Hi Jon good to hear of this potential project..
I am certainly convinced that Open Space would be a great way to surface 'the difference that makes the difference'... and would love to support you in your proposal.... unfortunately, while I've been working with OS since 1992 and running training with Harrison since the 1990s.... I am not personally aware of a project that has been directly analagous to your proposal. Last year I did a 650 person event for Patricia Hewitt of DTI , to surface stories of what's working well with the range of change initiatives that they have been involved in over the past few years (including work that I did with them over a couple of years)..... In this particular case we didn't use Open Space - mainly because the troops also needed to hear from their leaders in this case, so the time was really too short to make sense of an Open Space. Also the event had partly been designed before they called me and said "help !"..... this is actually more than we can cope with internally. Certainly the work could have effectively been done in OS. I expect your 24 hours has well run out by now... so I'll just wish you well. meanwhile.... so 'shout' if you would like someone to share ideas with (apologies for not replying before - returned from India late yesterday evening) all the best Jon Romy On 6 Nov 2004, at 06:43, Jon Harvey wrote:
Hallo I work in the field of public services - and I have a potential client who wants help to discover what works in the field of community safety. Specifically they coordinate a number of projects thoughout a large city here in the UK - and they have conducted some recent evaluations of 4 of their major projects. However - the evaluations did not discover what were the critical success factors to the 4 projects - in other words - why ~did~ they work? They need this info - so that they can apply the learning to future projects. So they are looking for a meta evaluation of the 4 projects - to try and identify what are the 'differences that make the difference' between success and failure in this complex field of social interventions to increase community safety. Easy huh! I am keen to use OS to work with the client all the stakeholders to help them achieve this. Why? Why OS? Well (obviously) I value and like the process hugely. Secondly - I believe they need an innovative process (beyond the standard research evaluation that they have already used) to dig down deeper (and deeper) to discover the essence of the evidence based practice. So... my enquiry is this - has anyone out there had any experience of using OS in such a way - I would be most interested to hear your experiences - whatever you can share. Time is of the essence - I have to finish writing the proposal in about 24 hours time - so any info I need before then. (By the way - has OS ever been used to help procurement professionals to have a slightly less anally retentive view of the world?!!) All thoughts most welcome. Many thanks Jon Harvey Oxford UK * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
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