Dear Lucas,
I enjoy sharing questions.
To questions I take off my hat, or not being in the habit of wearing
one, take a bow.
Deep bows to those questions that get me to think/reflect/ponder
on what I do as facilitator, this being one of my favorite activities.
"Best ways" of doing something falls into my basket I call "answers".
Something I often trap myself to do, answering (sigh!).
This has nothing to do with honoring a question.
What I like are stories about experiences and the questions and stories
arising from them (not recommendations or best ways). There are zillions
of such stories on this LIST as you pointed out.
When I ran into your example "ways to empower participants" I smiled and
at the same time lit all those warning lamps... and remembered this
story from about a decade ago:
In a Next Meeting two months after a three day OST gathering with about
150 participants I arranged the chairs in a half circle so that everyone
of the 40 folks that showed up to share what had been done since the OST
event and what the next steps would be was able to participate in and
follow the visualisation of their work.
After the welcome by the sponsor I stood up, introduced the agenda and,
after getting agreement from the group to proceed according to the
agenda, began with the question:
"Thinking back on your event two months ago, what comes back to your
mind? At the beginning of this Next Meeting you are invited to share any
memories you want to offer."
After that, while folks were gathering in break out sessions or
gathering at the buffet one participant came up to me and said:
"When you stood up at the beginning and asked us to think back on our
event two months ago and to share something with the group I saw myself
back in school with the teacher standing up front... and I decided to
say anything."
Since then, I always start Next Meetings with everyone sitting in a
circle (!!!), me included. After the part on recalling impressions from
the OST event, I ask the participants to rearrange the chairs in a half
circle so that everyone can comfortably walk up to the visualisation of
what the group is working on.
That practice has worked well.
Is it "best" practice? Perhaps it was "my" best practice at that time.
It does, from my point of view, qualify as a praxis tested practice.
That, of course, does not generally make it "best practice", whatever
that might mean.
My recurrent questions since that experience have increasingly been:
"How do I get into a mode of being unattached to outcome?"
"Which are the conditions under which the force of selforganisation can
do its stuff?"
"Which of these conditions can I as facilitator influence?"
"How do I get into the mode of being fully present and utterly invisible?"
And I hope to make it to the next WOSonOS in Belgrade in September to
get close (again) to those story tellers that populate OSLIST to share
stories and questions and stories that are elicited by those questions.
Greetings from Berlin
mmp
On 16.05.2014 23:14, Lucas Cioffi wrote:
Hi All,
I'm quite excited to bring this topic up and I'm hoping there are a few
like-minded souls willing to explore this direction with me.
*The Goal:* /complement rather than replace this discussion list with a
searchable knowledge repository, consisting of stories and recommendations/
/
/
*What: *I'm building a tool which can help us share stories and
recommendations with each other in an efficient way. I would like to
put it to work in service of the OS community. When I floated this idea
on this discussion list a few months ago, I got some great feedback.
Some people see the potential for how we can better archive the
stories and insights that we are already sharing on this list.
*Why: *Every one of us probably has at least a few quick & useful
insights about OST and facilitation each month (that ends up being
thousands of insights per month!), yet we are collectively sharing only
a small fraction of all those insights. On a practical level, if
someone is planning an open space event and faced with a particular
challenge, they could perform a quick search on the knowledge repository
to see who has dealt with this in the past. After holding their event,
they can add their insights for what worked and didn't work for them.
*How:* The tool is called Bark!Best and it can do some fun things. At
the simplest level, it is a way to share questions and answers and to
make those answers easy to find. Most interactions happen like this--
people sharing short recommendations in text form. At a more advanced
level, it is similar to a 24/7 online open space; it lets participants
take any question and post it as a video-chat session at any time of the
day.
*Getting Started*
I took a few first steps. Harrison gave me permission to go through the
full text of the User Guide; I extracted 160+ recommendations and their
respective 270+ supporting reasons, organizing and posting them all here
in a Q&A format: http://www.barkbest.com/openspace
Those quotes from the User Guide are just a starting point for all of us
to build upon. */Think of a living book that is written and updated by
all of us, all the time-- what an amazing body of knowledge that could
be. /* For example, the User Guide describes two "ways to empower
participants <http://barkbest.com/s/DuQLY>"; as a group, we might be
able to think of a dozen more based on all our experiences.
*Next Steps*
* Some of you might have some exciting ideas for what might be
possible here. Please, please, please reach out to me or to
everyone on this list.
* It would be absolutely amazing to work with a few folks who would
donate a few hours of their time to go through some of the most
fruitful parts of the archive, to harvest insights and copy them
into the knowledge repository.
*Respect & Caution*
Having been on this list for five years, I respect and honor that this
discussion list has been going a very long time before I got here. I
recognize that I cannot succeed without a few other people who are
willing to take the lead and guide this project so that it meets the
actual needs of this community. I hope you'll join me!
--
Lucas Cioffi
Co-Founder, Bark!Best
NCDD Board Member, 2011-2013
Charlottesville, VA
917-528-1831
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Michael M Pannwitz
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Check out the Open Space World Map presently showing 396 resident Open
Space Workers in 68 countries working in a total of 143 countries
worldwide: www.openspaceworldmap.org
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