Hello again Dirk,
Woke up this morning wondering if it would work
to have the wall divided in three parts: the
individual scheduled events grouped on say the
left part of the wall and the rest open to topics
people will put up, the right side being reserved
for "new topics" after the opening on the Monday.
You would open the space on the Monday, and then
people would self-manage for the rest of the
week, and closing on the last day.
I can see this working in my head with break-out
rooms, at least a few for discussions, and one
for the News Room and posted reports so that
anyone can walk in and read if they wish to, even
while someone is presenting in the main hall. Now
in real life... any thoughts anyone?
Cheers from snow-stormed Verchères :-)
Esther
At 23:00 2007-12-01, you wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm involved with a variety of research
conferences and would like to better understand
how you can fit open space into a research
conference with a set time-grid and competing
events. I searched the OSList archives and the
web but didn't find anything so I hope it is ok
to ask here. (And a pointer to a previous
discussion would be a perfect and much appreciated answer.)
The research conferences I'm involved in
typically have a fixed time grid with two
morning slots of 90min (30min coffee break in
between), lunch, and two afternoon slots of
90min (also 30min coffee break in between). We
have had open space at two such conferences now,
and in both cases it worked, but open space
remained in competition with "the regular
program" i.e. set talks. We tried to schedule
the open space opening and ending to be without
competing event but that made them very early
(late) i.e. at 8am and at 5pm. The reason open
space worked was certainly the excellent
facilitators we got, but also the enthusiasm of
folks at these about 100 people conferences.
I'm trying to bring this now to a much larger
research conference, which has > 1000 people
attending. I only have control over "my track"
but that track has considerable influence. Open
space is viewed as an experiment as it has never
been done before at this conference. I get one
day with no competing events (Monday) and then
three days of the main conference (Tue-Thu) with
lots of competing events. On Monday we can
structure the day the way we want it, on Tue-Thu
we have the aforementioned 90min sessions with
coffee breaks and lunch in between. Typical
problems I expect and wonder how to deal with them:
- plenty of folks who attend don't know much about open space
- many folks will show up in the middle of the
day or just 30min late not knowing how it works expecting to participate
- the competing events will make people come and
go in a disruptive way (but maybe that's just the law of the two feet :-)
This year (2008), we have two specific additional challenges
- we have no idea how many people will actually
show up for the open space part
- space is at a premium, we may have to share a
large hall so I wonder whether that's disruptive as well
Also, does it make sense to have open space
afternoons (rather than full days)? I'm thinking
of reducing event competition by having open
space in the afternoon only on the three busy days Tuesday-Thursday.
The event will take place in Oct 2008 and we'll
try to be smart about it until then to take some
of the guesswork out of the equation. I.e. early
engagement like inquiring about expected open
space participation at registration time.
Also, I'm a big fan of wikis, and intend to
build up buzz and pre-organization on a wiki
leading up to the conference itself.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Dirk
PS: We will be looking for a facilitator.
Obviously, this is a paid job, though the
research conference itself is not rich. Here a first blurp:
Open Space Facilitation Engagement Oct 2008 Nashville TN
For OOPSLA 2008, we are looking for an
experienced open space facilitator near
Nashville, TN. Your engagement will be to
facilitate one full (and hopefully intense) day
of open space + several half days. Part of the
job is explaining open space to those who don't
know it yet---which we expect to be many as this
is the first attempt of having open space at
OOPSLA. OOPSLA is a >1000 people computer
science (research) conference, but we expect a
significantly smaller number of people to
participate in the open space part only (current
estimate is between 100 and 300). Location is
Nashville Convention Center, time and date is
October 2008, with initial and occasional
consultations before then to prepare for the
meeting. For further questions, please contact Dirk Riehle, d...@riehle.org
--
Phone: + 1 (650) 215 3459
Web: http://www.riehle.org
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