Dear fabulous Lisa Thanks for your response. It went to me directly but I just assume it was intended for the list, so here it goes.
Agree with what you wrote about having speakers etc first but the time according to how the overall design is right now, will not make that possible. So, I have not yet had a chance to speak more than briefly with the organizer and got some info via email. Don´t know for sure if they are flexible to the plan they sent me. I will share some reflections with them and then we´ll arrange a pre-meeting to find out what they want more than open up some space. The event will be in November. The OS-afternoon will, according to the current plan, be at the same time as there are multiple workshops to choose from. So maybe 100 or several hundred. They will have to make choice when registering. So the plan is to have these workshops the afternoon of the first day + one hour and 15 minutes in the morning the 2nd day. Then a couple of lectures and finally a summarizing debate-kind-of-thing lead by a famous Swedish journalist...quite traditional. I like your idea of using Worldcafé for the extra time the 2nd day that´s a good option which might fit in the design. But I find it difficult not to have a closing to the OST, but do understand your point! So one way, you mean, could be to use Worldcafé as an invitation to reflect on what happened the afternoon before kind of closing? Had another email from Kerry, off line, to invite people to form virtual action teams to outline plans for priorities voted on the first day. Is also an option which may fit! That might be combined with a closing circle for the OST but then they will have to go on to these lectures....or use their feet. This design could allow for 3 sessions the first day + evening news. Then morning news, re-opening, short action meetings, closing circle. A bit stuffed, but could work too. As mentioned, the choice of design will be informed once we know more about the purpose/theme for the OST-meeting. Lots of hugs and thanks I will let you know how it goes. Thomas _____ Från: Lisa Heft [mailto:[email protected]] Skickat: den 3 maj 2007 01:18 Till: [email protected] Ämne: RE: Another hour and 15 minutes? (X-posted OS/GC lists) Hi, fabulous Thomas You wrote: < I have been invited to facilitate an OST meeting as part of a large 1,5 day national conference. About 1000 participants who will be able to choose different workshops for the major part and have some gatherings together too. The sponsor wants to have an OST-meeting for 4 hours the afternoon of the first day as one option to other workshop kind of stuff and there is a possibility to use another hour and fifteen minutes the following morning before the whole group meets again for the rest of that day. Of course it sounds interesting to get some more time but I am not sure how to design this. Of course we will have some pre-planning but I am already starting to think about possibilities to use that extra time. Any ideas??> I always counsel conference organizers to use Open Space for the *last* 4 hours of the conference sort of a what do we all want to learn and share together before we all go our separate ways?. You know this of course, Thomas if OS happens earlier there is the possibility that the participants will not want to sit still in the more traditional workshops after that. But perhaps you have already had this conversation with the organizers and this afternoon-of-first-day is what you have. I have had the okay experience where if you put the OS in the late afternoon and people get to leave after that (go to dinner, do whatever) the energy keeps percolating I would caution against the conference doing anything to close the afternoon and that energy. Is the entire conference doing the OS? Or just some participants? To me that may help inform how you use the 1.5 hours the next morning. It is possible though, either way, that you could I suppose use it for people sharing their experiences from the day before. It might be interesting to use World Cafe as a method for that. Otherwise it will feel like closure and then the conference has to go on. I have done short-form OS where we set up for 2000 people because we did not know how many attendees would come and it was a 2,600-person conference. It all worked well as usual, it can be a bit tricky to design the appropriate text for the program and multiple messages throughout the conference to give participants an idea of / interest in / draw to the Open Space portion but you know how to do that, as well, dear Thomas... Waving to you from sunny California, Lisa ___________________________ L i s a H e f t Consultant, Facilitator, Educator O p e n i n g S p a c e <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <http://www.openingspace.net> www.openingspace.net * * ========================================================== [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 * * ========================================================== [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
