The workshop lasted one and a half day and was organized in 12 sessions. It was devoid of regular academic presentations, and participants were not required to prepare themselves or read any material beforehand. All that was asked of them was to leave negativity at the door. They were made aware that things mentioned during the workshop could be made public through the live visualization.

The general idea behind the program was to first diverge and then converge, also to have thoughts run as freely as possible on the first day. Only in a late stage on the second day was there some confrontation with reality and practical limitations.

The charge to the participants was simple: Imagine our current system of scholarly communication, based on a paper-based reward system, never existed. Assuming today’s technology and the amount of money currently in the system, how would you design a system of scholarly communications (“The Scholarly Commons”), the goal of which, was to maximize the accessibility and impact of scholarly works. By putting us in an alternate reality with a clear charge, we sidestepped issues that often engulf such discussions: why do we publish and who do we publish for.

Specific instructions, however, were kept to a minimum, in order to allow participants to go where their interests and imaginations took them. Over the course of a day and half, individuals formed into groups and considered scholarly communications from multiple angles. At the end, we compared visions and principles that emerged from them as to how a Scholarly Commons should function. The workshop was facilitated by YKON and a live visualization capturing and organizing the discussion was made by Marcin Ignac.

Because of the interactive nature of the workshop, we did not livestream the event, but we did take live notes, using Google Docs and Trello Boards, that were available for anyone to view and comment on. These notes were progressively synthesized during the workshop into the interactive visualization. We also encouraged live tweeting using the hashtags #FutureCommons (to talk about the workshop in general) and #FCviz (to gather ideas people thought should be part of the scholarly commons and wanted to see included in the visualization). The record of the meeting is presented here.

Opening reception

The opening reception featured a slide show of all participants with personal mottos, and a presentation by Maryann Martone of the Scholarly Commons Working Group (Fig. 2). The opening reception was also used to introduce the facilitators (YKON) and visualizer (Marcin Ignac) to the group, and to explain their role in the workshop.

9:05 Welcome words by the organisers

9:15 YKON Facilitation starts

Duration: 15 min

Introducing the Shared Property-rule for the entire workshop:

All the thoughts and ideas expressed during the workshop are for collective use. We are not here to compete but to contribute, learn and build on each other’s ideas in the process of creating a new collective vision for scholarly communication.

Introducing the Islands of Possibilities:

The Islands of Possibilities are stationary modules (Fig. 3a) that are in place through Friday and Saturday. Participants can use these spaces to get inspiration, gain new perspectives and generally open their minds.

Examples:

• The Personality Modification Device (Fig. 3b): a taped area with a dart board and darts. Participants can use it to change their attitude.
• Observation Islands (Fig. 3c): areas taped to the floor where participants can stand in. The areas are marked with suggestions to allow participants to regard the process from new perspectives.

9:30 SESSION 1: The Vanishing

Duration: 15 min

Goals

• Push the mind and imagination beyond "restrictions of reality"
• Produce a creative and playful atmosphere
• Gather ideas and connect to needs and values on an individual basis

Instructions

This text is narrated:

The scholarly system has vanished. The forms of communication that were valid just a moment ago are now part of history. The contracts (international and individual) have ceased to exist. All the universities, publications and job titles are no longer in effect. The good news is that this is not an end: We have gathered this very group here to re-start the whole system, and this is a chance to do it better. You can use the same amount of money and technology that there was available before, but use it better. Another good news is that your intelligence, knowledge and creativity have not vanished. We will need those qualities today. We are happy you made it to this emergency meeting. Because of this situation, the scholarly world faces the question: Now that we have to start from a blank slate, how do we want to organize ourselves? How could we create our communication anew?

Now, before the meeting starts, please take 10 minutes to write down what is important to you, the issues you want to raise.

Find a spot where you're comfortable or move around, and write the ideas that are important to you on a piece of paper. You don't have much time so keep it short. One sentence per idea is enough for now. You are knowledgeable about the recent reality in scholarly communication, but you are free to consider totally new avenues.

You can write down your needs, expectations, new models and ideas or anything in between. That's up to you.

9:45 SESSION 2: Speed Dating

Duration: 20 min

Goals:

• Exchanging the ideas from Session 1 and building on and combining them.
• Creativity boost: To surprise and to be surprised about the large variety of point of views.

Instructions:

Now that you have your early ideas, it's time you get to share them.

1. When music plays, walk freely.
2. When it pauses, stop and turn to the person nearest to you.
3. Describe to them one idea you have, and listen to theirs. Make notes when the other one speaks.
4. When the music starts again, start walking, leaving in mid-sentence if you have to.

Note: You can also steal ideas from others and introduce them for the next one as if they would be originally yours.

10:05 SESSION 3: Soap Box

Duration: 40 min

Goals:

• First moment of sharing ideas collectively.
• General awareness of what ideas are present.
• Forming preliminary groups: Organization of ideas into groups, for upcoming group work.

Instructions:

1. Take a moment to choose or re-develop your favorite (or most urgent) idea from the previous session. Write it in a full sentence on a post-it.
2. One participant at a time steps onto the soap box. Say your name and read your sentence out loud ("Hi, my name is... and my idea/thought is...."). Then step down from the box and attach the post-it to the wall. As the wall gradually fills, place your post-it beside those ideas that seem to relate to your statement.

YKON will facilitate the organization of the post-its into groups. Groups are formed by ideas that cluster together. If a group is too large, it can be divided into two groups sharing similar starting ideas. People that are separate can voice their interest of which group they would like to join.

YKON tells which group sits on which table – participants can choose the tables / groups. Recommended amount of people per group: 5-6. The related post-its will be attached to each group's table.

11:15 SESSION 4: Perspective Engine

Duration: 75 min

Goal:

• Generate group discussion and expand on each of the ideas, by discussing them from different perspectives.

Instructions:

1. Everyone in the group is responsible for taking notes.
2. Spend 10-minute session where each sentence from the post-its are read out loud and freely commented.
3. Run your original ideas through the Perspective Engine (Fig. 4).
4. Start with an original idea by placing it in the centre. Run this idea through the engine, using the various perspectives to generate expansions to the original idea. Write down the descriptions of the issues brought up.

There will be a printed game board on each table containing research phases, issues, disciplines and stakeholders/perspectives—visible to everyone.

12:45 LUNCH

14:00 SESSION 5 - part 1: Formulate (prepare for presentations)

Duration: 15 min

Each group discusses how they want to present their outcomes. They are encouraged to try something else than a conventional academic presentation format.

14:15 SESSION 5 - part 2: Present

Duration: 30 min (3 minutes per group)

Goal:

• To create general awareness of the ideas developed, and offer their inventions for others.​

The presentations are timed to maintain the schedule.

14:45 SESSION 6: Fair of the Future of Scholarly Communication

Duration: 35 min (Fair 20 min | Group (Re)Formation 15 min)

Goal:

• To see the material created so far, recombine and build on the chosen ideas.
• (Re)form groups.

Instructions:

Fair of the Future of Scholarly Communication (20min):

Each group table turns into a Fair Booth (Fig. 5) with their ideas and perspectives clearly visible on their table. 2-3 persons of the group should always be present at the table. Others are free to walk around: they should engage the groups and ideas they found interesting, ask more from them.

Important: Make notes while you're at the fair whether you're walking around the floor or representing your table. Seek to engage with many participants and question them about their presentations and perspectives.

Group ReFormation (15min):

The exchange during the fair provides the basis for new groupings.

15:25 SESSION 7 - part 1: Visionary HQ

Duration: 50 min

Goal:

• Using the ingredients they've gathered, groups create and formulate a more complex vision of an alternate system
• The questions of practicality and implementation are introduced to the discussion for the first time, still in a fairly light manner.

Instructions:

Bring the ingredients you have chosen back to the table (not physically) and process them into a vision of a future of scholarly communication. The style of the vision is free. However, consider the following questions while creating it:

• How does it work? (Describe its system and function)
• What's the best way to tell about it? (i.e. it's story)
• What does it enable?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How should it be built?

Prepare a presentation for the whole group.

16:15 COFFEE BREAK

16:45 SESSION 7 - part 2: Presentations

Duration: 50 min (6-8 minutes per group)

Goal:

• To present the refined and fleshed out visions of each group

The presentations are timed to maintain the schedule.

17:35 SESSION 7 - part 3: Reflect on variety of visions

Duration: 10 min

Goal:

• Consi der how your vision relates to others; which elements of other visions combine well with yours?

Instructions:

Each group at their table, reflecting other groups' visions

17:45 SESSION 7 - part 4: Formulate questions

Duration: 15 min

Goal:

• Formulate questions within the group to further develop their vision

Instructions:

After each group has reflected on the presentations, they will conclude the workshop day by formulating questions:

• What are they still looking for in their own vision?
• What kind of information would help them making their “proposal” still more believable and complete?
• What questions did the other presentations raise, and how would they like to express them?

18:00 WRAP-UP

9:05 Welcome words (about today's session)

9:10 SESSION 8: Question ambassadors

Duration: 20 min

Goals:

• Cross-pollination of processes between the groups
• Enabling the groups to draw on other groups' expertise
• Creating new ties between the groups

Instructions:

First, the groups have five minutes to reconsider their questions from yesterday. Perhaps they already had conversations about them during the dinner or sleeping over them made a trick - or maybe they want to update their questions for other reasons. After revisiting the guestions, the groups send one or two of their members as ambassadors to other groups, to hunt answers to the guestions. The rest stay, ready to give answers to the ambassadors from the other groups.

9:30 SESSION 9: In broad daylight (detailing and clarifying your scenario)

Duration: 60 min

Goal: Fleshing out the scenarios in groups, confrontation with real world limitations/stakeholder visions.

The groups can choose their own approach to this process and also have the chance to implement the new answers from the previous session. YKON members will be on the floor to give support if needed.

10:30 SESSION 10: Principle distiller

Duration: 45 min (includes time for coffee)

Goal:

• Create a list of principles that underline your scenario.

Instruction:

The groups start by listing their personal principles, based on the scenario they've been working on, then discuss to agree on a list of common principles for the group.

Note: all principles are written down on a large sheet of paper in such a way it can be cut into strips later.

11:15 SESSION 11: Final presentations

Duration: 50 min

Goal:

• All the scenarios are presented alongside the principles each group agreed upon.

Instructions:

Each group has about 8 minutes of presentation time.

12:05 LUNCH BREAK

14:05 SESSION 12: Towards common principles

Duration: 55 min

Goals:

• The goal is to find commonalities between the principles of each scenario.
• Identify, graphically, principles of interest.
• Create a shared list of principles.

Instructions:

The principles of each scenario are brought to fore (each principle is on a separate paper). First task for the whole group is to organize them by association(on the window or wall): the ones that are similar should be placed together, strongly associated principles are placed nearby each other.

After this, people gather to those draft principles that interest them, thus forming groups. The task of each group is to polish the chosen draft principles, formulating one overarching principle roughly along the lines of the draft principles.

Finally the polished principles are once again brought together for a final discussion.

As a preliminary selection, all participants get two votes in choosing the principles they like best.

15:00 END OF WORKSHOP

Workshop impressions: Fig. 6 shows participants at work during various workshop activities

All session outcomes (individual and derived ideas, group visions, group principles and suggested common principles) were captured in Trello by assigned notetakers among participants. Ideas suggested by others via Twitter were captured via the online tool Zapier and automatically added in Trello. During session 3 and 4, two dedicated taggers enriched each Trello card with tags denoting research phase, discipline, stakeholder and/or issue (e.g. equity, infrastructure, credit), where applicable. During and after session 7, cards representing elements of a group's vision were linked by denoting their relationship to other elements as tags, thus creating triples (card 1, card 2, relationship between 1 and 2). In addition, cards were labeled with tags indicating the sesssion and group they were created in, and a checktag #viz to denote the presence of the card in the live visulatization (see below). For the purposes of the user interface and faster tagging we introduced concept of tag families e.g. #G* or #s** that would group similar tags together. Cards that were part of a triple were also assigned the checktag #triple.

We used the following structure in Trello:

1. Card title with hash tags (Fig. 7a)
2. Card comments with links to another idea (Fig. 7b​)

During the two days of the workshop, 691 idea cards were added to Trello. We used 88 tags to describe them and a total of 133 relations between the ideas were established. In addition to being used for the visualization (see below), all cards were shared through a public Trello board (Fig. 7c).

The ideas, visions and suggested principles captured in Trello were synthesized into a live, interactive visualization during the workshop. The visualization progressively showed individual and derived ideas (after session 3 and 4), group visions both as groups of ideas and as interconnected elements (after session 7), group principles (after session 10) and suggested common principles (after session 11). During and after the workshop the visualization allowed people, both those present in Madrid and those following online, to explore the width and breadth of generated ideas (Fig. 8a) and see the various group visions as interconnected components, showing overlap between visions (Fig. 8b). The visualization also makes it possible to follow the progression from ideas to connected vision to suggested principles (Fig. 9).

The visualization is available online to fully explore. Some things to keep in mind:

a) the schematics of the group visions as connected elements (using the option 'Show triples') are based on relations defined in the ideas noted by the groups themselves. In formulating these as triples, we tried to be as objective as possible, but the process inevitably included simplification and making assumptions. Thus, these schematics should be viewed as examples of what is possible, rather than as fully fleshed-out representations of each group's vision. b) as mentioned in the section on Trello, cards also (can) have tags indicating the research stage, discipline, stakeholders and issue (e.g. equity, infrastructure, credit) they address. While not fully implemented during the workshop (e.g. cards for group visions and suggested principles have not been tagged in this way due to time constraints), in theory this would provide an additional layer to the visualization. E.g. cards could be grouped based on specific aspects they share (e.g. all cards dealing with a certain issue), and one group's vision could be supplemented with specific elements from other group's visions that deal with a certain aspect, to identify gaps and suggest possible expansion of visions.

During the workshop, two sets of suggested principles were produced:

1. Group principles, derived from each group's vision (session 11)
2. Common principles, synthesized from the group principles (session 12)

The suggested common principles could be conceived as the most concrete outcome of the workshop. In the last workshop session, participants voted on these to get a feeling for their importance and priority (Table 2). However, while useful in rounding off the workshop, the suggested common principles did less reflect the richness of ideas and the thought process the groups went through during the two days of the workshop then did the group principles. Therefore, the steering committee of the Scholarly Commons Working Group decided to use the group principles, rather than the suggested common principles, as the basis from which to distill the main themes that emerged from the Madrid workshop. This task was commissioned to Fiona Murphy, who was also a participant in the workshop.

As a result, the group principles were re-ordered under five subheadings:

• Open and sustainable
• Fair
• Credit for all endeavors
• Technology- and business-enabled, not -led
• Governance and funding

Table 3Table 3 shows all group principles ordened in this way.

YKON is a collective constituted of artists, scholars and game designers who develop facilitation models aimed to generate meaningful exchange in unexpected ways. Our interaction modules are very suitable for groups of people who don't know each other, but have to process complex issues with strangers in a fast and profound manner. It's facilitation approach/mechanics breaks down hierarchies, allowing the participants to think about situations differently and with courage.

For the Madrid Workshop we designed a customized facilitation tool kit. To create it, we used approaches from not just facilitation, but also from arts practices, and particularly games. While our aim was not to create a game, per se, we wanted to create a generally play-like atmosphere for our interactions.

We consider interaction with a wide perspective. The design can focus on anything, from conversation to movement or atmosphere—any potential influence is worth a consideration. Of course, the existing layout of the workshop space contributed to our spatial set-up as well.

Force11's general mission and the goal of the Madrid Workshop matched well with YKON's principles. However, given the ambitious goal, the short time frame was a definite challenge for the design. One of the areas we emphasized on was the generation of unconventional ideas and unexpected approaches. For idea generation, simply saying that people are "free" to think does not challenge the underlying conventions and practices. From another perspective, saying that you're "free" to think, means: "You're on your own. Use what you already know." To put it in a nutshell: to facilitate unconventional thinking, it's useful to create unconventional situations.

As the workshop had many sessions, with individual results, we particularly appreciated the range of ideas generated throughout the workshop, not just the final outcome. It would be useful to revisit some of these proposals for future development. Many of them are worth further consideration.

In February 2016 I had a chance to participate in a Force11 workshop aimed to re-imagine scholarly communication. The invitation came from Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman as they were looking for "real time visualization of concepts during a workshop". Given my specialty in data visualization and long term interest in linked data, open research and ways to model knowledge systems, I stepped up to the challenge.

Role of the visualizer

From the very beginning the task at hand was shaped as an experiment and investigation into the role that "a visualizer" (person designing the visualization) can play during a workshop session. How can a visualization facilitate the idea creation? How adaptive can the visualization be to respond to the workshop dynamics?

Requirements and Challenges

Exploration of available tools for collaborative editing and brainstorming failed to reveal one fulfilling all of our needs:

• ability for multiple people to write down notes during brainstorming sessions in parallel
• easy way of tagging and sorting of ideas
• possibility to define relationships (links) between ideas
• open API for accessing the data end export during and after the workshop
• interactive visualization and filtering

Beside these technical requirements, we had number of challenges for the visualization itself. First, we were trying to visualize data that didn't exist when we started the project. We haven't done similar workshops in the past so a set of constraints and predefined boundaries had to be set. We estimated the amount of text we would be capturing and the vocabulary (tags) we would use to describe the ideas. Removing any friction for note takers was crucial in choosing the tool for collecting the ideas. Compared to paper note taking, digital tools can be distracting and excluding. We eventually decided on assigning only one person to take notes in each group and set on Trello as the interface because of the familiarity among participants. There was also a question of realtime vs. live visualization. A realtime visualization would update as notes would come in, streamed via the API. Live visualization comes with a slight delay needed to process, tag and organize the notes. We decided to go with the second option, as it allowed for a more curated and less distracting experience during the workshop as the visualization was projected in the same room as participant sessions.

Technology stack and setup

The final visualization used during the workshop was built on top of a number of tools:

• Trello : two separate boards, one for note taking, one for organizing, tagging, grouping and linking of ideas
• Node.js server pulling the data from Trello API and caching them of the use in the visualization
• D3.js visualization with force directed layout showing the individual ideas, colored by brainstorming group id and linked via relationships.

Outcomes

The data captured during the 2 days of the workshop resulted in an unique documentation of a workshop brainstorming process. Trello proved to be an excellent choice and we were able to capture much more ideas that we hoped for. Nevertheless, due to the workflow of transcribing and annotating there was around 1 session (1 hour) delay between the capture and visualization. While annotating, some of the ideas were rephrased in order to use common vocabulary and make connections between them. This synthesis, together with the vast amount of information, proved to be challenging for the participants. While they were the creators of the ideas, seeing them represented in a completely new way required exploration and focus for which there was no time during the fast-paced workshop. More research is needed on how to best visualize the evolution of ideas with some ideas outlined in the next section.

Future improvements

The following open questions remain:

1. How can we represent the change in the captured ideas over time? The introduced concept of sessions hasn't been fully utilized in the visualization and it was not always possible to track which ideas were build on top of which ones from the previous sessions.
2. How can we give more context to the visualization? Screen estate was quite limited and readability suffered. A multiscreen projection would allow for a more zoomed-in view as well as potentially showing all groups in parallel. Additional space would make it possible to include commentary and instruction on how to interpret the visualization, which currently required 1:1 sessions.
3. How can we allow people better explore ideas during the workshop? The way we visualized the data and always updating aspect of the visualization suggest more exploratory mode. A systhesised view was developed after the workshop allowing people to see prefiltered views of the visualization. Additional commentary is required to set the context and initial interpretation.

I'm looking forward to future workshops where these ideas could be explored.