What is a Persona?
Personas function like writer’s pen names within our community; each member in FieldReport has up to three. Using personas, you can publish yourself anonymously on FieldReport and even win prizes without revealing your identity to the public. Personas are different aspects of your personality—Public, Private, and Peer—not false identities. You can toggle between them at will, and they function like three separate accounts to other members of FieldReport. To find out more about how to use Personas, see “FieldReport Personas for Beginners” in the QuickStart Guide.
It is a real virtual user. The person described in the persona does not actually exist but is created through research to typify some of the characteristics of a group of users. Biographical details are developed, even down to a photograph, so that the person concerned is so real that the intranet team starts to identify with them as an individual of the organization. This is a very brief bio, but it is just for purposes of illustration: “John Nolan is a consulting engineer. Aged 35, he lives in Birmingham with his wife Maureen and his two children. He was educated at Cambridge and then worked in Australia before joining the company three years ago.” The next step is to define his primary goals. These might be along the lines of: “John wants to make sure that he keeps track of the projects he is involved with, is aware of new techniques in bridge building, and has ready access to travel information as he is always on call anywhere in the world.” This composite would be based on talking
Participants in the SCA may create a “persona,” a character they would have liked to to have been during a specific time and place during the Middle Ages. Choose your name, clothing and create an entire biography of the person you are pretending to be. You can not have the persona of a real person, living or dead. Remember, your persona may never be royalty. You must earn a rank.
