Tools for conversation

Two weeks ago 7 of us met in Berlin to clean up the principles. When we saw cleanup that included:

Reducing redundancies (they’re not gone yet).
Growing the Lifecycle section
Improving up the uniformity of the ‘zoom level’ of each principle (also not completely done). This is about making sure we’re using the same level of granularity with each principle.

This was a great use of a small group’s time but we were missing a number of voices. We’re looking to organise another London event in June and would love to see more people come to the table. We’re planning which day to meet, so please fill in our survey and join us! It’ll be a year since our first event last June so it’ll be a time for reflexion on the work we’ve done over the last year.

Today I’m in Zurich, after spending a few days with Thomas Amberg, founder of Yaler, who had me over at the meetup in Zurich last night. Today, I’m speaking at a Google UX event called PAIR and on Thursday I’m going to be speaking in Manchester’s Future Sessions. I’ll be sharing with attendees the work of the last 24h which is a set of tools and visualisations to talk through our principles.

Firstly we’ve been thinking a lot about models of engagement for the principles. How hard is it for companies to implement? How hard is it for a startup vs a large organisation? How easy should it be, or how desirable is it regardless of effort?

In order to start to have those conversation we tiered the principles according to ‘Must have’, ‘Nice to have’ and ‘Best scenario’ which is about putting down what we think would constitute a baseline and a minimal viable mark. We’ve also made an empty poster that you can fill in to workshop these ‘levels’ as well as downloadable and printable cards which you can print on an A4 printer (Letter coming soon), one page for each category (Privacy, Interoperability, Openness, Data governance, Permissions, Transparency, Security, Lifecycle).

We’re sharing these tools (Dropbox here! and Github here!) and hoping to help organisations big and small that are planning to make or support a connected product workshop the mark. Please get in touch with us if you’re up for a little workshop, a number of us can help you out in the UK, Europe and US.