harvard came to san francisco in the form of a mobile identity workshop – an unconference

This question from Rene in the Netherlands…

Thanks for sharing your experiences with Open Space on your web site and in your publications. I’m a consultant in the creative industry in the Netherlands and I have facilitated a lot of workshops over the years. I bumped into your approach and want to use Open Space for a
workshop next week.

After reading your work (and other resources on Open Space), one question remains for me: How do the principles “it starts when it starts” and “it’s over when it’s over” relate to the agenda making process, where subject owners plan a room and a time spot where they will discuss their topic?

Click the comments link (immediately below) here to read my answer, or to offer an answer of your own.

Have a question, too? Send it along. We’ll post and invite answers as we’re able to get to them. Thanks!

Travailler en Forum Ouvert: Petite Visite Guideé, une observation d’une réunion hypothétique en Forum Ouvert, illustrant les conditions et les possibilités de ce genre de réunions, réalisée par Michael Herman, transduction nouveau par Esther Matte. Plus de Forum Ouvert en français…

Thanks to Renee Bledsoe for a recent message…

My program Addiction Alchemy involves sacred circle ceremony and is based on Native American Medicine and Tree of Life technology and from what I’ve read so far is unknowingly tapping into Open Space!

…and for linking to us in some pretty good company.

Last year, on a whim, I invited a wonderful select group (whoever cared to come) to join me in Camden, Maine for OSONOS-by-the-Sea.

OSONOS, as most of you probably know, is an acronym for Open Space on Open Space, and for a number of years in various places in the world, people have gathered to consider the space of their lives, and ways in which that space might be expanded (opening space).

Each gathering has been rich and wonderful, but I have recently found myself somewhat restricted by a sore back which keeps me off of long plane flights. So, said I to myself, if I can’t journey to foreign parts, why not invited everybody who might care to come to the beautiful town of Camden. And it felt so good I have done it again – and you are invited!

The dates are September 6-7, 2007 and COMPLETE DETAILS ARE POSTED HERE. If you have some friends who you feel might enjoy and contribute, please pass this invitation along.

I look forward to seeing you!

–Harrison Owen

A team of Ukrainian and International open space facilitators is happy to invite you at 15th Worldwide OS on OS, that will take place on May 24-26, 2007 in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

Complete details and REGISTRATION FORM: OSonOS-Kiev.pdf

For 15 years now, worldwide open space community gather together in order to have a privilege to become participants of Open Space event, to experience chaos and create new reality out of it.

Open Space Technology is the way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to produce inspiring results. During OS on OS you will experience its different aspect such as chaos and creativity, learning and doing, fun and inspiration, change and innovation, passion and responsibility. You will have an opportunity to raise and discuss issues which are really important to you, share your ideas, concerns, questions and receive input from other people, and finally make up your own “next steps” out of it.

IF YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT…

* Creating space for inspiration at government, business, and community projects
* Reaching extraordinary results on regular base
* Discovering one of the most powerful worldwide leadership practice
* Having fun while experiencing all mentioned above

PLEASE JOIN US!

Venue: Congregation Hall of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, first university that was founded in Eastern Europe. This is an ancient building from 17th century, which is placed in the downtown of Kyiv, not far from Dnipro river. It takes 3 minutes to walk to the Congregation Hall from metro station “Kontraktova Ploscha”. It is also very close to famous ancient street, where you may find traditional Ukrainian souvenirs – embroidery, pottery, woodcrafts etc.

Language: Open space will be held in English. However, the participants will self-organize their work in any other possible languages (Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Arabic etc.).

Complete details and REGISTRATION FORM: OSonOS-Kiev.pdf

The 6th Annual Open Space on Open Space practitioners’ conference in Haiti will be June 28 – July 1, 2007. Email John Engle to learn more and see photos from last time (June, 2006). International practitioners welcome!

Mashups are web applications that combine content from more than one source, one common form is when a data list of some sort is merged with a map. This story from zdnet about the Third Mashup Camp makes no mention of Open Space, but obviously that was the format…

Many popular mashup applications involve plotting information, such as a calendar entry, on a mapping Web site. But Alan Taylor and others at the third Mashup Camp are looking to push far beyond maps. Hype Machine, for example, tracks discussions of music on blogs, aggregates that information and allows people to listen to mentioned songs.

Because Mashup Camp is considered an “unconference,” discussion topics were proposed by attendees and scheduled on the first day of the two-day event. Perhaps as a reflection of their enthusiasm, participants were able to decide on the conference content within 20 minutes.

The semi-structured format is particularly well-suited to mashups, which many attendees likened to a grassroots cultural movement.

via Peter Perera, who’s planning an Open Space Camp of his own, called ThinkCustomerDataCamp.

Rob at Transition Culture (an evolving exploration into the head, hearts and hands of energy descent) writes as part of an ongoing series, “Open Space Technology is an extraordinary tool. … In theory it ought not to work.” He goes on to describe the some functions of OST in his community:

• It brings together the majority of the people interested in a particular subject (i.e. food)
• Within that, it brings together people interested in particular aspects of that subject (i.e. allotments or veg. boxes)
• It is a great research tool, for drawing out ideas and visions within the community
• If timetabled properly, it also creates time for people to just be with each other, to chat and eat.
• If you run an event a few days before with a dramatic title (i.e. “How Will Totnes House Itself Beyond Cheap Oil?” or “Feeding Totnes; Past, Present and Future”) and then the Open Space, and promote both heavily, it can bring that issue to the forefront for a lot of people. This can be very powerful for the TT process in terms of identifying what is already happening in that area, and who are the main movers and shakers

.

Jevon MacDonald writes in his Manifesto for an Emerging Consultant Counter Culture writes about Johnnie Moore and Open Space Technology:

[T]he law of emergence means that those of us who work on a project, and invest heavily in it, must most often step out of the way at the last minute, because by then we have our own ideas, and we have to trust the people involved to come to the truth themselves.

Sometimes people hear about Open Space and wonder how it can work, with nobody “in charge” of what’s going on. But then again…

…The economy is non-linear, and no one is in charge. There was a famous statement by a Soviet official during Glasnost in the 1970’s. The Soviets were beginning to tour the United States and couldn’t believe that the houses were real, that the workers actually had cars. The Soviet official who was in charge of bread production for Moscow was said to have asked the mayor of New York where the man was who was in charge of bread production for the city of New York. The mayor responded, “No one is in charge of bread production for the city of New York.” The key thing about our Western economy is that nobody is in charge of it, no one giving orders, no one planning, and so far things have mainly been OK.

From Gregg Easterbrook as reported at WorldChanging.org, in response to the question about what our most important tool might be for creating bright green cities.

noneck writes a “How did we get here?” for Rootscamp:

Around the beginning of August 2005, a group of progressive technologists modified the long standing exclusivity of the invitation only hacker event “Foocamp,” and started planning Barcamp. Armed with a venue to host two days of free flowing and open conversations, Barcamps circled the globe and spread the meme of Open Space Technology. They have since evolved to meet particular needs in Govcamp, Podcamp, Artcamp, Copycamp, Drupalcamp, and in September 2006, the New Organizing Institute (NOI) and Emerging Progressives decided to grow their institutional knowledge and foster a 2006 political debrief; Rootscampwas born.

I’m not sure how unconventional OST is anymore, but Stephen Citron writes in his rant Conferences without the Conferring are a Con:

Similarly, conferences could raise their game by allowing all present to participate, contribute, express themselves and be listened to. Some have already taken this delegate focus to extremes, with unconventional and bold “unconferences” and “open space technology”. These are group sessions that run without prior agenda or speakers, and look to the delegates to create content on the fly.

Steve Pashley has a great post Engaging with Local Communities about using Open Space Technology, including Open Space Online. He notes that the NHS (Britain’s National Health Service?) has used face to face OST meetings “engage with stakeholders” in a one-off way without democratizing the organization. He proposes the online version as a possible on-going tool to push change further.

On April 7, 2007, there will be an Open Space Technology event to write the charter for the Black Rock Federal Credit Union, serving the Burning Man community.

This from Harrison Owen today on the OSLIST…

You may remember that last year Michael Pannwitz and I had the privilege of Opening Space for the Congress of Imams and Rabbis in Seville. The occasion, as I reported, was more than a little exciting and definitely not according to whatever “Plan” I might have had. That said, the gathering was also profoundly moving and powerful for the two of us and, we believed, the participants as well – at least that is what we saw, and they said. Now almost a year later it was very nice to receive a note from an advisor to the King of Jordan and sometime Ambassador to the UN, which said in part,” It was wonderful in Seville and the great role you played changed the entire atmosphere, into what turned out lively, warm and cordial.”

Had the event been only another community/corporate gathering, the words would have seemed nice but not particularly significant. But that event was filled with virtually every conflict and tension imaginable – and at points seemed quite ready to fly into a million pieces. The shift from catastrophe (as some were calling it) into “lively, warm and cordial” was, to put it mildly, mind blowing, and confirmed once again, if confirmation was needed that opening space for peace can be very effective. And of course, the real heroes were not Michael, me or Open Space. The people did it all by themselves, as usual. Once they had the space to become what they already were – a vibrant self-organizing system searching for peace with themselves and their world, nothing else was needed.

As we sit at the edge of 2007 watching the so called “world powers/leaders” going in circles, seeking to control events and the lives of others with disastrous results, I find the experience of Seville to be nothing short of uplifting. To be sure we could all blow it this time around, but there is an alternative. It is also true, I think, that we in this funny little online community have a lot of work to do.

For the longer story of what happened in Seville, see here and here.

Seamus (Shay) McInerney begins his 5-7 minute description of OST this way:

Open Space Technology is not so much a technology as a technique and it’s not so much a technique as an experience.
more

Alexander Kjerulf reviewed Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology back in 2003 and just included it in his list of books about happiness at work. He calls OST:

the most insanely efficient and fun meeting form I have ever tried.

A colleague and friend to many of us in the Open Space practitioners community, Laurel Doersam, passed away on October 23rd from ovarian cancer. She was the co-host of the 2001 OSonOS in Vancouver BC. From Lisa Heft:

The fabulous Laurel Doersam died the morning of October 23, 2006 after a graceful, fierce, shifting, always surprising, full of miracles, surrounded by love, dancing the dance of each moment battle with ovarian cancer since 2001.

She died the way she lived – sharing spirit, breath, and community, surrounded by loved ones.

Take a moment if you like, to read Laurel’s daughter Chelsea’s last several writings on the blog she had set up to share the news during these recent transitions. Bring a tissue, as your eyes may become as full as your heart as you read Chelsea’s eloquent reflections.

Our condolences to her family and friends around the world.

Chris Corrigan offers the heart of years of practicing and listening and living in Open Space, in the form of a book he has written that expresses the wisdom of the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching, in the language and sensibility of Open Space.

In some ways this book chronicles the essence of my own emergent practice of Open Space. In looking over it one more time, I realized that almost everything I know about Open Space is somehow distilled into these chapters.

Using a Creative Commons license, Chris is making this loving gift of deep insight freely available for download, here.

Beautiful!

easily amazed: Opening Space and Deepening Connection
# I breathe. I listen to my breath. I allow my breath to guide me. I follow.
# I value myself and I value others.
# I explore new techniques and organically arising processes for listening to and connecting with my internal experience.
# I love others… through loving others I am introduced to a variety of aspects of myself.
# I play with children. Listen to their world and allow myself to follow the mystery of their engagement with life.
# I trust my felt sense and my experience of now.
# I follow my passions. I take responsibility for what I love.

A question was raised recently in an OSLIST conversation about the “next generation” of Open Space. Gabriela Ender, founder of the OpenSpace-Online virtual conferencing facility, offered a beautiful response:

Next generation of OST? Why? The gift and the power of OST its exactly this beautiful easiness. When we want to enable and support selforganization – we have to be role models for “less is more”. I think, we facilitators facilitating OST not for us. We do it for the people.

My question would not be “next generation OST”, but rather next generation of consciousness. Consciousness in terms of how to include the elegance of OST into ongoing or planned communication or transformation processes, the consciousness of how to combine complementary methods and resources within in a longer term process (also offline and online), and also consciousness in terms of what is our role as consultants/facilitators, if we work with OST.

If we step into the shoes of the people, we do not need a next generation OST, we need humility for the miracles of OST and a personal dinner demand for quality regarding well designed participatory architectures.

For me, OST has nothing to do with trends. It simply touches the heart of people and because it gives official permission for selforganization. For me its all about “back to the roots and forward to higher consciousness”. I deeply believe and feel, its all just the beginning – based on millions of evolutionary open space years.

Harrison Owen had a nice response to this, as well.

Chris Corrigan and I have been using the words “Inviting Leadership” to describe this evolution, but we’ll save that story and link for another day.

They Do Things Differently There was the theme of a day for Customers, Testers and Developers Learning Each Others’ Languages — A French-English Open Space forum …hosted by the XP (eXtreme Programming) Day Montreal 2006 conference.

Deborah Hartmann has posted the invitation, photos of proceedings, and some other bits about this program, in the OpenSpaceWorld.NET wiki workspace. Way to go Deborah!