Dear Agnieszka,

for decades I have practiced the exchange of "rain checks" (kupon, Gutschein, كوبون, buono, купон,..) exactly for situations as the one you describe.

If someone wants me to be a facilitator for a situation they cant afford to pay a fee for I ask them to pay me with a rain check. This means that I can draw on them in case I need a facilitator, so we exchange services without money flowing.

This, of course, also works for baby sitting, haircuts, back rubs, a translation, an editing job... you name it.

We also suggested this procedures to participants of trainings: Convene an Open Space in your business / team / neighborhood / school / NGO /etc and "hire" another participant from the training to be the facilitator... keep doing this for a while and you will be surprised about the kind of contracts some of us need (those with fees to buy groceries, send the kids to college, etc.).

If you offer not just the facilitation of the "event" but also ask the colleague to facilitate the prework (planning session) and the action planning and the Next Meeting, the whole enchilada, the colleague will get a chance to have a grand experience... and then you in return.

The other aspect you mention has already been discussed a bit by others on the list. My experience is that I cant really be totally present and utterly invisible for the facilitator role if I also have urgent issues and I find it impossible for me to dive into issues full throtle having my facilitation role in the back of my mind. So, I avoid it.

My longest experience in one and the same organisation has been my 10 year stint in the German Agency Youth where I facilitated some 30 events in that decade. One of the regular events was the yearly retreat of everyone working in the office (about 35 people). After a while folks felt that they could run "internal" events in os by themselves. I supported their idea adding that I wanted to be part of the experiment in the role of visiting colleague giving them a feed back. As far as I could tell, it did go well. The two colleagues who did the facilitating and also had issues and the group as a whole processed this experience and decided not to repeat it.

In another organisation I used to be a member of, the berlin open space cooperative (boscop), we switched from one of us being the facilitator to all of us having a "silent" introduction. After setting up the venue together (chairs, signs, bulletin board, breakout spaces....)we gathered in the circle and starting moving into the open space everyone having the (silent) facilitation role... after 8 to 12 minutes folks started to announce and post issues. We had a standard agenda (times and activities) and it all went smoothly... after closure we had a feed back which resulted in a steady flow of adjustments. In this case the members of boscop all were experienced os-workers and had experienced each other in the various roles typical for an os-event. So, the starting point was unique.

Greetings from Berlin and wishing you a productive open space in Szczecin and see you next year at the September WOSonOS in Poland
mmp

On 19.11.2014 08:58, Agnieszka Maja Wawrzyniak via OSList wrote:
Hi All,

I am to facilitate an Open Space for a team I am a part of and I really
would like to participate, but as a facilitator, I know I shouldn't.
We will probably not able to hire an external facilitator, so I'm tryng
to work this out...

Do you have similar experiences? Any ideas? Recommendations?

Greets
Agnieszka



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