Key Personalities

[Melinda Salazar]

Dear Diana,
Ah, a very familiar scenerio and one in which we, two teachers who 
collaborate on an annual Teaching Peace conference for educators, 
parents, and community folk, struggled with this year.  Our first 
conference offered the un-Open Space/traditional conference format with 
compelling keynotes (published, renowned academics) and a 5 strand 
breakout workshops, also presented by academics, educators and 
community members.  We provided a conference line-up not to be missed 
(tee-shirts and all!). We drew a little over one hundred participants, 
including students, teachers and community activists, as well as the 
(left-leaning) filmmakers who used the ocnference to 'get up-close and 
personal' with  anti-war scholars.

After experiencing Open Space at a Baha'i environmental conference with 
Steve Cochran (US Partnership of the UN Decade for Education for 
Sustainable Development), I convinced my conference collaborator to try 
Open Space the following year.  Long story short, the OS conference was 
equally successful with a smaller attendance due to, we believe, a 
challenging date vs. conference format.  The biggest difference between 
the two conferences was: 1) no matter what we did, we could NOT get the 
academics to attend, which is interesting in an of itself in terms of 
our (I also wear an academic hat) retention and promotion conference 
activity as well as a gap of OS in higher ed settings, and 2) 
attracting participants without the 'line-up.'

We tried a version of your proposed plan, which I've come to learn from 
this list as a functional transitional strategy. We invited key 
individuals to host an OS session and had to work hard to convey OS 
concepts to these individuals over and over: you are not presenting a 
paper, or facilitating a workshop, rather you are kick starting a 
conversation about.....  This approach was successful for some and not 
for others. We did provide a Marketplace space where these selected 
indivuals, as well as others, could set up a table, etc. and worked 
Marketplace time into the conference.

Can you read more about our OS Teaching Peace conference on our 
website? Not yet!  Have I done anything with the OS reports? Not yet!  
Hopefully, over the summer.....so I appreciate this opportunity to 
revisit our 1st OS conference.

Warmly,
Melinda


Melinda Salazar, Ph.D
University of New Hampshire
Women's Studies
Oyster River High School
Social Studies Department
603.682.4525



Quoting Diana Larsen <dlarsen at futureworksconsulting.com>:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm working with two or three conference planning groups who want to  
> hold conferences completely in Open Space next year. They all have a  
> little concern about whether they can attract the kind of  
> participation they'd like without well-known KeyNote or Invited  
> Speakers - the folks whose presence justifies the participants'  
> attendance to bosses, etc.
>
> One planning group came up with the idea of inviting Key  
> Personalities and offering them honoraria and help with travel  
> expenses as if it were a regular conference - but asking them /not/  
> to give keynote speeches. Their names would be included on the  
> invitations to others as having committed to attend, possibly along  
> with some topics they consider proposing for the marketplace.
>
> Has anyone tried this before? What do you all think about inviting  
> "key personalities" to an Open Space conference? Has anyone done  
> this? What benefits/pitfalls do you see, did you experience? I have  
> mixed thoughts and emotions, and would like some further data to  
> offer the planning groups. What effect on "Whoever comes are the  
> right people" happens when some folks receive compensation for  
> attendance and others don't?
>
> Thanks,
> Diana
>
>
> Diana Larsen
> www.futureworksconsulting.com
> 503-288-3550
>
> Watch for:
> "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" by Esther Derby &  
> Diana Larsen, available Summer 2006! Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf 
>  (new title!)
> http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/dlret/index.html
>
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