>From the very beginning (1985) Open Space Technology has been free and freely available. I can't possibly remember how many times I have said this in print, verbally, and online - but I am reasonably certain that whenever I said it, I followed with the words -- But there is a cost. That we freely share what we are learning. The mechanisms of sharing are multiple including training programs, public presentations, private emails and of course OSLIST. The substance of what we share is even more diverse: Technical "How toss," Philosophical meanderings, and deep feelings from the heart. And in many ways, I think the deep feelings are the most important. It is from those feelings that we learn who we are, what we are doing, and what the true value might be. Were Open Space simply a technical approach to better meetings, we might avoid both the philosophy and the feelings. I believe we have discovered, however, that OS as a meeting methodology is but a tiny part of the reality. Over time we have wandered into the strange world of self-organizing systems, questions of peace making, human dignity, personal sense of worth, constructive conflict. And our journey has always been a shared one. No single person has, or could have, the total experience. And no one has the interpretive capacity to explain and elucidate that experience. We can only do this together, freely and openly.
Occasionally I am asked why I never trademarked, patented, or franchised Open Space Technology. A flip, but honest answer would be that I was too lazy, in addition to the fact that I had better things to do than spend my time defending the sacred precincts. The same might be said for my refusal to "Certify" OS Practitioners. More to the point, and closer to my heart (true feelings :-)), I really felt/feel that OS does some good in ways that this funny world of ours can truly benefit from. Therefore I wanted it to be freely available to whomever, wherever, and however. . . And I don't just mean Open Space Technology as a narrowly prescribed methodology. I mean the whole enchilada - Method, Philosophy, Feelings, and anything else that has popped up along the way. The OSLIST has been one critical part of the Open Space experience, and the evolution of the global Open Space community. From the very beginning it was open to anybody who cared - with no questions asked about why they cared or how much. People have come, people have gone, and some have just hung out. There has never been any promise of privacy or exclusivity, indeed just the opposite. Anybody who thought they had joined a private, exclusive club was operating under a severe misunderstanding. Indeed, the nature of the Internet, of which OSLIST is an infinitesimally small part, fosters this openness, for anything that appears anywhere in cyberspace is quite likely to show up somewhere else. In the case of OSLIST, all of this has been profoundly and wonderfully true. Messages forwarded and copied have gone around the world multiple times making Open Space, and the possibilities of Open Space, available to people and places we will never know. Fantastic! For myself, I propose to keep the space fully open. Or if we do restrict it to a particular community, I propose the community of the Planet. And that is a very strong feeling. Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, Maryland 20845 Phone 301-365-2093 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com <http://www.openspaceworld.com/> Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
