A workshop in the print shop

Our first content modelling workshop in the Copenhagen print shop: twelve people from a museum, a library, a ferry company and a newspaper, one bus station, too much coffee, and a dog who wanted to help with the pile. Everyone found their own content in a building.

We flew to Copenhagen last Thursday for the first workshop in the print shop. Aoife ran it; Callum was there to take notes, refill the coffee, and keep Noir away from the pile.

Twelve people came, from very different places: two people from a regional museum, three from a university library, one from a ferry company, a small newspaper's whole digital team (two people), an architect, a charity that runs community gardens, and two developers from an agency who had been sent by their boss and were visibly suspicious.

The exercise

The workshop is built around one question: what is this field for? Usually we ask each group to bring one thing their organization publishes, and we model it together. This time, Aoife tried something new. Before anyone modelled their own thing, everyone modelled a building.

Specifically: Fennell Quay Bus Station, register number DMR 0412, the one Dublin calls the Accordion. We handed out a printed copy of its index card, front and back, Declan's pencil included, and asked them to do what we'd done at the Register in May.

It took the room about forty minutes to discover what took us a full day: that a building is a building, an architect and a street. The museum people got there first. "That's an object, a maker and a gallery," one of them said, which is exactly right, and which is the moment the exercise starts working. Everyone suddenly sees their own content in someone else's.

• The library: a work, a copy and a shelf.

• The ferry company: a route, a sailing and a port.

• The newspaper, after a long argument: a story, a version and a section.

The suspicious developers said nothing for a long time, then asked if they could take the spreadsheet home.

The name cards

Birthe, who owned the print shop before us and teaches us to use the press, insisted on printing everyone's name cards. She set twelve names by hand on Wednesday afternoon, in the twelve-point roman with small capitals, and printed them on the cream card from the cupboard.

We have never seen a room of adults so quiet as when they were handed a name card that had been printed for them, letter by letter, by someone they had never met. Several people asked if they could keep them. All of them did.

The pile

The best part of any of these workshops is the pile in the middle of the table: the cards nobody can explain. This time the pile included:

• extra_info, brought by three separate organizations. Aoife was delighted.

• featured, which, on closer questioning, meant four different things to the four people who had it.

• last_updated_by_hand, a field the newspaper keeps because their system's own "last updated" changes whenever anyone looks at a story funny.

• A card from the ferry company that just said ?, in homage, they said, to the Register's mystery card.

Noir tried to help with the pile twice. The second time she got a card, legacy_id, which she carried under the press and wouldn't give back. The ferry company said they'd been meaning to get rid of it anyway.

The slugs

Leela came in for the last hour and told the story of launch night: the 214 plaques that pointed at pages that no longer existed because a name had been improved. Then she asked everyone to find one thing in their own model that was printed somewhere.

Every organization had one. The museum's object numbers on wall captions. The library's shelf marks on book spines. The ferry company's route numbers painted on the side of a ship. The newspaper's addresses in a decade of other people's links.

Nobody in the room had thought of those as fields before. Everybody went home with at least one card moved from "editable" to "permanent".

What we'd change

Twelve is the right number. Six hours is slightly too long; we'll finish at four next time. The bus station exercise is staying. And next time we'll order less coffee. There was a lot left, and the only one who was going to drink it was underneath the press.