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[Kim Willing]

Dear OSLIST!

It's been a while since I've been in touch!

I am writing in a brief moment while both children (ie; the reasons why I
haven't been in touch for a couple of years) are asleep as I am embarking
on my first Open Space facilitation for this year in a couple of weeks.  I
must tell you some time about the other OS experiences I have had as I
realise I have been awfully remiss in not contributing to the network and
in hiding out somewhat - however - the immediate to begin - incase I have
to leap up to a waking babe -

The Scenario:
A national conference - 350 delegates - 3 days traditional conferencing -
papers etc incl one day field trips the day before we embark on 1.5 days OS
facilitated by moi. (I expect the delegates will be tired, but those who
are there will also be suffering some indigestion of info and keen to
process it).

As I have dared to do in the past (other stories here) we are doing one day
workshops followed by half day (morning) convergence - which also serves as
the last day of the conf. so people will be invited to relect on whole conf
in closing circle.  The purpose of the OS is to allow people to work with
the issues that have emerged for them during the conf., to identify what's
hot and to create a future out of it all.

Re: convergence - In the past I have worked with up to 120 people and
around 30 topics. I have given each person 15 sticky dots and asked them to
allocate 5 dots to top priority, 4 to next etc down to 1.  I think the
converging of similar topics has happened later, in the action groups when
people are asked to relate and record similar topics -

People will have a photocopied report of all the workshops given to them
when they arrive on Fri morning and after being given some time to read and
digest this, I will invite them to PRIORITISE THE TOP 10? TOPICS (? not
sure about this no.)  and we will form action groups on those.

Questions:
What method will I use to do the prioritising of those topics requiring
immediate attention??

And, once hot topics are found, shall I ask for a champion to nominate for
each before people break up into action groups or let each group decide (I
am inclined to identify champions whilst still in large group, before
action groups form).

Would it be better to converge similar topics BEFORE prioritising?  The
voting may be more meaningful this way - less spread out and more
informative? I understand this would need to be a fairly quick, crude,
intuitive process with this no. of people but it might help?

Also, even if only 250 come to the Friday morning session, would it be
unwieldy to use 15 dots each, and given that there may be many more topics
than with a smaller group, I'm wondering whether it might be better to ask
people to just list their top 10 (rather than 5) issues and to give 1 dot
to each vs. ranking them. The counting of dots has to happen fairly quickly
once the voting is done and I don't want to make it impossible.

I look forward to hearing from those of you who have any thoughts on this.

All the best and thanks,

Kim Willing.

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