Deborah Hartmann and Esther Matte worked together to open the RoCoCo camp event recently in Montreal. They did that in French and in English, taking things paragraph-by-paragraph, repeating everything in two languages. Then they came to the OSLIST to talk about how others do it. Harrison Owen offered an elegant approach…

When Michael Pannwitz and I did the Open Space for 2000 in Wurtzburg, Germany — we did everything all at once. The situation may have been a little different as most people spoke German and some English. Also in the plenary session (Opening) we had simultaneous translation. But in any event we did a duo. At the start Michael went one way in the circle, I went the other — and after we crossed at the starting point, we just wandered all over, everywhere. When we started I announced that Michael was not going to translate, rather he would do his thing, I would do mine, and hopefully we would end at the same place, which I think we did. It took a little longer, but we also had a lot of fun doing it together. The best part was Michael’s comments on what I had to say. One time after a rather lengthy discourse on my part (maybe 30 sec.) Michal came in with just a single word. Everybody howled. Wonderful!