research

[Harrison Owen]

Oh Lucas -- you are dreaming a dream I have dreamed for years. And we almost
pulled it off. Here is the idea --

In most large dome stadiums they have a marvelous wide angle camera
suspended from the roof. So we do a large Open Space in such a place and run
the camera from start to finish. Let's say it was 2000 folks opening space
around the future of education in their city over 2 days. We ask teachers to
wear blue shirts, students red, parents yellow, general public green and so
on. All the Open Space takes place on the stadium floor -- no breakout
rooms, but rather break out spaces. Roll Camera!

Then we get fancy. Compress the 16 hours of tape into 10 minutes. Fuzzy the
pixles a bit, and play it back. Transformation! The individuals and groups
now become flows of color. And if those flow patterns aren't fractal I'll
eat my famous hat. Self organization rolling out before your eyes. Strange
attractors doing their thing. Chaos and emergent order right before your
eyes!

And there is more. We write a little computer routine (actually it already
exists) that can capture the individual colors (shirts)and measure the
interactions. We would know who is in each group, where they were previously
and where they went, who goes along with whom, etc. And we could cross
corolate all that with what they were talking about specifically (the posted
issues and the proceedings). Talk about big brother doing his thing! But
Wow!

Anyhow, it looked like we might really pull all this off in Seattle with the
Kingdome. Unfortunately they tore it down before we could get all the ducks
in a row.

Ah but the dream was wonderful. And who knows, maybe someday . . . ?

Harrison

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland   20845
Phone 301-365-2093

Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
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-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Lucas
Gonzalez
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 4:31 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: research

> Also, are there any research protocols out there?  Or ideas that you
> wish someone would research?

I don't know if I've shared this small idea here, but one possibility
might be to use webcams from above, so you may follow the behaviour of
bumblebees and butterflies - all without distracting the actual persons
who are doing their job.

If you have a way to actually know a bit about "who is who" (maybe a
hat or maybe ask them to look upwards once at the very beginning), then
you would be able to correlate things like (official) status, interest,
personality traits, success of the generated change, and what not.

People's movements might be a bit like "brownian movement" (small
particles within a liquid), of the kind Albert Einstein was said to
think good things about.  Actually, I think it was something along the
lines of "temperature = movement".  So that might be one thing to
study.

What other things would you like to do research about?  I'd certainly
like to know what happens *before* open space.

Please keep research fun!

Lucas



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