Hello everyone. After receiving so much insight from lurking on the list, I want to report that I facilitated my first Open Space event today, and it sounded like people loved it! The event was a two-hour planning session for a conference in September. The theme for today's event was "How can we create a two-day event to energize the Philadelphia region to revitalize urban neighborhoods through good urban design and development?" We had about 30 participants, all working in some area related to the topic, but many of whom had never met before. We were in one room all together, with break-out spaces in each corner plus one in the middle. We had two rounds of 45 minutes each, with 15 minutes at the end for reflection all together. Like so many stories people have told here before, the group was suspicious and puzzled at the beginning, but someone immediately jumped up to post a topic. We then generated more topics than we had space for. I invited people to come up and negotiate with each other about re-arranging topics, finding another spot to meet, merging topics, etc. In no time people had re-arranged things to have just 10 topics. We had non-stop talk, at least two people volunteered to work on the conference committee, and the host group decided to hold one-day of the conference in Open Space!
Here are a few things I wished I had: --Clipboards for people who wanted to take notes (no one expected to not have a table to write on) --A one-page bullet list for the conveners, asking them to have people sign the attendance sheet, find someone to take notes, and get the sign-in sheet and notes back to me --better tape And on to my question-- I'm curious if people have favorite supplies they like to use in an OS? Favorite markers, tape, paper, anything else? Thanks for sharing all of your wisdom and experience- Jennifer Hurley ------------------------------- Hurley~Franks and Associates Planning & Urban Design 1429 Walnut St., Ste. 601 Philadelphia, PA 19102 P: 215-988-9440 [email protected] http://www.hfadesign.com Association for the New Urbanism in PennsylvaniA (ANUPA) http://www.anupa.org * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
