When you bring together a group of folks, empower them to co-create their own learning, provide just enough structure to ensure progress, and hit the Start button – that’s Open Space, a style of self-organized “un-conference.”
What is Open Space? | Agile Alliance
In Open Space meetings, events, or conferences, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel sessions around a specific theme. Open Space is a straightforward way to create participant-driven events to address a specific question or theme. After being introduced to the principles and practices of open space, participants are invited to build the event schedule, just-in-time. Individuals propose sessions they’d like to lead or sessions they’d like to see someone else step up and lead. Quickly, almost if by magic, a schedule emerges, composed of sessions around topics people feel passionate about pursuing.
Open Space is a process that allows everyone to participate in sessions with others whom they may not normally have a chance to talk with. Like Agile itself, Open Space Technology sessions operate under a small set of guiding principles. These principles are deceptively simple, yet provide just enough structure for spontaneous discussions:
- Whoever comes are the right people.
- Whatever happens, is the only thing that could have.
- Whenever it starts is the right time.
- Whenever it’s over, it’s over.
- Wherever it happens is the right place.
Additionally, there is one law—The Law of Personal Mobility: If you find yourself where you can’t learn or contribute, move yourself to a place where you can.
What is Open Space? | Agile Alliance
Regular immersion in Open Space that is facilitated by members of marginalised communities is a way of providing training wheels in cultural and psychological safety, allowing organisations to rediscover collective learning, and to incrementally become familiar with the thinking tools for creative collaboration. It provides an avenue out of the deadly lock-in to paradigmatic cultural inertia, and this in turn may shift how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled as part of the big cycle of life.
Safe environments allow organisations and individuals to find their niches and thrive in the world. We invite you to collaborate with the Autistic community and other marginalised communities to discover deeper forms of collaboration. This applies to organisations in all sectors and industries, and to organisations of all sizes.
Nurturing ecologies of care, healing, and wellbeing | Autistic Collaboration
Open Space is an inviting alternative to the usual meeting, conference or summit format, in organizations, communities, alliances and networks, when these conditions are present – and especially when levels are high and/or rising:
- Complexity – when the question to be solved is bigger than any one person, group or area of expertise will be able to fully address.
- Diversity – when successful resolution of the issue or question necessarily must include input and action from a wide variety of different kinds of stakeholders and/or with a wide diversity of interests.
- Conflict – real or potential, when there’s real passion in the situation, meaning people care enough to fight for or about something.
- Urgency – when the time for decisions and action was yesterday.
Open Space will work with almost any question and any group that cares about that question, but it works even better when things get challenging in these ways.
Open Space Anywhere | OpenSpaceWorld.ORG
We never know exactly what will happen when we open the space for people to do their most important work, but we can guarantee these results when any group gets into Open Space:
What Is Open Space Technology? | OpenSpaceWorld.ORG
- All of the issues that are MOST important to the participants will be raised.
- All of the issues raised will be addressed by those participants most qualified and capable of getting something done on each of them.
- In a time as short as one or two days, all of the most important ideas, discussion, data, recommendations, conclusions, questions for further study, and plans for immediate action will be documented in one comprehensive report — finished, printed and in the hands of participants when they leave.
- When appropriate and time is allowed for it, the total contents of this report document can be focused and prioritized in a matter of a few hours, even with very large groups (100’s).
- After an event, all of these results can be made available to an entire organization or community within days of the event, so the conversation can invite every stakeholder into implementation — right now.
- AND… results like these can be planned and implemented faster than any other kind of so-called “large-group intervention.” It is literally possible to accomplish in days and weeks what some other approaches take months and years to do.
Open Space Technology has been defined as:
- a simple, powerful way to catalyze effective working conversations and truly inviting organizations — to thrive in times of swirling change.
- a methodological tool that enables self-organizing groups of all sizes to deal with hugely complex issues in a very short period of time.
- a powerful group process that supports positive transformation in organizations, increases productivity, inspires creative solutions, improves communication and enhances collaboration.
- the most effective process for organizations and communities to identify critical issues, voice to their passions and concerns, learn from each other, and, when appropriate, take collective responsibility for finding solutions.
The goal of an Open Space Technology meeting is to create time and space for people to engage deeply and creatively around issues of concern to them. The agenda is set by people with the power and desire to see it through, and typically, Open Space meetings result in transformative experiences for the individuals and groups involved.
Insights and Foresight: Open Space Technology
How does an Open Space Technology meeting work?
Open Space operates under four principles and one law. The four principles are:
- Whoever comes are the right people
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
- When it starts is the right time
- When it’s over it’s over
The Law is known as the Law of Two Feet:
“If you find yourself in a situation where you are not contributing or learning, move somewhere where you can.”
The four principles and the law work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion and bounded by the responsibility of the participants.
Insights and Foresight: Open Space Technology
The Arts and regular immersion in Open Space help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care – ecologies in which care and mutual aid are the primary values.
The ecological niche of A♾tistic peoples | Autistic Collaboration
All Systems Are Open and Self-Organizing
- All systems are open.
- All systems are self-organizing, including human systems.
Every decent scientist understands that systems are never ever closed.
Harrison Owen | Opening Space for Science | Science ‘UnSummit’ 2010 – YouTube
What I see, check it out for yourself, is an unending progression of infinite complexity stirred up by radical change at any given moment.
Harrison Owen | Opening Space for Science | Science ‘UnSummit’ 2010 – YouTube
Non-separation is the nature of reality. Relationship is where reality gets created. Relationship is where reality gets created in quantum theory, and relationship is when it’s created between you and the plants in your garden and between the plants and the soil and that relationship is what gets torn apart and ignored and ruptured when you have the idea of mechanistic reductionism.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, We Can Do This Podcast: Healing Through Gardening with Dr. Vandana Shiva – YouTube
