No more unproductive and boring meetings …Try Open Space!

Who wants to sit in a boring workshop that doesn’t interest you at all? As a speaker, isn’t it depressing when you end up talking and no one seems to be listening? It’s both frustrating and a waste of time. Perhaps if people know about Open Space Technology (OST), there will never be boring workshops anymore. Everyone will go home informed and please with their meeting results.

OST, as conceptualised by Harrison Owen, is a different approach for conducting conferences, meetings and events. It is focused on specific tasks but is free flowing in a way that the discussion is steered by deep passion, opinions or information shared by the participants. OST workshops usually start with an invitation from the meeting organiser or facilitator wherein the topic for the meeting is announced. The facilitator would then encourage participants; seated in a circle to first identify issues related to the topic and will set a time and a place for parallel discussions. Participants can freely decide which sessions to attend and may go from one session to another as his or her interest dictates. At the end of the discussions, reports are posted on the wall so that results generated from the meetings will be available to all participants.

OST is governed by a law called the “Law of Two Feet” which states that if a person feels like he is not benefiting from the discussion, he or she can always use his or her feet and walk away to transfer to other discussions. Mr. Owen said that in this way, all the participants are given the right and responsibility to manage their own learning and contribution which only they can determine and control.

To learn more about OST, you may want to consider signing up for the upcoming Open Space Facilitation workshop that will be held on September 28-30, 2010 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Attending this workshop will quip you with the essential skills to design and execute an open space workshop or incorporate open space within your existing conference formats.

Categories: Advice for Event Management

Tags: Event Magazine, Open Space Technology, OST

About Adam Parry

Adam Parry is the editor for Event Industry News. If you would like to get in touch and learn more about Event Industry News email editor@eventindustrynews.co.uk.