Dear friends in Open Space /GC-list Since a few months I facilitate a meeting every Sunday in my community as part of a Tillsammanscafé (Together café) for people living in my community who want to contribute to making it a better place for everyone living here. Its a 2-hour meeting where we start with having coffee/tea, then welcoming and sharing some news (especially if relevant things have been happening). Usually there are 50-100 participants sitting at long tables (due to logistics and the short time I have chosen not to use the circle. In real meetings I always use the circle).
It started as we felt we need to do something to create space for new inhabitants to meet those of us living for a long time here, so among the participants there are asylum seekers and refugees. When meeting in large group we translate everything to English, Arabic and Swedish small groups have to help each other. Next step in the meeting is that I ask who has a topic they want to raise for conversation today. Of course its more challenging than when we sit in a circle so we tried different things such as keeping topics from last meetings that anyone can put up again + invite more. We also tried to invite people during arrival/having coffee to put topics up. Normally we have 5-10 topics from playing the guitar, looking for internship and work, finding housing, learning language etc etc. I create spaces for people to meet in small circles to have their conversations (45-60 minutes) then we gather again and I invite each group to share a bit about what they did before we close the meeting. We are now thinking about alternative ways to develop this and Id love to have more ideas. While writing one idea came to me. As we have been talking about having meetings dedicated to a specific theme, or to cook together during a meeting (we have access to a space with several cooking places) or do something else together. I am thinking about opening space in a real way to create an agenda (in a real open space way using the circle!) for example for the coming 3 meetings which would then be like break our spaces. That way it would not be so repetitive and more time would be there for each break out/or it could also develop to sometimes having a specific theme for one meeting I would love your input, experiences, questions . Tillsammans we can make difference Thomas Herrmann Open Space Consulting AB <http://www.openspaceconsulting.com/> www.openspaceconsulting.com Ni når oss per telefon: +46 (0)709 98 97 81 eller Epost: <mailto:tho...@openspaceconsulting.com> tho...@openspaceconsulting.com Open Space Consulting AB är ett företag med STORA ambitioner att guida ledare, organisationer men även lokalsamhällen att nå sin fulla kraft för att infria sina drömmar. Vi bidrar med kunskaper och praktiska verktyg för att stödja er att finna er bästa väg. Mer information LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasherrmannopenspaceconsult Facebook Företagssida: https://www.facebook.com/OpenSpaceConsulting
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