With 23 posts and 76 comments on the working group’s blog I think we have a lot to talk about in our session this Sunday. I’m not entirely sure about the best way to organize our session. We have a range of great posts on general visualization and interface questions and a series of posts that report out on detailed case studies. We have posts that focus on ways end users can visualize and create interfaces and posts that focus on the kinds of interfaces that we want our organizations to be able to provide to different audiences. We’ve discussed maps, timelines, graphs and charts and a range of different kinds of digital objects, including photographs, oral histories, and material culture. My hope for our working group’s face-to-face meeting is that we can have a chance to try and think across this work and use this as an opportunity to consider where we go from here.

I would suggest that we take the following approach to our session time.

1. Introductions: Many of us have yet to meet face to face, I would suggest that we start by briefly introducing ourselves and our project/posts. Anyone who joins our group can use this as an opportunity to get a quick introduction to the work we have been doing.
2. Open questions: Once everyone has had a chance to introduce themselves and their work I would suggest that we take some time to pose questions to the group or to individuals about their posts. Consider posting ideas for general questions you would like the group to respond to and discuss in the comments on this post. I would like the questions to originate first from members of the working group, but then if time permits to take questions from whatever audience members we have.
3. How we are thinking differently? I would then suggest that we take the last few minutes of our session time to briefly go back through the group and have each group member briefly explain how participation in the group, working up their post, or reading one of the other pieces has changed their thinking. I think it is really important for us to be meta-cognitive about this sort of thing and I would love to get a sense of how our thoughts on this subject are changing.

So that is my suggestion for how to organize our face-to-face workshop time. If anyone has a different idea for the best way to use this time you should feel free to post suggestions in the comments.