UPDATE Dec 2015: Videos now available at http://dmdii.uilabs.org/videos !!!

 
UI LABS hosted a DMC workshop at UI LABS headquarters on Goose Island on September 23rd. The core purpose of the event was to build support and quality contributions to the DMC project and 15-16 project call through:

• Educating attendees on the DMC technology and integration points;
• Fostering collaboration; 
• Building an energized community

During the day the team showcased the latest developments and functionality, facilitated audience hacking, and held breakout sessions. Adobe Connect was used to facilitate online collaboration and participation by in-room attendees and remote participants. At its peak, more than 200 people participated.

Group Photo

We are currently working on cataloguing everything we got out of our recent DMC Workshop, but here are a few things that came out of it right away.

Schedule and Planning

The web pages for the workshop were:

• DMDII Webpage
• Project Webpage

Some key highlights of the day included:

• Virtual attendance & participation
• Live 45-minute demo from GE with multiple vignettes
• Audience hacking and breakout group activities
• USB thumb drives handed out with pre-loaded DMC software and documentation

USB Flash Drives with DMC software

Final Agenda:

Workshop in Action                      

Attendance & Participation

Total number of registrants was 170: 75 in-person and 95 virtual. The online link was advertised and shared during the actual event and at the peak, attendance surged to 200. Several people in the room also joined the adobe connect at different points throughout the day to chime in on the chat session.

We developed and used a metric called Member density to tell us about the audience:

Member density (Md) = members / nonmembers

The theory is that this tells us something about the attendees:

• Motivations (should I join online or in-person?)
• Membership engagement vs. non-membership interest (which membership sectors have strong attendance? Weak?)

We think an optimal number would be around 1.33 (three members to every two nonmembers) because it means you have a strong interest from nonmembers, but still majority members who are already initiated and prepared to propose. In addition, this ratio will help nonmembers discuss and find a comfort level with the membership process. Here was our member density:

Registered Attendees

For the online participation, we had several controls and protocols in place - read the full Adobe Connect rules of engagement.

Adobe Connect

Connecting with Others

There have been many questions about how to get in touch with interesting folks for teaming or from the workshop. While we cannot distribute contact information from the workshop, we can encourage you to connect with each other through other channels.

• Our community discussion forums is great way to ask questions and send private messages
• We are working on setting up an always-on online chat for DMC, such as IRC or slack

Results and Outputs

There were lots of great interactions throughout the day, and we will soon be posting the many questions that were asked during our sessions and how our administrators went about answering to those. 

Upcoming items we will post here:

• Chat logs
• Edited videos
• Q&A
• Photos and transcriptions of whiteboards from breakout sessions

In the meantime, here are a few quick results:

Wordcloud generated from the online discussion

Treemap + heatmap which we generated from the "audience hacking" session. This  is it people, this is our community for the DMC as of today!

The size of each box portrays the number of people who identify with that community. The color represents the number of people who want to connect with that community (the brighter the color, the stronger the desire).

Treemap of our community

DMC Workshop Presentations

USB Thumbdrive

The contents of the USB thumbdrive from the workshop was all publicly available materials available of projectdmc.org. However, for those interested, the usb drive contents have been replicated in perpetuity at http://projectdmc.org/files/usb_drive/.