RebootingWebOfTrust is both a culture and a process. An important part of our culture is that we are focused on collaborating together to SHIP — whitepapers, specs and code that will have impact that we can largely complete in 3 days. We have some process that we’d like you to participate in to facilitate this that that has worked well in the past, but essentially our culture of working together to ship something comes first. Process is second.
We'll start by setting expectations for the workshop, and well as introducing the RWoT Code of Conduct. We'll identity the CRT team, who are the points of conduct for any concerns or violations of the code of conduct.
Our first morning we will be doing some exercises to both bring out our passions and topics that we brought with us, but also allow us to hear the weak-signals that we collectively may not know may be becoming vitally important. So for this SCAN phase it is important that everyone listen between the lines and not solely share your own ideas and agendas — instead connect the ideas and interests together.
As our day progresses, there will be some ideas that are just too large or not scoped well enough to dive into, or we just don’t have the right people here today participate such that can have impact. Our goal is to narrow down and FOCUS on those that we actually can accomplish. This may mean that your own important and powerful ideas may have to take a second seat to different topic. It is not that it is any better, but it may have the critical mass of people to complete it at this event—that comes first.
Depending on what emerges from our SCAN and FOCUS stages, we likely will need to select from multiple equally valid choices. Some topics and team will be ready to start, but others we may need to have further discussion or election. Every event how we choose has been slightly different depending on how topics have emerged — trust that we will find a good way to get down to 5 or 6 teams that work together to ship.
When the teams first meet, they should choose from among themselves someone to facilitate their discussions. This person does not need to be the ultimate topic lead after our event, but instead should be focused on bringing everyone’s voice to the table, and to help everyone focus on what will be required to ship a first draft by the end of our three days together.
Before the end of the first day the teams should be selected, but once they meet and talk, they may discover the final nature of their topic and goals is not what they started with. That is not atypical and to be expected.
By the end of the first day each team should present their topic with a brief abstract.
On the second day, the teams will continue meeting to continue developing their topic. It's common that teams revise their topic by narrowing or pivoting.
During this day, a team sets their own cadence for breaking apart into subgroups to research or prototype a specific item (if applicable) and checking back in to report progress internally.
Also on day 2, we regroup and use a similar process used on day 1 to identify weak signals that may emerge from work so far. After selecting weak signals of interest, people choose a weak signal group they'd like to participate in (which may be different from their topic group).
This group spends 1-2 hours developing their weak signal. The output is typically an abstract of what was discussed, to preserve context for future development of the weak signal
Sometimes what a team chooses as their topic doesn’t quite fit what everyone on the team wants to work on during the event. In that case, talk to the facilitators and maybe we can help you discover someone else that does want to work on a topic with you. Our key requirement is that our topics much create collaboratively, and we must have a first draft by the end of the three days — a number of late-formed teams have completed powerful topic papers in past events.
At the end of day 2, each team reports out their status.
Topic development continues as on day 2, but the focus is to wrap up and/or identify owners for subsequent activity. See our Suggested RWoT Paper Development Process.
This is an opportunity to present your topic to the RWOT community. Each team selects a presenter to describe the work that's been done so far, including any demos the team has developed.