VRM East Coast Workshop 2009

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The Second East Coast Workshop (tag vrm2009b) will be hosted by ProjectVRM and the Berkman Center at Pound Hall at Harvard Law School, on Monday-Tuesday 12-13 October, 2009. The event will go from 9AM to 5:30 on both days.

As with earlier workshops, the purpose is to bring people together and make progress on any number of VRM topics and projects. The workshop will be run as an "unconference" on the open space model, which means session topics will be chosen by participants. Here is the Wikipedia page on open space.

In open space there are no speakers or panels -- just participants, gathered to get work done and enjoy doing it. Participation includes contributing to the this wiki.

Registration

The workshop is free. You can register through this EventBrite link.

Possible Topics for sessions / discussion

  • Personal health records
  • User-initiated terms of service
  • Where Personal informatics / self-tracking aligns with VRM
  • Information Sharing Workgroup (Kantara initiative) (Previously Volunteered Personal Information Workgroup)
  • Emancipay / paychoice
  • Personal RFP

Remote Access

  • Looking at possibly setting stuff up.

Schedule

Monday

Open Space sessions

In open space workshops, topics are suggested by participants in the Agenda making session, which is attended by everybody. Participants write the title of their topic on a sheet of paper with a bold marker, add their name, then describe the topic to the group and post it on a large "spreadsheet" of times and session locations, a blackboard in the front of Pound 101, which will be our main room.

One person in each session will take notes, either directly (or eventually) on the workshop wiki. At the end of each day somebody from each discussion session will report progress to the group.

Dinner on Monday Night

Put your name here if you hope to join us Monday night for dinner so we can make reservations. It will be a few blocks from Pound Hall near Harvard Square.

  • Doc Searls
  • Keith Hopper
  • Dean Landsman

Tuesday

Panel-led discussion: Users controlling their own data

The issue of users conrolling their data is central not just to VRM, but to parallel efforts in health care, privacy, governance and other areas. So we are opening Tuesday with a discussion among participants, led by a panel of folks who have been obsessing on the topic. More specifically, we've been thinking about this as "personal informatics / self-tracking and some opportunities and projects emerging around storing, sharing, and using personal data."

Open Space sessions

Same as Monday.

Research possibilities

ProjectVRM is classifed as a research project by the Berkman Center, and conducting research of some kind is part of ProjectVRM's charter. So we have a brief session near the end of the day to talk about the possibilities here, based on discussion during the last two days.

Space

We have a the John Chipman Gray Room in Pound Hall (on the second floor) booked for both days.

If we need additional small session spaces, there are plenty of those out on the lawns and in the halls and public seating areas amongst nearby buildings at the Law School. We'll make room on the session "spreadsheet" for these, so we're ready as the need arises.