Esther Matte reports a recent Butterfly sighting:

In a recent OS event, I noted one person stayed back when everyone went to the Market Place wall. This person was just sitting on her chair, playing with the papers in her participant’s kit. Eventually, she got up and moved around. But she didn’t participate to any discussion, even though people invited her to join them.

At the time, I thought she was uncomfortable in this space, that it was simply too open for her to work in. I often saw her reading reports coming up on the Breaking News Wall. In the closing circle, to my surprise, her comment was something like: “I had a great day. Lots of participation, lots of open and frank discussions. Thank you everyone!”

I guess we should never assume anything! Taking care of herself, this person stayed close without joining discussions. She found her space and connected in her own way. She was a true butterfly.

In Open Space, The Law of Two Feet says that only you know when you are learning and contributing as much as you can. So you are in charge of that. Use your two feet, or whatever else you normally use to get around, to go wherever you need to go, move to any conversation or space where you can maximize your learning and contribution. When the rule is applied in practice, performance is maximized by two sorts of characters: Bumblebees buzz from group to group, carrying energy and information, cross-pollinating. Butterflies float around, and may not join any group, but their flitting and fluttering directly supports a state of openness and flow.

Stanley Park announces the new Korean Open Space website and adds:

For many of you who find Hangeul (Korean language) rather uncomfortable, please just enjoy viewing two videos of OS events here and here. When the site becomes fully in operation, it will have a section in upper right that serve our friends whose language is not Korean.

I can’t read Korean, but it sure looks like Open Space to me!

Das Lernforum ist unter Großgruppen - Facilitators längst kein Geheimtipp mehr.

Wie jedes Jahr lud all-in-one- spirit zum Netzwerktreffen ein - und es kamen 160 externe und interne Berater. Seit seinem Bestehen steht dieses Treffen unter dem Motto “come from abundance”.

Als langjähriger Visueller Begleiter dieses Forums war es diesmal für mich ein besonders tiefes emotionales Erlebnis. Es war ein Genuß, mit welcher Heiterkeit und Klarheit Dr. Matthias zur Bonsen den Open Space anleitete.

Do you long for wide open spaces? Want to get some real work done?

Forget meetings. Throw out the agendas prepared in lengthy meetings that are never followed. Scrap the PowerPoints and flowcharts and make your next meeting an “un-meeting” with open space technology.

That’s the advice of Harrison Owen, the originator of “open space technology” and the author of Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 3rd Edition, Spring 2008).

Owen, along with 85 other “brave” souls, originated the open space concept back in 1985 at the Third Annual International Symposium on Organization Transformation, held in Monterey, Calif. When participants arrived at the event, the only things they knew were when it would start, when it would end and what the general theme of the conference might be. There was no agenda and no planning committee, and the only facilitator in evidence disappeared after several hours.

The 85 participants sat in a circle. As each person determined that he had some area of exploration he would like to pursue, he wrote a brief description on a small placard, announced his topic to the group, posted the placard on the wall and sat down. When no further topics were posted, the original proposers determined the time and place for meeting, and anybody interested in a particular topic signed up. That was it. Two-and-a-half hours later, an agenda for a three-day event had been completely planned, including multiple workshops — all with conveners, times, places and participants.

The result? Excellence, profound accomplishment, and breakthrough learning, according to Owen and thousands of others, who have been facilitating open space gatherings at conferences and within organizations for 23 years. To date, Open Space has been used in excess of 100,000 times in 134 countries.

The actual process has changed little, if at all, over the years. However the necessary “start-up” time has fallen to somewhere between and hour and an hour and a half, even with groups of 2000 and more.

Training Executive Exchange recently spoke to him about how open space can be put to work by trainers and managers within their own organizations - either as an alternative to meetings or as an alternative to training itself… Read More (from the OSLIST)

Fr. Brian Bainbridge sends this from Melbourne, Australia:

Some 7 parish reps (16 persons) in Open Space Sessions, Looking together (a major miracle, perhaps) at what to do LOCALLY about adjusting to the imminent reduction in numbers of priests available in their zone/region. Some came to fight/defend against the future (inevitable) changes. Others with different agenda. By the end of the day – another major miracle – all seemed together about options to address this eventuality.

There have been a series of such attempts, but never using Open Space. It’s a wonderfully potent situation and may just change the nature of the Church in Australia. Stand by for the next extraordinarily exciting development.

Questions about Open Space in Churches or Australia? Email Brian

This is to let you know that 5 french executives will exchange on their OS practices in Paris on April 3rd. If you happen to be in Paris then you are invited and welcome. You will find hereunder the details of the event and how to confirm your participation. Contact Philippe SLIOUSSARENKO for complete details.

MHG Europe a le plaisir de vous inviter à la réunion sur le thème :

LA METHODOLOGIE OPEN SPACE

Une démarche de conduite de réunion en petit ou grand groupe ou une nouvelle façon de s’organiser et de penser ?

Avec la participation de dirigeants ayant pratiqué l’Open Space :

§ M. Sylvain AUGERE, Directeur de l’Animation des Réseaux de Formation, UIMM
§ M. Emmanuel CAUX, Directeur Général Région France Nord, STARWOOD HOTELS AND RESORTS
§ M .José PIRES - GOMES, Président, GROUPE FRANCE BOISSONS
§ M. Hervé MARTIN, Directeur Général, SENSITIVE OBJECT
§ M. Emmanuel MASSY, Directeur Marché Gares, GROUPE ELIOR

Nous poursuivrons ensuite nos échanges autour d’un cocktail dînatoire. Dans l’attente de vous recevoir, je vous adresse mes plus sincères
salutations. — Philippe SLIOUSSARENKO

Singapore-based Prabu Naidu shared this recently after Opening Space in Tehran:

On 4th February 2008 some forty producers and managers from the radio division of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) converged in one of the studios that was the venue of an Open Space Technology (OST) session to discuss on the theme “Radio Management in Iran”.

The participants who came to the session - based on open invitations announced on banners throughout the studios - had a desire to contribute to the future of Radio in Iran, they came, enjoyed the collegial networking and contributed ideas and thoughts.

The Open Space was facilitated by me. The event was co-sponsored by the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung and IRIB.

In the full day session, six concurrent market place discussions were held over two time slots of one hour each. There was deep conversations and many ideas generated on the theme. During the action planning; six key ideas were voted to be worked on next and six leaders accepted the responsibility to take the ideas to the next step.

The next day on 5th February 2008, a smaller group of ten participants in the morning and another ten in the afternoon attended a training session on Open Space so that they will be equipped to conduct Open Space sessions on their own in the future. These participants had also attended the full day session the day before. The participants intend to use Open Space to engage their own staff as well as their listeners in improving their programmes and services.

The two-day proceedings were beamed live on the Internet for IRIB staff outside Tehran to follow.

Prabu was part of the hosting team when I taught Open Space in Sinagapore some years ago. And this, to me, is the most amazing thing about the practice of Open Space. We never really know where it will lead, or turn up, next. Good to see such fruits still ripening, many years beyond the first plantings. Way to go, Prabu! And may the Iranian harvest be bountiful, as well!

Thanks (and congrats!) to Joern Geisselmann, Adviser for Public Participation & Capacity Building at Shining Stone Community Action, for this report from mainland China:

On May 15th Shining Stone Community Action (SSCA), a Beijing-based NGO promoting participatory urban governance, conducted what was perhaps the first Open Space event organized and facilitated by a mainland Chinese organization entirely on its own. SSCA decided to include a one-day Open Space into one of its training courses on participatory community development following a training on the Open Space methodology in April 2007 by Stiftung Mitarbeit, a German foundation dedicated to the promotion of public participation, and CANGO (China Association for NGO Cooperation).

The theme of the event was “Public Participation in Community Development”. Participants included community workers, NGO representatives, and residents. Since Open Space is so different from typical Chinese meetings that tend to be very formal and hampered by hierarchies we were worried at first how participants would respond to the unusual latitude given to them. However, this concern vanished quickly as participants began taking the initiative proposing topics they wanted to discuss. The enthusiasm and resourcefulness of participants continued to astonish us throughout the event and Open Space turned out to be the highlight of the 3-day training. In fact, about a week later a participant informed us that they had enjoyed Open Space so much that they had already conducted a community meeting using some of the Open Space elements.

For more information, please contact Ms. Song Qinghua, Director of Shining Stone Community Action.

Christopher Carfi posted a nice summary of work done in a breakout session in Open Space last year, following the Consortium for Service Innovation Annual Summit in Orlando.

His summary is about the work, not the process. And that’s the point. Real work gets done in Open Space — and becomes the center story of the event. I wonder how many other participants went out posted their notes.

His posting represents the kind of “action” that keeps real work moving, based on personal passion and responsibility, but never shows up on the screen when people ask, “How does action happen?”

This group should know something about getting things done. The conference sub-theme: the economics and social elements of mass collaboration.

Harrison shared the following today on OSlist:

Every now and again we seem to get ourselves involved here on OSLIST in
creating and comparing “elevator speeches” about Open Space. I have never been very good at all that, but a young Korean friend caught me early in the
morning on the shuttle to the airport. Given the hour I wasn’t sure how it
would all turn out, but I guess it is a good picture of The Hat. And for
sure it is the shortest speech I have ever given. If interested, check out

http://youtube.com/watch?v=TDi0GLTO9ao

Jost Wagner is a Thailand-based German facilitator and consultant working in the Asian region and beyond primarily working on development issues. He sent this news and video from Bangkok:

Media fighting stereotypes - a short Open Space Session in a unique environment.

In September 2007 the German Friedrich-Ebert Foundation (FES) organised an Open Space Session during the Asia-Pacific and Europe Media Dialogue taking place in Germany and jointly organised by Deutsche Welle and Asia-Broadcasting in order to create a dialogue about the role of media - especially TV and Radio - can play in fighting stereoytpes and discrimination. Participants were senior members of broadcasting authorities and broadcasters from Asia and Europe and many other invited guests from politics, industry and civil society. The Session took place in the former German parliament in Bonn - a very unique and challenging environment. The Open Space was facilitated by Janice Lua from Singapore and Jost Wagner - a Thailand-based German facilitator. FES sponsored also a production of a short and nice video.

The space looks a bit unusual, but clearly the spirit of this event was completely Open Space. That you can hear in the many participant comments in the video. Nice work, Jost and Janice!

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!

Kaliya Hamlin and friends are working in the world of network technology and making an important link between the Open Space and Unconferencing movements. Here’s a good invitation and example…

The Supernova Open Space Workshop is an open forum on the social, moral, technical, and strategic questions impacting the increasingly connected world in which we live. Discussions about topics like user control, neutrality, identity and open standards are setting the stage for future policies and economic decisions. Come to this event to learn more, participate in the community and shape the future of the New Network.

The workshop is being organized in conjunction with the Supernova 2007 conference (notably, sponsored by Wharton Business School), but is a distinct event, open to the entire community.

Go, Kaliya! Go!

This on the OSLIST from Deborah Hartmann…

RecentChangesCamp is the international conference for folks interested in Wikis, Collaboration, Community Building, and Self-Managing Teams. The latest of several incarnations dating back to January 2006 is taking place now in Montreal as RoCoCoCamp.

Here is the link to the slide show (so far
*http://flickr.com/photos/tags/rocococamp/show/
*if you click on the image you will see the caption of each photo as it
cycles through the slide show.

Session notes are accessible from the home page.
http://www.rocococamp.info/

See also “Talking Chair” for (what I think is) an exciting development!
http://www.rocococamp.info/TalkingChair

The space has been amazing to work with… unique and with its own
challenges and incredible benefits.

Today we will “converge” to move forward. Exciting!!

deb

UPDATE: RoCoCoCamp in the mainstream media, original in French and translated into English.

John Engle began a lively discussion of the “Whatever happens in the only thing that could have” principle in late April on the OSlist. And it is continuing! Here is how it all began:

I know that some have been through this hundreds of times but I’m wanting to get the most recent reflections on the principle:

What Happens is what happens - learn and move forward.

Join the conversation on OSlist!

Howard van Rooijen attended last fall’ Scrum Gathering for Agile programmers. His post is a great description of OST from an attendee and he notes:

Instead of being confrontational and pouring on vitriol in order to justify their own job or methodology, attendees of the Gathering were so open minded. More often than not the reaction was “Wow, my experience of doing X was completely different. How did you handle situations like Y?” Ideas were cross-pollinated and people came away with a myriad of new techniques to try.

Harrison Owen recently shared on OS list about a retreat he facilitated for students at Columbia Business School. As is often the case, the meeting was so fruitful that “opening [the] space…just wouldn’t stop– [it kept] getting deeper and richer.” Indeed so rich, that one participant sent Harrison a poem afterwards:

Open Spaces
Tibetan bells
Open spaces
Safest people
Safest places
Magic creeping…
(rest of poem here)

by Carol J. Morley, CFA, Managing Director

In conclusion, Harrison writes, “Maybe we ought to keep this one around for the next time somebody asks us for a
recent client evaluation of Open Space, particularly an evaluation from the Business World. :-)”

Might it behoove us to start a new resource called “Client evaluations-alternative formats”? After all, this is definitely not the first time that a participant has written an “evaluation” of an OST meeting as a poem!

From the Change Management Blog:

I owe a lot of learnings to the international community of Open Space practioners, so here is my dedication to them: a reader with nine stories of successful application of this methodology. The stories come from Russia, Israel, Mozamique, Canada, Haiti, Italy, Colombia and Bulgaria and show the full spectrum of Open Space applications: Open Space Technology - New Stories from the Field

Gabdulla Hamitov facilitates conference on youth leadership development, “Path to the Future”
Ufa, Bashkortostan (Russia)
photos courtesy of Bashtorg, a major regional wholesaler in Russia

Since the 14th annual international Open Space on Open Space conference in Moscow in August 2006, OST has continued to be applied in many different kinds of organizations, especially in companies.

Recent applications include a meeting on personal safety and responsibility with RusAl, one of the largest aluminum producers in the world.

The sponsor, Elena Sochkina, responsible for corporate culture, noted “my most pleasant discoveries with the Open Space method were:

*the number of participants is limited only by the size of the physical meeting space.

*the conditions are created where formal boundaries are erased (status, hierarchical, and professional)

* the participants create the agenda (which is the guarantee of success).”

(Direktor po Personalu magazine)

OST has also been used recently with major Russian political parties, at marketing conferences, training conferences, at a coaching conference (co-sponsored by Open Space Institute-Russia), with Russia’s Central Bank, with cellular phone service provider Beeline, and with a major pharmaceutical company.

Note: PROMT offers a free and relatively good quality Russian to English webpage translation service.

Raffi Aftandelian writes from Russia:

Phillip Guzenuk, a young St. Petersburg (Russia) trainer saw OST applied at an Intertraining (professional association of trainer and consultants in the NIS) annual conference in Moscow last year.

OST was something he had been looking for, which led him and colleagues to start a “Director’s Club”, a professional networking space for St. Petersburg CEO’s.

This first meeting, which brought together 60 CEO’s, was titled “In the fight for talent”.

I love the contrast of the handwritten signs and the hotel space

Guzenuk made a video which you can see here.

I love the way the pre-conference conversations mimic the in-conference conversations.

Jonathan Burrows curates a season of discussion, enquiry and debate in a program called Parallel Voices. Through February to the end of March 2007, Jonathan Burrows has been invited to curate a series of artists’ talks as part of a public art season at Siobhan Davies Studios, St. Georges Road, London. The program(s) will welcome leading dance and theatre artists, where, over four evenings, three artists will discuss their passions in an open session of enquiry and debate.

On Saturday 31 March, the season will culminate in an Open Space meeting called THE BIGGER PICTURE, for everybody interested in dance. Open Space is a method of running a large meeting in a more flexible and lively way, to approach a subject without an agenda, and allow the people there to create their own conference. We see it as an opportunity to look at where we’ve come from, where we are now and what we might wish for in the future.

Learn more about this…

Diana Larsen (facilitator) points us to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, one of the hosts of Agile Open Northwest, who had never (knowingly) participated in an OST event.

Rebecca, who hosted entirely on faith and with a few nervous moments about whether it would really work, wrote a blog post about her take on the event.

A great look at how newcomers experience open space, complete with Green Eggs and Ham (photo). This session? Overcoming Resistance!

Sharon Quarrington shared this, via the OSLIST, on the Toronto Transit event previously reported here:

A group in Toronto held a “camp” for the Toronto Transit System - and
their opening is posted on YouTube:

I found it very interesting - how it was similar to and yet different it was from the OS openings I am most familiar with. I found I missed many of the “traditional” elements that were skipped - and yet wonder if perhaps that is just me being stuck in a rut!

I think not a rut at all. The “camp” and “unconference” movement and language is flourishing in the info tech world, which has embraced “open space”, but seems to have lost some of the “traditional” elements Sharon refers to. I, too, think something is lost without some of these elements, a certain elegance and ease in the opening process and story.

Opening can be easier than it sounds here, I think… and And AND… it obviously still worked. I’m glad to see opening practices seeping into the management of urban transit and other community institutions. I’m glad to see real work getting done with circles, invitations, marketplaces, and references to The Law of Two feet. I’m glad to see people making and sharing videos like this, that show real people practicing in this way. So props for opening practices and public sharing!

See (hear) also our podcasts archive for two (audio) recordings of more “traditional” openings by Chris Corrigan and Harrison Owen.

What do you think? What does it take to make an opening open?