seek is a definition, Google (or Bing) is your first port of call. ††
• Everyone should feel welcome. Obvious to most, but worth being explicit. No excuse for lechery, discrimination and sexism of any kind.
• This event is Open by default. Expect a very strong bias towards Open Code/Licences/Hardware/Information/etc †††

† Okay, you might have to move physically, but there is no obligation to stop. If you carry on the conversation for months after the event, so much the better.

†† (Unless no-one is able to access the net, in which case everyone’s apparent IQ will drop by 30 and we’ll be reduced to scrawling crude 140 character quips on paper, stapling them to polaroid pics and hurling them at each other. Instagram-lite y’all.)

††† If you regularly feel an urge to make people sign NDAs before you talk to them, then this is not the event for you. On the note of secrecy, note that this is a tech conference and most people’s phones will be capable of photoing, tweeting, blogging, videoing, audiobooing, tumblring, ustreaming, hipstagraming and whatever the new fancypants service is. It DOESN’T give them a right to record you but expect inadvertent recording will happen. Rule of ‘Dont be a Dick’ still applies but expect to appear in photos and videos, unless you ask to not appear in them.

Workflow:

Wake up

(Very important step. We start early and work til late. Caffeine intake is advised and sources of it will be available with 5 9′s of uptime. Maybe 2 9′s, but you get the point.)

First portion of the day is devoted to Core Skills.

Core.

Skills.

The basic idea of these workshops is that the people in front have skills and experience that they are willing to share, and the people in the room are trying to learn. Powerpoint might be deployed here, but there will be code. Oh yes, there will be code.

Some tips and pointers:

• You will need a laptop, or access to a friend’s for the duration of these. Remember, try to Do instead of just Looking and Watching. You’ll get far more out of it.
• If you are going to a session titled “How to do make MAGITECH software do advanced magic!” or “Further programming in LOLWUT” or any other title that does not allude to it being an absolute beginners session, PLEASE try to install the relevant software on a laptop (or if you are swanky, a virtual machine) BEFORE the session. Like, way, way, way before the session. Like the week before the session. People are orders of magnitude happier to help you get past install problems when they are not busy running a session. In fact, try to get the software installed and running beforehand, even if the session is called something like “Installing Rails”. If you managed it, you don’t need to go. If you didn’t, they’ll help you.
• There will always be unallocated space for other conversations and activities if you do not wish to attend an planned session. So don’t waste your time attending something because you feel ‘obligated’ (Some other conferences confine these conversations to corridors and breaktimes, we give over entire rooms to them. You’ll have to share space of course, but these rooms are BIG.)
• If you want to have an in-depth discussion about python 2 v 3, low-level PyPy considerations or C-bindings, then you may be disappointed by a core skill session on “Python”. (However, those would be fascinating topics for a discussion in the ‘third’ portion of the day, so keep them in mind.)
• If you are a master wizard at all the core topics on offer for that day and are feeling charitable, then please offer your help to those running things. More than not, they’ll say ‘That’s fine, but thanks anyway!’ At other times, that offer might be a real favour to the person running the session. (But remember, it’s their session – they probably spent many hours prepping for it so be nice and let them do their thing.)

“Lunch” for two hours.

Note the double quotes there. “Lunch.” You probably even read it out in a slightly differently internal voice too (possibly due to the use of an Engineer’s Capital Letter). “Lunch”, the two hour time period, is not necessarily anything to do with lunch, the meal. Sure, there’ll be awesome food on offer but this is not (necessarily) what this time of the day is about at Dev8D. Time to expand your social (technical) circle!

During “Lunch”, tables will have visible signs on them, on which the theme/topic of that table is written and people are encouraged to sit on tables that are relevant or interesting to them. It may be “python” or “java” for example and you can expect python ninjas and newbies, and java gurus or disciples will congregate on their respective tables. There may even be a table tagged with “Sharepoint”. That will likely turn into a prolonged group therapy session for all those tasked with keeping an instance “running”. Note again the use of the quotes.

You can expect code or technology ‘surgeries’ at this time too – bring your problems or even better, try to answer the problems other people bring.

If  part way through lunch, you find yourself with an interesting topic and an empty table to hand, then tag the table’s sign and see who joins you. (Just remember, ‘Field of Dreams’ is a fiction.)

If you are shy and don’t want to eat in front of people you don’t know, then my advice is to eat early on. This will give you the most time to mingle, chat and engage with people in your own time and space. There is no pressure, but after the intense first session, this is the perfect time to talk, collaborate or even get deeper into some topics. Or exchange lists of favourite Lolcat pictures with new friends. It’s entirely up to you.

Second portion of the day is devoted to Emerging Technology.

Up and coming technologies which might be a useful addition to anyone’s arsenal of tricks. You may not have heard of some of these, or even don’t understand why you might benefit from them, but hopefully, attending these sessions will answer all of those questions for you.

Guidelines are the same as for the first portion of the day, but with a heavier emphasis on get-stuff-installed-first-or-at-least-try.

Third portion of the day is devoted to Pushing Ideas Further.

Now, this is where it gets tricky to define up front. The sessions that happen here are chosen and will be run by the people at the conference (i.e. you) but we cannot say what these will be beforehand. They will be a reaction to the ideas, collaborations and discussions that are brought up by the first part of the day. See? That’s why they can’t be allocated beforehand.

You may think that without structure, there will be no content. Not so. In fact, I have found that these parts of the day contain the most rewarding, informative, imaginative, creative and exciting sessions to attend.

The sessions that run at this point will be those most important and more desired by the people at the conference.

These will be organised in a similar manner to an unconference, but people are free to put up sessions at any time during the day. This part will be explained at the event, so don’t worry. The breaktime before this session will be used to firm up and finalise the running order, so it’s important to be in the Basecamp at this time as it is possible that conflict resolution will have to go to a vote, via dotmocracy or something else pragmatic.

• Say a session on image manipulation brings up the topic of copyright which leads to a discussion about data retention and archives. Say people want to have a round table discussion on this topic, because it turns out, lots of people there cared about it. This portion of the day is the perfect time to thrash it out. Book a slot, let everyone know about it and turn up.
• People may want to have a longer session discussing Sharepoint. This is a perfect time for that.
• More bird’s of a feather meetups? This is a perfect time for that.
• Geodata collaborations? Again, perfect.
• Geek game creators BoF – writing interactive fiction, board games, and MMOs? Fine and dandy. (Actually, this will probably be one of my sessions. Woo Inform7!)
• Remember that in-depth python discussion idea you had earlier? Yeah. That. Here.
• Nanode 101? Not so much. Why? because you’d be better off doing a longer session in the Project Room, or one of the other larger rooms.

From Louise Angell (@louise_angell)

#bbcbigscreens are keen to hear from developers/artists interested in creating interactive games & apps for our platform. Get in touch! – (19 Oct 2011)

At that time, I was already talking with a number of interesting people about creating interactive projects and installations, so this was a well timed tweet! I emailed Louise for more details about the technical side of things, and she quickly sent back a number of documents showing the past projects, games and other interactive pieces they have already done. She elaborated further in the email, saying:

(from her email:)

We’re keen to consider proposals that will engage the public and enhance the city centre spaces in which our screens sit.

Although the screens are free to use, we have no budget to commission work.

However we do occasionally have opportunities via other BBC departments and external organisations and are keen to build the range of developers we work with.

An understanding of the platform and how audiences engage with it is essential when it comes to pitching ideas so we like to offer the opportunity for artists and developers to get to know us.

In short, a very, very exciting idea!

Lots of potential and I am interested in making it more physical (using objects, RFID’d items, Kinect-based motion/dance/pose/etc interaction) and the idea of having the people at one screen location compete against those at another, across the country, is a particularly interesting idea especially with 2012 coming up.

I’ve summarised the specs for the Bigscreens into bulletpoints below as currently they aren’t on the website, but you can get the specification PDF from Louise by contacting them through the Bigscreen’s website.

Bigscreen at Leeds in use (© 2011 BBC)

Technical Specifications:

Output:

•  16:9 anamorphic LED screen
• 26m to 35m “square”. (I am interpreting ‘square’ here as the diagonal measurement but basically, they are BIG screens)
• 10m or more elevation above ground.
• Stereo audio

Inputs:

• Connected to: PC or Mac Mini (on site) at either 800×600 or 1024×768
• PAL composite video and separate analog audio feed  (48Khz stereo is suggested).
• (NB The screen requires PAL 720×576, but displays at a 16:9 aspect ratio rather than 4:3. For example, something that appears circular on a normal monitor will appear squashed and distorted on the LED screen if the application doesn’t factor this in.)
• Camera (PAL signal) with pan, tilt and zoom functionality. Video input is connected to the PC via a capture card. Camera images are therefore not available through the Mac Mini as yet.
• Bluetooth (USB dongle, range 100-200m line-of-sight). From the technical specs PDF it states: “At some sites rather than using a dongle there is a Bluetooth transceiver built into the screen.” but I am unsure what this means apart from a greater range and potentially a weird driver in the OS.
• ASDL internet access (typically 4 to 8 Mbps down/200 to 400 Kbps up) Not private, but firewalled access to the public web.

Interactive projects can use their own equipment, provided it can output composite video. Note that this requires someone to be on site while it is in use and so not suitable for use in applications which run unattended.

Other information:

• Any text should be at 18pt or larger to ensure it is readable, due to the nature of the LED screen and composite video.
• From the content guidelines: “The BBC’s need to be impartial means we have to be careful about being seen to support campaigns – the BBC cannot endorse or support any personal views or campaigns. As a rule of thumb, we can give factual information rather than urging people to change their behaviour.”
• Content must be ‘pre-watershed’ in nature – so that the content can be run at any time of day. Due to the screen’s highly visible and public nature, people will not be able to ‘switch off’ or choose not to view the content so this must be taken into consideration when creating media to be displayed.
• Internet access is available; applications running on one screen can communicate over the public web with other screens.

Mia Ridge posed this question:

‘what book would you give someone to read to understand your geek mind?’ is an interesting question /cc @benosteen  – http://twitter.com/mia_out/status/127683665693122560

And later, she qualified the question to: “… books that give an insight into our odd geek world view”

To me, that suggests the idea of ‘Geeklore‘ – “cultural material and traditions transmitted from one geek to another.” (An abuse of the definition for ‘Oral Lore‘ and ‘Folklore’.)

So, what books transmit the geeklore – the ideas, concepts and metaphors – that would help someone understand our ‘weird’ worldview? (inb4 Seth Godin)

I can’t answer that, but I will glance round my bookshelves and pick out some of the titles not yet listed in the Wired list:

My Geeklore:

In my defence, I find it hard to write well in comment boxes and I admit my tone here has come out harsh!

After reading your points about the ‘cost’ of development, I would like to illustrate a number of the issues you will run into and the not-so-obvious gotchas you will have to manage which you have not mentioned:

Development phase:

- Milestone+Functionality management: You have chosen to develop a system that has many different, but interrelated (interdependant?) subsystems. This is manageable with a small and tight team, but gets a lot more difficult as soon as more stakeholders affect the direction of development (something you allude to with your paragraph on custom workflows and views on the content).

Typically, this means that the schedule of development is prone to slippage, and regardless to Agile or other methodology, there is a chance of friction between you and the people you have to report to as expected functionality and other projected milestones do not quite occur as you may have predicted.

- Scope creep: It is very hard to scope out a system that performs truly new functionality. I would very much like to see a CMS with more advanced administrative tooling as you describe but I would be naive if I thought I could guess the manner of user experience to present to even match expectation, let alone keep them from running to the hills. I would recommend extreme caution when suggesting the resources and time (NB not equivalent) required to achieve the system you plot out here.

- Bike-shedding. I cannot think of a single bespoke system I have been party to building and/or designing that has not been waylaid by this. The out-of-the-box experience of a CMS can be used as a very useful tool to define and contain these discussions – “If you want X part to change, then it will take Y time”. It supplies a useful psychological constraint against demands which is not a strongly present when a system is being created “out of nothing”.

- Ignoring existing workflows:
– pre-existing internal workflows – if I can be frank, you will discover ‘insane’ procedures that already exist for the tasks you seek to replace with your system. People will expect your system to follow the pre-existing /cultural/ workflow, even if it makes no sense.
– pre-existing ‘external’ workflows – people have become used to the idea that browsing the web is ‘idempotent’ – clicking around on blue links and using ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons should not change the pages they are viewing. Clicking ‘back’ 5 times should take me back to the page I saw 5 clicks ago, or pop up and warn me if not. There is a whole host of expected functionality and guidelines and it is worth pointing out that the best of these are not inventions, but they are catalogues, registries of behaviour. It is unwise to tinker with these expectations as people will not change.

There are more, but I want to move on to some important points

Maintenance phase:

The system is up and running, and the development team and relationship with your overseers is well in hand. Congratulations!

But…

- Hiring operational staff: This gets very difficult, and very quickly to, the more bespoke a system’s environment is. In short, it will raise the cost of sourcing, training and keeping staff to carry out the mundane service administration. TL;DR can strike even within job listings – I suggest that you attempt to write a short and concise description of the skills and experience required by candidates and to keep that mentally updated when your system develops. If they need to know how to calm distributed RoR setups on Heroku, Redis or AMQP backend administration and node.js server environments then this will narrow the range of candidates and increase the role salary.

Once you have found your better-than-average staff (aided by your .gov project and branding), you will have to retain them. The more skilled the staff are, the more likely they will become bored by non-developmental tasks.

This is not generally a concern within private enterprises as the means to entice and compensate staff are more flexible than with a public sector payroll.

- In-house training: As the designer, builder and maintainer of your bespoke system, you will also have to arrange for trainers, and training documentation to teach people the unique manner in which your system works. This is not something that is best to leave to this phase, as it will take time to ramp up this side of things (and no, normal documentation efforts will not be enough.)

- Expectation management: The group of people who you are working with to spec out and scope this project are not likely to be representative of the majority of the systems users, unless you have gone out of your way to ‘step over’ the hierarchy and be in contact with a broad spectrum of users. If you are adopting a phased roll-out plan, you may find quite that expectations and feedback changes in tone dramatically.

• Levels of privacy and other contextual terminology.
• Public query API by way of illustrative HTTP query dialogues.
• Protected Data query via OAuth.
• OAuth Workflow is illustrated in some depth

This is a pre-release of the API; it is nearly there, but it would be foolish to assume that the API will not change if any difficulties arise or if a better way is agreed upon.

Google Doc version of API:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hEHwKEpQ3wH-qmgmQAgdxdcEIG1jmv6e2-FgdEfW89I/edit?hl=en_GB

As the document is ‘view-only’, you cannot comment on it directly. Please post queries and observations to the ORCID Researcher Google group.

NB Posting a comment here will not directly reach the other members of the ORCID board.

The Videos of all the talks and Q&A sessions are now available here

Program

10:00 Welcome and what’s new – Howard Ratner, ORCID Chair (Slides [PPTX 2.55Mb])

Talk discussed:

Key quote “ORCID will work to support the creation of a permanent, clear and unambiguous record of scholarly communication by enabling reliable attribution of authors and contributors”

Re-statement of the 10 ORCID principles

Various demographics and participant statistics

Illustration of how the Trusted Partners can give more weight to the assertions made in a profile by a researcher by ‘agreeing’ (same_as):

An overview of other researcher ID initiatives and some bullet points on why they feel ORCID is different:

• Only not-for-profit contributor identifier initiative dedicated to an open and global service focused on scholarly communication
• ORCID is backed by a non-profit organization with over 250 participants behind it
• ORCID is backed by many different stakeholders
• Publishers are an important ORCID stakeholder but are just one part
• ORCID is serious about building an open system
• ORCID is the only researcher identifier that is not limited to discipline, institution or geographic area
• ORCID is the one to bridge them all by registering the identifiers of all other relevant standalone services (silos big and small)

10:30 What ORCID already does and will do next – Brian Wilson and Geoff Bilder for the Technical Working Group (Slides [PPTX 3.8Mb])

Talk covered:

Development approach, timeline and progress overview

Discussion of the form of ORCIDs as URLs

Overview of what the Query API will provide (non-technical)

Details of the VIVO/ORCID collaboration and code resulting from that.

11:00 Open Q&A on the above

11:30 Cool, but who’s going to pay for that – Craig Van Dyck and Ed Pentz for the Business Working Group (Slides [PPTX 1.19Mb])

Talk covered:

Details of the financial models and projections for the ORCID project

Expected cost to institutions, publishers and funders

$2.75 million required as investment capital (to be paid back after the project breaks even)

13:30 ORCID and me: synergies – Each followed by animated discussion with the audience

ORCID and researchers – Cameron Neylon, STFC

Cameron’s key points were:

Without giving researchers total control over their data and their profile, the system will fail. This includes the power to not list works and co-authorship that the researcher does not want to show.

The most authoritative information you have about a researcher, WILL be from the researcher. Not the institution, not the publisher, but the researcher. It is up to them to specify what is ‘true’ or not.

Researchers wanted three things:

• Online profiles that could be used to generate CVs (as maintenance-free as possible) – “It should just know about what articles I publish”
• Tracking and aggregation of non-standard outputs in repositories (eg Data, software). This also relates to an identifier being used as a marker that I can use to say “This is a scholarly output for me” even on non-traditional outputs (eg blog posts)
• And this is the key. Automating and simplifying grant submissions systems but critically manuscript submission systems. That got clearly the most votes, is probably actually the most tractable and offers the most opportunity for immediate traction with researchers.

Provided an overview of DataCite and why it exists (no current convention for citing datasets, attributing impact to them or linking them to the articles which use them)

“DataCite is part of ORCID as ORCID is a community, DataCite is about linking all types of scientific content together, and author identification is one of the key issues”

DataCite search interface: http://search.datacite.org/ui

An example PANGAEA dataset (NB not the one used in presentation unfortunately): http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.733100

ORCID and funding agencies – Carlos Morais-Pires, European Commission (Slides [PDF])

Provided the EU context for FP8, and where ORCID and related efforts may fit within the overall strategy, including overarching figures and funding information.

No questions were raised immediately following this talk, but it did give a very good context to the levels of money that the EU is pushing into this area.

ORCID and your university library – Consol Garcia, Biblioteca del Campus del Baix Llobregat (a Prezi which I cannot find online, may be private)

Provided a good illustration of why the ‘first name, last name’ paradigm falls flat for many cultures and languages.

Asked many questions about what ORCID may do to help libraries but also how it could fit within library practices as they currently stand.

[Ben: Fundamentally, it raised more issues about current library practices and its shortfalls than what a global id for researchers could do]

ORCID and your repository – Najko Jahn, Universität Bielefeld

The presentation gave an overview as to the work they had been doing for the past year or more on their repository. They had already begun to tackle the author disambiguation problem, assigning IDs to authors and so on. Librarians suggest which works to attribute to researchers, and the researchers were able to simply confirm or deny that the work was authored by them. They had done so for approximately 300 of their researchers.

The key question he posed at the end was “What would adopting ORCID do for my repository?” which is a perfectly valid question, given the work they had already undertaken to disambiguate. The discussion was slow, but eventually focussed on the difference in scope – their researcher IDs were locally valid without a widely understood API to query about them, and an international ID system would have a global scope, with effort being made so that the API is as simple but useful as possible.

ORCID and your journal – Brian Hole – Ubiquity Press (Prezi presentation)

Talked about how ORCID may work with a small, independent publisher and what made them different from others (publishing by researchers, for researchers)

• ORCID is a registry of profiles for people involved in research – a profile can be created by the person themselves (self-registry) or by what is termed a Trusted Partner, such as a University or Publisher.
• The people using the system decide who is and is not a researcher, not the system itself.
• A self-registered profile, for “John Smith” for example, can state that it is the same ‘John Smith’ in a profile created by a Trusted Partner and vice-versa. (akin to the semantic web’s “sameAs”)
• Profiles which are linked like this in both directions (researcher to trusted partner and back again) are trusted more than a profile without such verifying claims.
• Profile data can have varying levels of privacy: fields can be made public (anyone can see the data), protected (only those that a researcher authorises can see the data) or private (only the researcher can see it). It is expected that when profiles are linked in the above manner, the researcher’s privacy settings will cover the data submitted by the other parties too (but this mechanism is by no means confirmed or implemented yet.)
• A researcher will be able to authorise other parties to access their protected data using a scheme called OAuth. This is a simple process for the user, and requires little to be remembered on their part. An example Twitter OAuth authorisation can be seen in the first 30 seconds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhrbmUbF0IE - blink and you’ll miss it.
• The main selling point for the system at this time is that it is attempting to save a researcher’s time spent filling in publisher and funder forms for article and bid submissions by having the pertinent details automatically drawn from their ORCID profile (once the publisher/funder’s system has been authorised via the aforementioned OAuth)
• The later selling point, when a tipping point of signed up users is reached, is expected to be for the universities, funders and publishers. The ability to draw up an REF return or to see which publications have been made as a result of which project funding is an expected feature.
• It is expected that usable ORCIDs will be assigned from Q2 2012

Money:

(much of the following is taken from Ed Pentz’s powerpoint presentation: http://orcid.org/sites/default/files/bwgsep11.pptx WARNING: new Powerpoint required to view.)

• Current projections suggest that the ORCID system will require operating costs of around $2.1 million a year for the next few years.
• The organisation has approximately 6 months left of funding capital left to work with and is on a funding drive at this moment.
• It is looking to follow in other CrossRef project’s footsteps by asking publishers and the like for loans – it projects that it will reach the break-even point in 5 to 6 years.
• No researcher is going to pay for access to the service to create and use a profile and its ID.
• The Trusted Partners are expected to pay – what the value-added services might be for these parties are still in discussion.
• The 5 to 6 years break-even point is based on what seems to be a conservative uptake by these parties – however, the system still needs to be sold to them! The following figures are extremely preliminary (tiering is based on number of people/size of organisation):
• 

[Ben: Just repeating - these figures are pre- pre- pre-alpha and subject to change at the drop of a hat. In fact, I'd bet that they already have]

Things yet to be dealt with (my opinion):

• Whilst no-one has stated a problem with ORCID’s software being Open Source, it has yet to be released as an Open Source Project. The code base that they are working on, IP belonging to Thomson-Reuters, has been scrubbed of any Thomson-Reuters specific code and they (T-R) have agree that it is suitable to be placed under an OSI licence. It just hasn’t been done yet.
• The ORCID software release was planned to be just a deployable .war file – without source code. This obviously is not acceptable if the O in ORCID is to remain to stand for Open (in spirit if not pedantically.)
• How privacy is to be handled with multiple parties asserting various pieces of information is not yet decided or agreed upon. This type of functionality is quite a deal-breaker for many academics.
• How malicious or false claims are going to be dealt with, at a policy level, has not been clear. What level of recourse will an individual have against false claims made (mistakenly) by a trusted partner and vice-versa? Researchers making multiple accounts? Profiles made by bored teenagers for ‘fun’?
• There is still a short-term gap of investment funding required of $2.75 million dollars – it remains to be seen what occurs if the code is still not made open source by the end of six months if no other sources of capital is found.
• Whilst other identifier schemes can be easily included within an ORCID profile, it is not clear if – at an organisational level – if they would be happy if another organisation used the ORCID code to set up another ‘ORCID’ system. Due to the timeline of when ORCID might go live (Q2 2012), the urgency with which other organisations require them might force other systems to be put into place much earlier. For example, as Andrew Treloar jokingly quoted on the ORCID outreach event’s live chat: “If you guys have an ORC-ID, then I want an ELF-ID” – could the next ORCID-free six months force some funders to take matters into their own hands?
• ORCID exit-strategies – both for the organisation and for individual profiles. What happens when the money runs out? What happens to the data? If someone wanted ‘out’, is there a way for them to remove all their data and take it with them? (in a similar vein to http://www.dataliberation.org/)
• The authorisation system relies on OAuth (which is no bad thing) but I don’t think that the time required for existing organisation to adopt this has been adequately estimated. ORCIDs use on other systems to save time and effort filling in forms is a crucial part of the ‘sales pitch’ to academics – this hasn’t gotten the visible focus I would’ve expected.