{"id":84,"date":"2005-03-16T12:30:36","date_gmt":"2005-03-16T18:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/03\/16\/open-space-meetings-sound-really-cool\/"},"modified":"2005-03-16T13:41:29","modified_gmt":"2005-03-16T19:41:29","slug":"open-space-meetings-sound-really-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/03\/16\/open-space-meetings-sound-really-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Open space meetings sound really cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

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>\nNo tag for this post.\n\t

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