Hi, Dicky -
Yes, I would say what Harrison says: "No difference".
Well, perhaps a few little adjustments in how you describe it to
participants. As you always would customize your description /
invitation for your participants' culture and context - in any kind of
Open Space event.
I do a lot of Open Space conferences and other knowledge-sharing Open
Space events.
There is not what some would say is a requirement - sense of urgency -
but participants self-select to come to a knowledge-sharing event
(conference, forum, issues summit) because they are passionate about
the topics, challenges, projects and discoveries in that field / that
topic. So no problem there - there is definitely the energy you need
for a good Open Space.
I would say to do the same thing as one would always do (perhaps the
host / client team is doing these things and you can help with
questions and lessons learned from other events)
- compelling invitational language for their culture
- inviting the full system / diversity into the room (which can be
harder than just putting the word out - but with much better results -
real invitation and outreach *strategy* and creativity and whatever it
takes to bring in diverse experience, culture and thinking
- for example: knowledge sharing amongst university folks and...health
care consumers / patients, doctors, nurses, health advocates, home
care providers, students, researchers...? What might inform the full
system? Depends of course on what your overarching objective / reason
for bringing people together is. But as with all our work in any
setting: diversity brings richness.
Sometimes for academic folks it helps to find out if the host can
offer education credits so they can better attend an event.
And if you have students helping - it helps to arrange to give them
school credit for their time.
Valuing everyone and sharing resources as this does.
A lot of times a knowledge-sharing event does not need action planning
built into it because the majority of participants are served by the
conversations, connections, co-learning and networking. It is not
always an intact working group. So they may or may not have focus and
energy to meet around topics post-event (as in some organizations
where they can hold topic-specific work groups post-event to continue
the work) but they will surely benefit from the dialogue, the Book of
Proceedings from their event, and the participant contact information
at the end of that Book - all of which will help them continue
networking or find each other to re-group around a topic at some
future time if any individual or group who attended may find this
might be useful.
Perhaps you were thinking of the book I give to participants of some
of my workshops - I have a book on Open Space I have written. Right
now it is not available as I am re-formatting, re-writing and updating
it - the older version had a bit of a hard time making it through my
changing computer systems. Which was probably a great message to let
me know that a new fresh approach was needed. I promise to announce
the book on the OSLIST when it can come back into the world. Soon? in
several months? Time (and life) will tell....
Warm wishes for great success in your Monday meeting.
Lisa
Lisa Heft
Consultant, Facilitator, Educator
Opening Space
[email protected]
Ask me about these 2011 workshops for facilitators and others who
convene people:
- The Open Space Learning Workshop
- May 4-6 and December 14-16 - San Francisco, USA
- June and October - Santiago, Chile (en español)
- June - Buenos Aires, Argentina (en español)
- The Power of Pre-Work - August 24-26 - San Francisco, USA
- Documenting Dialogue - Coming soon
On Apr 6, 2011, at 11:03 PM, Methorst, Dicky wrote:
Lisa, you mention a book about knowledge sharing Open Space or Open
Space in university settings. In what aspects is it different from any
other Open Space? I have been asked to facilitate a knowledge sharing
event on healthcare. I'm having a discussion with them on them next
Monday, so I am really interested to know from more experienced people
what I should take into account when doing the open space on knowledge
sharing.
Warm regards
Dicky Methorst
_______________________________________________
OSList mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
