Opening space for action

Mon Feb 9 15:04:41 PST 2009

Hi Carol, 

Here are some suggestions to your question. I am very touched by what you
are working at creating with this OS event. I have close friends in Europe
who have relatives in Israel and who are themselves in Israel trying to
create opportunities for connections between Arabs, Palestinians and
Israelis. I have given them information on OST in the past and have sent
them your message. They will be encouraged by it I am sure.

To ‘’attempt’’ to answer your question, here are options on convergence
easily done in the 5 hours you have. One of the key decisions you will need
to make at the outset if whether you are looking for collective priorities
and actions or whether you are satisfied with individuals or small groups of
individuals planning action on their own personal priorities.  

If it’s for individual priorities and actions, once people have read
reports, you can go directly to opening space this time on an Action theme.
People announce, post and work at action plans, individually or they can
combine topics with others. 

If you are aiming for more sustainable collective action, it is worth taking
the extra 20 minutes to have the group set its collective priorities with a
survey (or if they are the final decision makers on this meeting, you can
call it a ‘’vote’’). See below how the survey can be done in about 20
minutes. 

Once the survey is done, you can use the richest method of convergence:
opening space again for action ideas - whoever is interested joins to
develop action plans and then prepare reports in the Newsroom. With this
approach, you can get several action plans addressing different aspects of
the same priority. Or you can invite people to regroup around the priority
for which they have most passion for, recognizing that bumble bees can still
move around. This makes for bigger groups (if your attendance is of 200 or
more) and you are likely to get one plan on an area the group felt was key
for a 1st step and possibly a list of quick actions and ideas of other
potential actions.

People regroup in the circle. Group representatives are given Action plans
are  for then report in about

I like to also give time in the closing circle (3-5 min) for personal action
plans. If you have an extra 10 min, the plans can be even shared in pairs
before the closing of the event. Everybody can find their space in some form
of action. People have often told me that this moment was a crucial moving
point for them.

This survey can be done with low tech methods such as:

- giving each participant tickets (eg. 5) asking them to put one in each of
the envelopes attached to the reports that represent their top 5 priorities.
This methods avoids peer pressure and group think that sticky dots can
create but it’s the same principle.  It takes only 2-3 minutes even with a
group of 200 or 400 because people have already read the reports and made
their choice as they read.  They even combined identical reports where
applicable with the consent of initiators of that report topic. The
facilitator gave them instructions to that effect before they started
reading.

-When they are done, combinations are announced (helps to spot wrongfully
created combinations – political reasons have shown to get in the way at
times).  

-Then volunteers are invited to count tickets (2 volunteers per report, not
their own, if outcomes are critical).

-Facilitator asks if a report received all possible points (same no as no of
participants) and goes down until the top 5 or more priorities are
identified.  

I hope this sketch of a process is useful,

Diane

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Carol
Daniel Kasbari
Sent: 9 février 2009 15:58
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: [OSLIST] Opening space for action

Dear friends and colleagues,

Greetings from Jerusalem!

I will be opening space for about 200 people next week, on the issue of the
Arab education system in Israel, and what contribution each one can make to
make it better. It will be a two day event, in which the first day will be
mainly for conversation and dialogue on the issue and the second  will focus
on action planning and team work. I was wondering if you could share with me
the different ways for opening space for action (for the second day), how to
do, what to use, especially that I have about 5 hours only for that, and
people are very eager to get to work on some projects/ plan next steps
together. What would be the ultimate way according to your experience to
conduct that?

I appreciate your help on that, and looking forward to hear you ideas.

Carol Daniel Kasbari

E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (6.0.0.386)
Database version: 5.11720
http://www.pctools.com/spyware-doctor-antivirus/
<http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/> 

* * ==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU ------------------------------ To subscribe,
unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of
oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about
OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist 

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20090209/1e3d9193/attachment-0016.htm>