[Fsa-guatemala] Group Identifiers for L>1 Workshops
Daniel Kahn Gillmor
dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Thu Sep 18 12:42:50 EDT 2008
Groups have been identified by color names in past workshops. This is
problematic in a multilingual arrangement where Red != Rojo.
I'm assuming that we'll continue to identify the Rights by letters
From the roman alphabet (A, B, etc). I'd prefer it if we can avoid
overlapping the namespace of the Rights with the namespace of the
Groups. I'd like to avoid numbering the rights, because numbering
implies an order (much more strongly than letters, anyway), and the
ordering of the rights is very fluid on the board as endorsements are
added and cleared. So i'm not even considering letters from the roman
alphabet for Group names at this point. But i'm open to reconsidering
it if folks have other suggestions for Right identifiers.
So how should we identify Groups in an L>1 Workshop?
* Color names; we could just have the Red group be the Rojo group,
depending on the selected language of the Scribe UI. What would
we put on the board in this case?
* Animals (dog, cat, etc); these have the same translation problems
as Color names; also, some animal names might be considered
inappropriate in some cultural settings.
* Blobs of Actual Color; This has some problems: There aren't that
many visually-distinguishable colors; Some Participants are likely
to be color-blind; Projectors often have weirdly divergent color
representations than monitors (especially since the wall projected
on might vary in color), so the association between Groups on the
Board and in the Scribe UI might be ambiguous. Colors don't
necessarily have clear names when you're talking about them even in
the same language; is it Teal, or Aquamarine, or Cyan? This might
make it tough to communicate about them verbally.
* Icons; These could be easily identifiable; but if they don't have
names that people already know, they could be difficult to talk
about verbally, unless we do careful selection of icons with pretty
unambiguous names in each Language. Does someone want to try to
come up with a list?
* Numerals; These are very recognizable symbols that are easy to
communicate about. Unfortunately, we only have 10 of them (0-9) --
will we have more than 10 groups? In combined pairs (00-99), we
could easily cover all conceivable Groups, though. Problems:
numbers often have social/cultural implications. Who is Group #1?
Who is Group #13? Group #0? There could also be confusion with
the counting-off process for splitting into Groups.
Any other proposals? What do folks think about the above ones? What
concerns or advantages did i miss? Can we settle on something? How
many Groups are we expecting to be able to support?
--dkg
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