Category: Events

Open space meetings sound really cool

I ran across this fine rant on Bill Tozier’s Notional Slurry (which looks like an fascinating blog – I look forward to reading more) on Open Space conferences/meetings. I’ll have to think this through some more, but I am naturally drawn to the idea. Lord knows I’ve shared many of the frustrations Bill mentions in his piece. I think it’s interesting that at a big conference like GECCO, where you have so much to attend/listen to, there’s so much inclination to skip it all and talk in the halls or go grab a bite and write science on a napkin.

All that said, I know as a speaker how hard it can be to pass up the opportunity to nail those poor suckers to their chairs and force feed them your (no doubt brilliant) slides ideas. The trick, though is whether that’s really a very efficient way to get your ideas out there. Are the people you really want actually in the audience? Are they paying attention? Is your presentation in a context where people are thinking about the right sorts of things?

At a workshop like GPTP there’s no real reason we couldn’t all read the papers before hand, skip most of the “formal” presentations, and instead focus on some really excellent discussions.

Really, why not?


An hour or so later…

After thinking about this some in the shower, I thought of one potential weakness with this approach. One of the strengths of a well organized event is being exposed to cool things that you probably wouldn’t have gone to/read/heard of otherwise. If everyone gets to self-organize, it seems that there might be much less of that.

One option might be to combine the Open Space Conference idea with something like the Dagstuhl approach to organizing tables at meals. There the workshop participants are randomized at each lunch and dinner, so over the course of the week you eat with pretty much everyone at least once or twice.

It seems that something similar could be done at a larger conference as well, and it might encourage more cross fertilization between groups that might not otherwise interact.

Could be a good thing…

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Ladysmith Black Mambazo were very cool

Ladysmith Black Mambazo played here last night as part of the CAC Performing Arts series. It was a very cool show, and an excellent example of a musical experience that’s very different live than it would ever be on record. The depth and spatial volume of their sound (and the way it vibrated your liver) is pretty tough to recreate at home, even with a nice surround sound system.

There’s a certain hypnotic sameness to their show that’s either wonderful or ultimately boring depending on the listener. I really enjoyed it, but it did tend to put you in a trance. They did some cool dancing and other stage antics that helped keep one’s attention focussed on the stage, and the high kicking of their not-quite-so-young leader Joseph Shabalala was quite remarkable. Sub-Evil Boy enjoyed it as well.

Their style of choral singing is quite amazing and beautiful, and powerfully different from traditional European classical singing, which tends to look down on the swooping slides, background chatter, and nifty animal noises that Ladysmith used so effectively. Their stage presence was also quite unusual in a cool way, chatting back and forth in the background and wandering on and off stage. I suspect that much of this reflects their origins in late night musical competitions in venues that were anything but upper crust, and it was a nice alternative to the highly formal presentations one often gets at such an event.

When we were in Birmingham (UK) on sabbatical, we went to several performances by African musical groups, and the audience often contained a large number of Africans. That was cool because they knew the music and language and culture and would dance and sing and even shout up to the stage. Last night we sat attentively and clapped loudly between songs, but we were clearly outsiders looking in.

Currently listening to: Ourselves as we do our show, “Unhindered by talent”, on KUMM :-).

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