How the Mighty are Fallen

Harrison Owen owenhh at mindspring.com
Tue Nov 28 17:14:52 PST 2000


At 11:55 AM 11/27/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Harrison--
>Condolences that you aren't the new record-holder.  Congratulations on a
>productive and wonderful meeting.
>
>There is always another day . . .

Thanks for your solicitude! But while I'm waiting -- I might as well
confess that there actually was some method in my madness. The reason that
I was hoping for a truly large group was in order to demonstrate to my own
satisfaction that handling a group of 1500 required essentially no more
pre-planning and onsite logistical support than for a group of 150.
Obviously there are more bodies which require more space and a bigger
wall.  But what about such things as traffic flow, group size (and
therefore appropriate breakout room size)? One could argue, as indeed some
have, that when you reach a certain size, you are going to have to bend a
few principles, if you will, in terms of doing things for the group, and
telling them what to do -- all in the name of preserving some semblance of
the civil peace. So it was an experiment of sorts.

Obviously 850 is not 1500. Then again 850 is not a small group either. And
this much I can say. Everything happened just as usual. No surprises. There
was one of me, and no additional effort devoted to traffic and space
management. Everything took care of itself.  I think it safe to extrapolate
from that experience (850) to a much larger group (1500) -- and say that
the power of self-organization amongst Homo sapiens is every bit up to the
task. No help needed. But that is just an extrapolation. Maybe on another
day the experiment will be run for real.

>Harrison Owen

7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-469-9269
fax 301-983-9314
Summer Phone 207-763-3261
Summer Address
189 Beaucaire Ave.
Camden, ME 04843
website www.mindspring.com/~owenhh
Open Space Institute website www.openspaceworld.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20001128/01a89b44/attachment-0017.htm>


More information about the OSList mailing list