Robert P. Taylor's JuryDuty: reflections on a trial 

The idea of creating a complimentary record of an important meeting, through a website exhibiting drawings of the meeting's participants created on-the-spot, during the event, emerged from several different web-building experiences. Creating Webbery and TCFolks (see Related Taylor websites below, for links) contributed to it informally, by providing general experience in drawing various known and unknown people and organizing the digitized versions of these drawings in websites. From working on them, I perceived that such collections could be quite revelatory of the activities and the people who participated in them, in ways that more formal records like proceedings, faculty meeting minutes, photographs, and so on were not. Their contribution was informal though, because neither was focused on a single meeting. What I learned from them with respect to meetings was piecemeal and serendipitous, and just emerged as I worked on the two sites. By contrast, the experience of creating Prana, a website based on a meeting on technology and education which I attended in Prague a few weeks before my jury duty, made a direct, formal contribution to the concept behind JuryDuty. The idea of making a meeting-based site was in my mind when I landed in Prague, and from the moment I arrived I began to draw its participants, with the aim of using the drawings to create a site about the meeting. JuryDuty is simply a translation of focus, from a formally scheduled international professional meeting to a formal meeting required by citizenship and New York City residence. Both have rules of behavior and a wide range of participants, characterized by different appearances and different points of view. So as I began my 1997 jury duty on 23 June, I was determined to create a drawn record of the experience to see how it would work. The rationale for making multiple drawings of those meeting with me, was also developing by this point, though only in retrospect can I articulate it even vaguely (see Statistical "populations" of Images below).