I ran across this fine rant<\/a> on Bill Tozier’s Notional Slurry<\/a> (which looks like an fascinating blog – I look forward to reading more) on Open Space conferences\/meetings<\/a>. 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<\/a>, where you have so much<\/em> to attend\/listen to, there’s so much<\/em> inclination to skip it all and talk in the halls or go grab a bite and write science on a napkin.<\/p>\n

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<\/strike> 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?<\/p>\n

At a workshop like GPTP<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Really, why not?<\/p>\n

\nAn hour or so later…<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One option might be to combine the Open Space Conference idea with something like the Dagstuhl<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Could be a good thing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Open space meetings sound really cool”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-general"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-1m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":223,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/08\/29\/martin-fowler-likes-open-space-meetings\/","url_meta":{"origin":84,"position":0},"title":"Martin Fowler likes Open Space meetings","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"29 Aug 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Martin Fowler just blogged in a positive way about Open Space meetings, and he's smarter (and more experienced) than your average bear (e.g., me). I really have to get myself in some situation where I get to seriously try something like this.","rel":"","context":"In "Events"","block_context":{"text":"Events","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/events\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":102,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/04\/02\/school-levy-letter-to-the-editor\/","url_meta":{"origin":84,"position":1},"title":"Morris needs to re-pass the school levy: A letter to the editor","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"2 Apr 05","format":false,"excerpt":"The following is a letter to the editor that I intend to send to our local paper regarding the current school funding issues (also here). Comments and questions always welcome. 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Awfully nice of him to share some of their more charming idiosyncratic behaviors! clipped from radar.oreilly.com Meanwhile, we get some real humdingers showing how out of touch with reality some of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/content.clipmarks.com\/blog_embed\/7b1820d2-b85b-4390-af38-5a95e7e194dc\/3423DECB-EB5C-4559-AC2B-BE0B4080DF25\/","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1823,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2013\/10\/07\/value-vs-worth-again\/","url_meta":{"origin":84,"position":3},"title":"Value vs. worth (again)","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"7 Oct 13","format":false,"excerpt":"WeatherGrrrl is today starting down the difficult road of recovering from knee replacement surgery. Being modern folk, we'd counted on wireless in the hospital to allow Netflix to be a key mental narcotic, helping keep her mind off the pain that unavoidably comes of having bones reshaped with saws, ligaments\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "economics"","block_context":{"text":"economics","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/economics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":748,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/12\/13\/748\/","url_meta":{"origin":84,"position":4},"title":"A wondrously deafening silence","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"13 Dec 07","format":false,"excerpt":"From the Center for Democracy and Technology: The House today approved, by unanimous voice vote, legislation that permanently prevents consumer's phone numbers from being automatically removed from the FTC's \"Do Not Call\" list. Without the legislation, those numbers would be scrubbed from the list after five years. 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Happily, a group came together on fairly short notice (essentially\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Events"","block_context":{"text":"Events","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/events\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Transforming an historic landmark","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1098\/841713397_795c05da73_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}