Well done! It always amazing to me how well intentioned, bright, involved
people can take so long to acknowledge a blinding flash of the obvious. As I
said in my post immediate, presentations give you yesterday’s news. When you
open space (by whatever name) now is the future, and the future is now. Pretty
juicy, and congratulations on your tenacity. Harrison Harrison Owen7808 River
Falls Dr.Potomac, MD 20854USAPhone
301-365-2093www.openspaceworld.comwww.ho-image.com (Personal Website)To
subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of
osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu:http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of Jennifer
Hurley
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 2:48 PM
To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu
Subject: An OST Story History of Open Space Technology in the Congress for the
New Urbanism
Caveat: This is my own personal take on this story, and I’m sure that other
people in the organization would have different perspectives.
Since 2001, I’ve been involved with a national professional organization that
is promoting a reform movement to support walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.
[For anyone interested in this topic, check out the Congress for the New
Urbanism at http://www.cnu.org.] One of the activities of the organization is
to put on an annual “Congress”. When the movement first began (CNU I was held
in 1993), the Congress involved about 100 people, with lively discussions and
jury critiques of projects that demonstrated cutting-edge ideas in planning,
development, and architecture. The organization has grown dramatically—it now
has over 3,000 members, and the annual Congress attracts 1200 – 1500
participants. As the event has grown, it has become more of a conventional
conference, with many large plenaries and small panel presentations, tours of
projects and neighborhoods with urban design lessons, and other typical
conference events.
From the very first time I attended a Congress in 2001, I thought it was an
enormously wasted opportunity to bring all of these passionate, talented people
together, and then just sit in a room listening to presentations from a few.
And I wasn’t alone – people who had been involved from the beginning bemoaned
losing the feeling of a “congress” as the size had grown. I had experienced OST
in a small way as portions of other conferences, loved it, and read as much as
I could find about it. I started talking about OST on some of the listservs
where new urbanists talked about the movement and the organization – but there
were no bites.
NextGen Starts with OST
A few years later in 2004, a group of young folks engaged in the movement
decided to hold their own event one day before the annual Congress. They
started talking about it on the listservs and invited people to join in the
planning of the “NextGen Congress”. When they started asking about what people
wanted to do during the event, I suggested OST. The idea was immediately
picked up, in part because it sounded so easy. The first one-day NextGen
Congress was held entirely in OST. The 70 participants convened a wide range
of sessions, and more importantly, made strong connections with each other.
Each year since then, the NextGen Congress has programmed their morning session
with speakers, but held their afternoon sessions in OST.
Transportation Summit Tries OST
That was a good start, but I still wanted to bring OST into the core of the
organization. In 2005, I was sitting at a table where some people were
discussing the format for the next Transportation Summit, a smaller event
(about 150 participants) organized by CNU and focused on transportation reform.
The group had met for several years and accomplished some of their initial
goals. For the next event, they wanted to figure out what issues to tackle next
as part of the reform agenda. I suggested OST. They thought it was important
to have presentations to the entire group about key accomplishments and
developments, so they held a typical presentation-oriented event the first day,
and held the second day in OST. Participants were very engaged and developed
many ideas for future work. I believe many of the reform efforts they are
engaged in now were first germinated at that event. However, the group has not
used OST for any of its events since that time.
OST Supports CNU Initiatives
In 2005, I was also asked to become co-chair of the Planners Task Force within
CNU, part of the committee structure for volunteers to engage in CNU
“initiatives”, largely reform efforts in the field. At my first Task Force
meeting, the topic of “Task Force Structure” was on the agenda, and I proposed
that CNU hold a one-day “Task Force Congress” in OST each year associated with
the annual full Congress in order for people to work together on existing and
new “initiatives”. The idea wasn’t immediately embraced, but in 2006, they
decided to hold a 3-hour “New Initiatives Forum” in OST so that people could
propose and discuss new initiatives. That event was held two years in a row,
and some initiative committees that are still working were first put together
at those events. Also in 2006, there was a need to have an interactive
discussion about affordable housing as part of the annual congress, and so we
held a 3-hour event just on affordable housing using OST.
Changing the Name: the Birth of the Open Source Congress
At this point, now that OST was getting some wider (but still small) use in the
organization, the language became problematic. “Open space” means something
very particular to planners, architects, landscape architects, and engineers,
and it has nothing to do with OST. Every time we talked about
*
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