Dear Diana,
Ah, a very familiar scenerio and one in which we, two teachers who
collaborate on an annual Teaching Peace conference for educators,
parents, and community folk, struggled with this year. Our first
conference offered the un-Open Space/traditional conference format with
compelling keynotes (published, renowned academics) and a 5 strand
breakout workshops, also presented by academics, educators and
community members. We provided a conference line-up not to be missed
(tee-shirts and all!). We drew a little over one hundred participants,
including students, teachers and community activists, as well as the
(left-leaning) filmmakers who used the ocnference to 'get up-close and
personal' with anti-war scholars.
After experiencing Open Space at a Baha'i environmental conference with
Steve Cochran (US Partnership of the UN Decade for Education for
Sustainable Development), I convinced my conference collaborator to try
Open Space the following year. Long story short, the OS conference was
equally successful with a smaller attendance due to, we believe, a
challenging date vs. conference format. The biggest difference between
the two conferences was: 1) no matter what we did, we could NOT get the
academics to attend, which is interesting in an of itself in terms of
our (I also wear an academic hat) retention and promotion conference
activity as well as a gap of OS in higher ed settings, and 2)
attracting participants without the 'line-up.'
We tried a version of your proposed plan, which I've come to learn from
this list as a functional transitional strategy. We invited key
individuals to host an OS session and had to work hard to convey OS
concepts to these individuals over and over: you are not presenting a
paper, or facilitating a workshop, rather you are kick starting a
conversation about..... This approach was successful for some and not
for others. We did provide a Marketplace space where these selected
indivuals, as well as others, could set up a table, etc. and worked
Marketplace time into the conference.
Can you read more about our OS Teaching Peace conference on our
website? Not yet! Have I done anything with the OS reports? Not yet!
Hopefully, over the summer.....so I appreciate this opportunity to
revisit our 1st OS conference.
Warmly,
Melinda
Melinda Salazar, Ph.D
University of New Hampshire
Women's Studies
Oyster River High School
Social Studies Department
603.682.4525
Quoting Diana Larsen <dlar...@futureworksconsulting.com>:
Hello all,
I'm working with two or three conference planning groups who want to
hold conferences completely in Open Space next year. They all have a
little concern about whether they can attract the kind of
participation they'd like without well-known KeyNote or Invited
Speakers - the folks whose presence justifies the participants'
attendance to bosses, etc.
One planning group came up with the idea of inviting Key
Personalities and offering them honoraria and help with travel
expenses as if it were a regular conference - but asking them /not/
to give keynote speeches. Their names would be included on the
invitations to others as having committed to attend, possibly along
with some topics they consider proposing for the marketplace.
Has anyone tried this before? What do you all think about inviting
"key personalities" to an Open Space conference? Has anyone done
this? What benefits/pitfalls do you see, did you experience? I have
mixed thoughts and emotions, and would like some further data to
offer the planning groups. What effect on "Whoever comes are the
right people" happens when some folks receive compensation for
attendance and others don't?
Thanks,
Diana
Diana Larsen
www.futureworksconsulting.com
503-288-3550
Watch for:
"Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" by Esther Derby &
Diana Larsen, available Summer 2006! Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf
(new title!)
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/dlret/index.html
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