This work session took place at Tree's house in Eugene. Arrival evening of March 28, departure morning of April 1. Attendees were Sue Woehrlin, Tom Atlee, John Abbe, Ted Ernst, Tree Bressen, and for a few hours Marc Tobin. Here's what we did.
Related Patterns: Finalized first pass on which patterns are related to which. Created separate fields in the wiki for "Primary" relationships (appear on printed cards) and "Other" (secondary) relationships. All primary relationships have now been entered into the wiki. (Vine is going to change the map to have the default version show only the primary relationships, which will appear as solid black lines; on the full version, secondary relationships will be visible as dotted grey lines.)
Images: Assessed all current primary images on two major criteria, "beauty" and "fit." Created an image status field to mark images done, good enough, or not ready, and marked the 8-10 images that ranked high on both as done. Brainstormed possible image ideas for ~30 images that ranked low on fit. Added more images to the collection and that process continues.
Categories: Added a field to the wagn for the new categorization, and entered category data for all the patterns. Categories are now replacing Stage as the primary view of patterns in the Menu bar and elsewhere.
PPPP, "Post-Publication Participatory Process": In discussing publication, we decided that we are probably going with self-publishing over attempting to go through a book company. Publishers these days don't help much with promotion, meanwhile going through their process would likely cause a long delay in release, as well as tremendous complications regarding editorial oversight. Given that we can form direct connections with our likely audience, it probably makes more sense to self-publish and then hire a company to do fulfillment. We also talked about the need to redo our website to make it more appealing for the public, and discussed the balance between keeping the editing as open as possible to invite participation vs. needing some controls in place so that our publication process doesn't get messed up. We brainstormed luminaries, organizations and others who might help us get the word out through various means. We are particularly interested in exploring a bigger connection with NCDD as a natural ally. See Eugene March 2011 work session PPPP notes here.
WORK PLAN FROM MARCH 2011
Category Chart: Get this wrapped up. Tree wants to revise the graphic with regard to colors, symbols, sequence, and so on.
Images: Sue, Ted, Dave, and anyone else will find what they can between now and the next work session. We will likely focus on this activity at the next work session as a primary task, attempting to have good enough images in place for all the patterns by the end of it.
Relationships: John & Tree will review all of the primary relationships and bring any suggested changes to the next work session. Vine has kindly agreed to copy data from the Google doc into the wiki, including entering the secondary relationships and how they are related as well as the comments for the primary relationships (plus deleting duplicates from secondary fields). Sue will edit that text to remove people's names, make the sentences flow, and so on. We are still determining final presentation form of that info, e.g. whether or not the patterns will be listed at the front of each paragraph with arrows, or embedded into the text of each one.
Heart Text Editing: Tom will work on polishing the dozen patterns that have been added since the last round of major polishing in the fall. Sue will review all the hearts and perhaps do some further polishing, and/or bring a few to the group's attention. Note that Sue & Tree also still need to complete their earlier Edit lists.
Writing the Booklet: Tree is the most likely person to draft opening sections on vision, what this is, etc. Sue will do a first draft on how the cards can be used. It would be great if these were done by the time the next work session starts, but it may not happen until later.
Researching Publication Options: We will ask Dave if he is willing to take the lead on this research, probably instead of completing the book proposal. That means researching what is involved in producing a high quality card deck and finding a company to do it, including dealing with printing accompanying booklets and likely a box. We will all keep an eye out for graphic designer possibilities, noting that there are potentially 2 separate roles here: an artist to design the uniform back of the cards, and a designer to do final layout for the fronts. Tree will explore with Nuriya, Sue may ask her friend Cathy for initial sketch ideas.
Honour and Acknowledge: We are grateful for the tremendous progress that has been made on this project and the sense that it is moving forward in a solid way. We want to remember to take a few more moments at future gatherings to acknowledge and celebrate what we are accomplishing.
DAY 1 REPORT
Hi folks,
We have a small but dedicated (and experienced) crew working on the project for 3 days here in Eugene: Tom Atlee, John Abbe, Ted Ernst, Sue Woerhlin, & me. The focus of our work at this time is mainly relationships and images.
In the past two months there has been an immense amount of progress on determining which patterns will be listed as related to each other on the cards. Sue & Tom & i each went through all 84 current patterns, listing up to 7 primary links and 5 additional links for up to a dozen related patterns per pattern. That yielded 67 patterns with enough congruence among our choices to consider their first pass complete. For the remaining 17, we are getting input here from Ted & John to see if that results in a clearer convergence. If not, then we'll actually talk to each other to see what results! Part of the evolution of our whole process in creating this pattern language is learning which pieces of the work to do as individuals vs. in subgroups or in the whole, and when to collect simple quick feedback vs. when to have a deeper conversation.
John did some "wagoneering" today (that's the name for when changes are made to the structure of our website) to:
(a) distinguish between primary relationships (which will be listed in the card deck) and the rest of the relationships; and
(b) add a field for our listing our new categories so that those can become the basis of the color coding on the map.
Once Vine completes the next stage of programming, the map will be color-coded by category instead of by stage of development. And primary relationships will be connected on the map by solid lines, with dotted lines connecting the rest.
The other big focus today was on images, particularly reviewing our existing images. We are mainly concerned at this stage with two criteria for images: are they attractive, and is that image a good representation for that pattern. So each person went through and marked feedback for each image on those two criteria, and then as a group we looked at the results. Based on that we approved 8-10 patterns as ready on both beauty and fit. So that means we still have quite a lot of work cut out for us in finding the right images. We also tweaked our criteria for images, clarifying that some criteria apply to each image while others (such as diversity balance) apply to the set as a whole.
So that's the daily round-up. Cheers,
--Tree
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