I gave this talk at the Bay Area Ignite in January 2010.
It gives a great over view of what an unconference in the style I do is. All the other presenters at this Ignite evening were women and I took the opportunity to invite attendees to She’s Geeky the women’s only technology science, math and engineering conference that I founded that was next happening at the end of January.
My friend Lisa Heft is putting on an Open Space Learning Workshop in December 9-11, 2009 in San Francisco, California USA
This is how she describes the workshop:
Open Space is a dialogic method where one facilitator can convene from ten to 2000+ participants for dynamic, participant-driven dialogue. OS can be used for bringing together an entire company to highlight emergent issues and opportunities before strategic planning, generating ideas for product or program design, sharing resources and best practices, understanding each other across cultures, sharing knowledge across disciplines, conflict transformation, exchanging thought and experience about complex situations and engaging groups from small to large in seeing a full-systems perspective for their opportunities or issues. The facilitator’s role in OS is very different than for other dialogic methods – participants facilitate their own discussions, documentation and noting of linkages and common threads.
Join me for 2.5 days of mutual exploration as we share learning in and about Open Space. Together you will discuss and create a theme for an Open Space meeting, explore the issues and opportunities in your own work, reflect on how behavior change theory can inform our roles as facilitators, experience an Open Space, and really delve into all those elements of pre-work that are essential to the success of an Open Space event.
Everything from developing a theme to exploring invitation and outreach, design, planning, materials, variations, adaptations for cultural differences (for example in a non-readers environment or in a situation with rich power dynamics), how the site, food and other elements impact or enhance an event, how to include action planning as needed, ‘what-ifs’, ‘when not to’s', documentation and more.
Pricing – as always – is flexible – custom tailored to what you as an individual can contribute and afford.
For more information on content, schedule and pricing overview and to register,
Contact me directly at lisaheft@openingspace.net
There are many steps to creating a great unconference or camp. Many happen before getting to this step, but once you have 50-300 people in a room, what do you do to support people creating a whole day or multi-day agenda live right there on the spot.
How do you go from blank wall to full wall.
If this goes well, you will have a very full agenda with amazing topics for conversation and presentation, build a coherent field of intention and understanding among those attending and with these two things, support community and action going forward out of the event.
What do you do to facilitate this process?
This post is long and detailed it does its best to support a person or team of people understanding step by step specifically what they should do in order. If you do nothing else do these two things:
1) Get everyone who proposes a session for the unconfernece to announce their session idea to the whole group.
2) Bring everyone together at the end of the day to share what happened.
They help facilitate the formation of a good energetic container/field for the conference by supporting people finding out what is going on during the unconference sessions and knowing more about what happened after.
STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS
Agenda Creation begins when the facilitator and other conveners gather everyone together.
This can be done in several ways:
After people are seated the facilitator can go through these steps:
1) Welcome everyone
2) Restate the convening topic or theme – why they are gathered?
3) Invite everyone to introduce themeslves in a way that makes sense for the gathering:
You must model the format and make sure that people are very crisp; for large groups you can have 150 people introduce themselves in 10 min.
4) Explain how the agenda will be created
“There is a blank grid here – in a few min i will invite those of you who want to lead a session to come forward and get one of these (holding it up) 8.5×11 pieces of paper and write on it (in the landscape direction) the name of your session and a description. These can be:
After you have written your session title, you will come forward to the microphone (or center of the circle) and announce the title of your session. I will then give you a piece of tape and you will go and place it on the agenda wall in the space/time slot that you choose.
5) Explain the shared norms for the day that are also posted around the space
“Before we make this agenda I want we have to some guidelines about how we will conduct ourselves today – how will this work?”
I am a big fan of the Open Space Principles and the Law of Two Feet that is intricately entwined with them. I recite these and elaborate on what they mean.
You could consider modifications to these, or some different norms, but setting norms of how people move about and share the space together are very helpful in making a day go well.
Share:
6) Share the flow of the day time and space wise, talk about where the rooms/spaces are relative to where everyone is seated during the opening agenda creation.
Example “Spaces A and B are outside that door (pointing at door) and down the hall to the right. Spaces L-M are outside that door (pointing at a different door) and down the hall to the left. Spaces I-K are at these tables in the middle of this large rooom. Spaces C-H are found around the edges of this room.”
Our first session begins at 10:30 and we have hour long sessions with 15 min breaks. There are two sessions before lunch and three afterwards. You are free to post sessions during lunch but be mindful that you are doing this and having conversations that make sense to have over a meal.
We will close the day all together back here in the circle and go over what we learned sharing highlights, insights and next steps.
7) Talk about how documentation will be happening during the day
8 ) Ask if people have any questions. Answer questions respectfully.
9) Invite participants to come forward who have sessions to convene
a) “Come forward get a piece of 8.5×11 paper and a marker and to have them write down the session name. In a few min we will start announcing session topics”
I like to leave about 5 min for this to happen because people want to talk during it… once there are many people with sessions written on papers, then begin session announcements
b) Get those who are calling sessions to get in a line to one at a time announce the name of the session they want to host. This can be along one or two of the aisles of the circle. If there is a microphone, it can be handed from one to the next in line as they get to the center.
It is ok to allow session conveners to elaborate their session titles but make sure you as the facilitator keep them from giving long speeches. If what the purpose is not clear or full of acronyms you can ask them to clarify. Allow audience members to ask questions if they are confused about what the proposed session is supposed to be about.
c) Once they have announced a session, give the convener a piece of tape.
d) The conveners will go to the blank agenda wall and post the session name card on the time/space they want.
Watch the wall as it fills and encourage sessions to balance out in time/space, like if you notice that there are no sessions in the last time slot of the day, just name this and people will move sessions into that time slot.
DO NOT as the facilitator try to help or coordinate in a specific way who should put what where on the agenda wall. The participants will self organize to do this.
DO NOT limit the break out space areas – a good rule of thumb is that if you have 100 people you need to take the number of people attending and divide by 3. So 30 breakout time/spaces 5 time slots and 6 spaces. If these fill out think about your space layout and figure out where if need bee more breakouts can happen. This can be at different tables, in hallway nooks, outside. Notice on the “full” agenda wall up above there was more space added.
10) Invite shy people to come forward and post sessions on the wall
As the agenda begins to fill and there are fewer people with sessions to announce, interject and remind/invite those who have not yet heard a session that covers the issues/topics they want to hear about at the event, to come forward and post such a session on the agenda wall. Get them to annouce the session before giving them tape to post on the wall.
11) Moving participants on to the first session.
If you have 100+ people attending an unconference, one way to get people to move to the first session is to actually read out the topics proposed in the first time slot into the mic.
Example “In space A we have organic farming, in Space B we have getting Apache servers running, in space C we have standards for identity online, etc.”
I usually end this by saying “Have a great day, see you back here at 4pm for closing circle.”
Then the direct “facilitating” part of the day is done. You as the facilitator are still responsible for holding the space of the gathering for those gathered. This is an energetic way of being.
Don’t tell people when they should change sessions. They will do this on their own. It is best to leave “break time” between sessions – 15min is a good amount of time; this supports a buffer of shifting time.
12) Bring everyone back together at the end of the day
Like bringing people at the beginning of the day, this can be done by:
Invite people to share what happened durring the day. If you have a wall of results, you can go through and ask someone from each session that happened to read that out.
Using “Popcorn style” for sharing highlights is another way. This is where the facilitator gets to play “Oprah” and solicit people sharing highlights.
A friend of mine in the facilitation world, Tree Bressen — along with Debby Sugerman and the Sunrise Facilitation collective — has written a paper about the Possibilities for Transformational Conferences.
Let’s assume that you are going to succeed at attracting 50-1000+ motivated, smart people from around the region or country to attend your conference, ok? As the convenor, you now have an amazing opportunity to engage and influence a large number of active and talented folks about an issue that is important to you. Inspiring speeches can energize attendees and spark new ideas, but that alone is not enough. There is nothing like active participation to prepare people to take what they have learned out into the world.
It covers a range of potential ways of including conversation and audience participation within ‘traditional’ conference formats.
Participatory Formats to put at the Middle or End of an informational presentation.
Participatory Formats to Supplement or Replace One-Way Presentations
I presented this several years ago to the International Telecommunications Union. I was invited to attend a meeting of Study Group 17 that was looking at different forms of identity, network, enterprise and user-centric. I was able to persuade the group to use Open Space for 2 days of a 4 day meeting and deeper genuine understanding between the different points of view emerged. I was invited to present about Open Space at the 2nd ITU-T Study Group 17 meeting to others at that institution who might find it useful. This presentation goes with this PDF Introduction to Open Space that goes into more details.
I think it is a good overview of the process covering how and why it works, in particular for technical communities.
One of the traditions of FooCamp is playing Werewolf. I really did not enjoy playing the one time I tried there but for the folks who do it. They love it.
Another Game we played there was the Reverse Scavenger hunt. This is where your team has 5-10 min to collect 10 objects. Then the list of ‘objects’ is given to the teams. They must creatively ‘hack’ their objects to match the descriptions on the list. The three judges give out points to the best team for each item. At FooCamp the judges derived their list from the board of sessions.
This post was inspired by reading about the Citizen Summit at Citizen Agency. They played Half-Baked:
which is a really fun game where 4-5 person teams grab two random words, mash them together into a dot-com and then in about 5 minutes come up with a product, revenue model, marketing strategy, logo and tagline. Each team does a pitch to the ‘investors’ and a winner is chosen.
I am wondering if we could play this game with a specifically identity focus at the Internet Identity Workshop? We could use the IdentoLatin BuzzPhraser put together by Doc. That would certainly be fun.
I am a bit stunned at the aggressive nature of ‘the rules of bar camp‘ that have been put forward. I guess I am not surprised because they are parodied from ‘the rules of fight club.’
Going back up to the ‘unparodied’ real rules. I think that mandating participation makes people feel intimidated to come. I know at Ruby on Rails Camp last week there were guys who came and said as they announced their session in the mic that they had not planned on presenting until getting there. There were also guys who combined their session because of the agenda co-creation process at the beginning.
Self-worth is a huge issue in the society at large. Just showing up may be a big deal for someone (yes they should volunteer and contribute in some way to help make the space). FooCamp originated out of OpenSpace ideas and roots and history are important. This process is over 20 years old and is practiced by 1000s around the world.
It started from this question that Harrison Owen asked himself:
My question was a simple one. Was it possible to combine the level of synergy and excitement present in a good coffee break, with the substantive activity and results characteristic of a good meeting?
It is a deep question in a way- How do we combine two interesting phenomena together so that people are involved and feel alive an energized? If it is done right – then people will be participating. It does not have to be mandated.
Here are some more inspiring quotes from Working in Open Space about invitation and intentionality.
The invitation itself was very simple, probably just a page or two, maybe a short email or postcard, or even something posted on a bulletin board. It spoke plainly about what’s working, what’s possible, and/or what’s needed now in some area of real importance. It was clearly not an invitation to complain or even “solve problems,” but rather to co-create some dimension of the organization, the community, or the world that we all really want to be a part of. This doesn’t mean that it denied or in any way minimized the importance of existing problems, only that it really focused attention on our strengths and assets — and invited people to work together to create more of them.
The simple, clear, broad and open invitation process assures that the people who show up have real passion for the issue AND signals to them that the best outcomes are theirs to create. A good invitation lets everyone know, even those who can’t or won’t actually attend, that this meeting is intended to go beyond suggestions, beyond recommendations, beyond rubber-stamping, beyond past expectations. This meeting is for real responsibility, real learning, real action on the issue(s) at hand.
Open Space creates a co-created space in a shared space/time of agenda creation. It is a wonderful moment at the beginning before the wall is full.
At this moment, the facilitator is, quite possibly, the only one in the room who has absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this group of 12, 120 or 1200 is on the brink of filling that large, suspiciously empty wall with a detailed agenda that will keep everyone working, playing, and learning for the duration of the conference — on the brink of what most (at this point) would call the impossible. The sense of anticipation and energy is so high in the room that even the sponsors and planners of the event are a little edgy, and eager for the agenda to appear.
The power of Open Space:
Hailed for its utter simplicity — and it’s power, Open Space starts with open-minded leadership, an issue that really matters, and an invitation to co-create something new and amazing. What happens in the meetings is high learning, high play and high productivity, but is never pre-determined. And what emerges, over time, is a truly inviting organization, that will thrive in times of swirling change.
Speed Geeking is a great way to share projects in a community it is a method innovated at Penguin Days lead by Allen Gunn director of Aspiration.
This process comes from Penguin Day. This process is great because it 1) Supports seeing a range of projects/software in a small group setting. 2) Supports those sharing there work improving there pitch.
You need a ration of audience to presenters of between 4-6 and 1. It works really well with 50 people and 10 presenters.
You spread the presenters around the edge of the room – each at a table or end of a table. You break the audience into small groups. You play referee and start a clock that goes for 4 or 5 min. Then everyone rotates and you do it again. In one hour each audience member will have seen 10 projects and the presenters will have presented 10 times. It is a good thing to do after lunch too.
I have myself speed geeked with an easel and some diagrams on paper to explain digital identity as a concept. They don’t all have to be code or demos.
Update: I have done several “mass” speed geeks with 20 stations and 100-150 people. It helps to get a numbered list of the different projects demoing. Then one sets out numbers in order on tables for the speed geekers. Once they are set it is good to get the audience to self organize into pods of 4-8. Then have one person from each pod raise their hands. If you have 20 speedgeekers and 20 pods – you are good to go. Get the pods to find a starting demo. Then for the next hour keep time every 5 min ringing bells inviting people to move onto the next station. People will really do their own thing and the initial pods will tend to disperse but everyone keeps circulating and sees demos.
Open Space Technology created originally by Harrison Owen, is a great process to support agenda formation amongst technical communities meeting to accomplish work together. Before the day of the meeting participants can put forward ideas they have about sessions they want to present or hope others will present on a wiki. This helps give everyone a picture of what will be talked about. The wiki can also have a list of who is coming to the event – this is sort of inn loo of speakers. You can as the organizer solicit specific people to come and present (just as you would at a regular conference) instead of being put on the ‘schedule’ by you they simply with the rest of the participants come forward to the front of the room and propose the session you invited them to present.
Open Space is good because it helps avoid the problem of ‘one person’ or a ‘small committee’ deciding who should be speaking about what and is a lot less work for the organizers.
It is called “technology” because it is a process. It was innovated in the mid 80’s before the world wide web, and like a lot of good ideas is still important.
The Opening Session
This is where everyone will get oriented to who is there and share the topics they want to discuss. Traditionally Open Space uses a circle to but this can get unwieldy above about 50 people so I usually go with theater style seating. I get everyone in the room to say there name and where they are from (either the company or the place – there choosing). You can also invite people to share a thought about what they hope to get out of the day or a question they hope to get answered. It is good to limit this to a sentence though. You want to make this energizing for the group.
The Day of the Event
The grid – Two pieces of 3’ or 3.5’ wide roles of paper to make a 6 foot high grid. I fold the paper to form the rows (about 9” so that 8.5” paper can fit into the grid) then I just use a maker to make the 12” grid. Along the top you have the breakout rooms listed. (These can actually be small rooms, corners of bigger rooms or even locations like under a certain tree outside). Along the side of the paper you can have the times of sessions.
Session length – I like to use 1 hour sessions with 15 min breaks. You can use up to 2 hour sessions if you know there are a lot of in-depth discussions to have.
Making the Agenda – Participants who want to present, demo or lead a discussion are then invited to come to the front of the room. They get a 8.5×11 piece of paper and landscape style they write with a marker the name of there session topic and their name.
They announce the title of their session to the whole room (maybe into a mic). At this point people can ask the session leader questions. Those who have similar topics know who they are and can speak to them about combining there topic in with there session.
Then once all the sessions have been posted the community standing in front of the schedule wall negotiates the schedule and moves sessions around. The session leader gets to decide whether or not to combine with others and when the session will be held.
If others want to move their session they need to check in with the session leader.
The schedule will likely be made in less then an hour and you can release participants to mingle until the first session.
Closing - The day closes with the all participants gathering in a circle one room and sharing for 20 -30 min the highlights of the day. You can invite people to share critical insights or breakthroughs they had that day. It is also good to invite people who know the have a session they want to lead the next day (if there is a next day) to articulate that.
Day Two – Day two of an open space starts out like the first inviting participants to come forward and put sessions on the agenda. The fist day agenda making includes putting up sessions on day 2 so this morning session is just building on the already proposed schedule.
The morning agenda creation will likely be a lot less time consuming then the first day. I often use the extra time between making the agenda and the first session to do a group process like the spectrogram or a fishbowl.
Food – I like to self cater the breakfast (begels, cream cheese, yogurt and fruit) and snacks (nuts, fuiet, dried fruit, chocolates, muffins) and drinks (soda, juice etc) of a conference because it is so inexpensive to do so. If you can get coffee made and brought in that can work great. You can buy fruit in boxes at the markets where grocers get there fruits. Trader Joes has nuts and other snacky things that are great. I like to bring in a catered buffet style lunch so that food is not wasted.
Documentation – It is important to document the outcomes of these sessions on a wiki. You can also do podcasting of certain sessions including day closings.
The principles of Open Space are important to remember and share with those participating.
Law of two feet: If you find yourself not learning or contributing at any time it is your responsibility to use your two feet to take and fine somewhere you are learning or contributing.
They originated to help the day move forward without people getting upset about things being exactly on time or that so-and-so was at there session. The law of two feet is meant to create a social norm about following your inner voice and passion to be in a session or doing something else that you get value out of. It is not meant to condone belligerence towards sessions one is not getting something out of.
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Facilitating Games for Innovation
This Friday I am going to be co-facilitating a day of learning and exchange about Innovation, Design and Serious Games Exchange this Friday in San Francisco. I would like to invite you all to participate. It will be an open space style unconference – with attendees creating the agenda – it is open to all.
Last September I took a training with the founder of Innovation Games Luke Hohmann (to be a game facilitator) and it was amazing set of fun “games” to play with the users/customers of one’s products. Quite different then a focus group in terms of the kind of information that you get about how to shape/design your products. (wikipedia article – details all 12 games and information about selecting the appropriate game)
I know what you are asking how is playing games going to help with my products, workplace or process. I wondered this too….here is a simple example.
I explained one of them (Buy a Feature) this way at the Online Community Unconference – say you have a next generation set of features to build for your product – you have 10 potential features but only time to build a few of them – how do you prioritize/decide about which ones to put in the next release?
Buy a Feature is a game you can play to do this (and it is both online and face to face)
You bring in 10 current customers together and give them each $200 of play money. You give each of your features a cost totaling $3000-$4000 (one might be $100 (really easy to build) $500 (harder/more time) etc.) They must amongst themselves figure out how to spend their $2000 to buy a limited set of the 10 features. You could play this with several sets of customers and then gather information about what they want. It helps you make decisions about what to build AND it is fun for them to play the game of “buying” the features they want.
The conference is not limited to “just” innovation games but also includes other design and “serious” games.
You don’t have to be an expert to attend – if you are just exploring these things we invite you along.
There have been a few companies in the identity space that have used these tools – I just can’t say who.
I am also happy to talk with folks if they are interested in using games to innovate and do better product design in the identity and social web space.
Here is the book if you are interested in learning more.
“Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play” (Luke Hohmann)
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