= NYC Anarchist Bookfair Debrief/Evaluation =

After the [wiki:nyc_anarchist_book_fair_2008 NYC Anarchist Bookfair (2008) workshop], the presenters debriefed and evaluated. We had about 15 - 20 participants (not including the 5 presenters). The workshop was audio recorded and should turn up on the [http://anarchistbookfair.net] web site eventually.

== Things that went well ==

 * Clear presentations
 * Well organized
 * People picked up on the [wiki:nyc_anarchist_book_fair_2008#UnderlyingIdeas 4 underlying ideas] immediately
 * We did well keeping things from getting too technical 
 * We left over 30 minutes for discussion
 * Passed out a stay in touch list
 * Discussion on the risks of facebook involved many of the participants and went well

== Things that could have been improved ==

 * Too much yammering on our part
 * We missed an opportunity in the middle to physically broaden the circle as new people came in late
 * Role playing directions should be re-written to say "Email person b@y.com" instead of just "Email person B"
 * Confusion on the role play: How did the police know to swap out the second message with a message with a different date when they couldn't read the message because it was encrypted?
 * Planning problems: due to sickness, family emergencies, forgetting meetings, and incorporating new people we had huge discontinuity in the planning process. Combined with the huge breadth of ideas originally proposed, making decisions to focus the workshop was difficult.
 * We did not ground the role play solidly enough in real email exchange (i.e. people understood the concepts in the role play, but didn't fully connect with how they send email)
 * We told stories and then did the role play, then discussed the stories and then the role play. We should have discussed the stories after the stories were presented and the role play after the role play
 * We would have benefited from integrating discussions through the presentation rather than saving it all for the end
 * We didn't fully take advantage of the announcement and presence of the mic in the room as a security discussion point.
 * Planning process: not everyone had a login to the Trac system to post comments. Email notifications are difficult to parse because they are all sent "from" the trac user - figuring out who actually read the comments in the body of the message is not easy.

Note: I'm making some changes in the Role play post-workshop to reflect minor changes we made prior to the workshop and suggestions for changes (jamie).