SV: [OSLIST] WOSONOS 2009 and Then.......

Mon Sep 14 07:12:58 PDT 2009

here's the thing that i think might still be the same about osonos.  it has
to do with the hosting of such things.

in the minute or two *right* after the vancouver open space ended, in the
middle of the all the shuffling and confusion where everyone kind of looks
around and has to decide if they want to continue saying thank you to folks
or move into "where do these chairs go?" mode, chris had just passed the
osonos hosting baton to the next guys, melbourne, i think.  i think i was on
the far side of the room from him, but i went straight for him.  with mock
urgency, i got up in his tired, smiling, post-os, now what? confused face, i
asked "you do know what this means?"  and, if you can imagine corrigan
without words (good luck!), he just looked at me.  "you're in deep," i
said.

it's not as if hosting osonos is some sort of special club, but it is a
special experience.  i think it's always a bit of peak challenge when we
practice in front of practitioners.  it has a way of sharpening our focus,
strengthening our practice, and confirming our commitment to it, maybe.  i
think the thing that's still the same about osonos is that it's a way to go
deeper, especially for the host.

so as lisa's led the charge for helping folks get to an osonos gathering,
i've always been more interested in folks discovering (and then showing)
that anyone with good head and and a good heart -- and a little bit of
experience in facilitating os meetings -- can open space on open space.
anyone can host.  anyone can start an "osi" or practice group.  anyone can
send an invitation for posting at openspaceworld.org, or send to oslist (but
strangers are more likely to stumble upon it on the blog than on the
oslist), or wherever else they like.

as the world comes to discover that anyone with a good head and a good heart
can open space, and anyone who attends can open an issue or topic for
discussion, then i think the best way to make osonos more and more
accessible to people everywhere is to make more and more osonos gatherings.
it doesn't take harrison and a bunch of previous hosts attending with others
from 12 countries to make it osonos.  osonos is the theme, the purpose, the
intent, the job to be done, not the participants or the sort of party it
is.  (to me, osonos is even better than training, cuz it's not dependent on
an expert, it's just people getting together to deepen experience.)

so how do we invite and support and record more and more gatherings *about*
opening space?  how do we invite more and more people who've done open space
to join with others and share their learnings?  or is that even necessary as
a practice goes mainstream?  isn't that the big challenge in this... how do
we share the *depth* (of practice, of generosity, of really open space) with
a mainstream that tends to focus on the outer technicalities of things?

invite them to come, work in open space.  (already happening everywhere).
invite them to come talk about it (osonos as it's been).  invite them to
open space for themselves and others (training, which continues and could
probably grow).  invite them to host their own conversations about how to do
it (osonos's everywhere).  this last one is, i think, the edge we might be
approaching.

what does it look like and what, if anything, might we be doing now or more
or differently, to make it impossible for any one person or group to count
how many "osonos" events have happened, in the same way that it is now
impossible to count os meetings or even os trainings?

what are the issues and opportunities for the mainstream to get deep?

m

--

Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates

http://www.michaelherman.com
http://www.ronanparktrail.com
http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
http://www.openspaceworld.org

312-280-7838 (mobile)

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 12:05 AM, Chris Corrigan
<chris.corrigan at gmail.com>wrote:

> I think there has another thing that has changed in the Open Space world,
> and that has been the fact that Open Space has really tipped into some sort
> of mainstream.  It is a process increasingly familiar in many places I
> travel to, and it seems to have been introduced and used in ways that have
> good integrity and were done well.  I run into people all the time who are
> longtime Open Space practitioners that have no idea of this community that
> gathers around the OSLIST and openspaceworld.org and yet there they are
> out there doing their work and doing it well.
> 10 and more years ago, a small group of organizational development
> consultants leaned heavily on each other to get through the hard work of
> introducing and pioneering Open Space in all kinds of places.  As Michael
> notes, the gatherings back then were a respite from a world that didn't know
> about OST. These days, OSonOS gatherings are a community of practice coming
> together but it's not the whole world of Open Space, not by any stretch.  So
> the flavour is different.  For me, I like to go if I can because I get to
> meet old friends and see new ones and maybe share some war stories, but it's
> not like a group of pioneers anymore...it feels like old veterans raising a
> glass in the Legion Hall.
>
> This is good news...Open Space Technology has really gone to scale.  There
> is no way you could account for the daily use of the process.  It is showing
> up everywhere all the time.
>
> So what is the WOSonOS gathering now?  What is the role of the OSLIST
> community in the context of a world that uses Open Space without knowing
> about us?
>
> Onward and best wishes for a great time in Taiwan and Berlin and wherever
> the gathering ends up next!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 8:11 PM, Michael Herman <michael at michaelherman.com
> > wrote:
>
>> i'm sure i missed the announcement on the paris gathering, christine...
>> but if you will send me a blurb with a link, i'd be glad to post it in teh
>> openspaceworld.org blog, alongside the taiwan invite.
>>
>> some of these other posts have me thinking some more about worldwide open
>> space on open space...
>>
>> it seems like there are three sorts of "world" (the big "one") osonos
>> event.  the first kind were (are?) focused on or primarily addressing the
>> global community of practitioners.  later, osonos went some places because
>> there was a strong community formed in some locality.  the third kind is
>> when osonos gets saddled with the added purpose of growing a local community
>> or (as happened at least once) got packaged up with a training.
>>
>> harrison's first four osonos's were of the first sort.  the community was
>> small and scattered.  lots of us were lone voices in our local
>> wildernesses.  some of us were small groups.  when harrison invited, we got
>> together in this weird way and enjoyed having it feel so normal.  at the
>> first four, and i would say chicago (#7), vancouver (#9), and maybe some
>> others i didn't attend, the only or at least very primary focus was on so
>> many scattered friends getting together.  in each of these, there were some
>> folks who came from nearby, but not very strong local practice communities.
>> harrison and i had done several training programs in chicago by the time
>> osonos came here, but most of the folks at those programs had travelled a
>> long way to get that training.  i wasn't really trying (or becoming) the
>> leader of a local group.
>>
>> at #5 in toronto, #8 in berlin, #10 in melbourne and a bunch of others
>> since, i think we travelled to these places because there was such a strong
>> community there already.  these are the ones where people started to do more
>> planning work.  when the extra planning bubbled up because of local
>> community excitement, that's great.  if the extra work comes out of some
>> sense of obligation because folks are travelling so far to get there, or to
>> make good on an invitation presentation made two years earlier, that seems
>> less fun.  worst case, the extra work happens because the host feels
>> responsible for the travellers having a good experience, or the sort of
>> experience that the host thinks they should have.  that's the hardest sort
>> of work and seems not very open space.
>>
>> the third kind, osonos gatherings that are supposed to form or strengthen
>> or otherwise grow a local community would seem to be particularly prone to
>> this sort of obligation or trying or trying to use it as a training tool or
>> whatever.  these sorts of events -- and i've not been to any of these
>> personally so can't say for sure if any have actually happened this way --
>> the balance or focus would be off... no longer just the gathering of so many
>> globally scattered friends, but a gathering that's supposed to "do"
>> something for the locals.
>>
>> who me?
>>
>> of course, all of this is a bit like trying to distinguish benign from
>> malignant space invaders.  messy.  but over time, it does seem to have
>> gotten harder and harder to have an osonos of the first sort.  in part,
>> that's great.  it's because we have more and more local groups that are
>> coming to know themselves as communities of practice.  they want to host.
>> they want to give the global friends a place to meet.  maybe the downside is
>> that it feels more competitive and it's easy to forget to make it easy.  or
>> at least, in the excitement, it gets harder to demonstrate just how simple
>> it can be.
>>
>> which is all to say that i have two wishes for the further evolution of
>> osonos.   the first is that more and more osonos events would happen
>> locally, because the local communities recognize that they are already so
>> rich, even if harrison and a small herd of 'old timers' don't come.  (think
>> haiti!)  all the better if the local groups sync up and meet simultaneously
>> -- just for fun.  and just because we now can.  and because it might be a
>> good practice-expanding experiment.  play into some of these mainstream
>> online tools.
>>
>> the second wish, and i think this is supported by the simultaneous stuff,
>> is that those who are still feeling like lone voices in their own local
>> wilderness, would find it easier again to host an osonos locally -- small as
>> it might be -- at the same time as some larger groups were meeting.
>>
>> what if?
>>
>> so what would it look like if berlin next year and haiti and australia and
>> canada and a handful of new voices/places all happened at the same time?
>> and of course a bunch of others could join in as individuals could follow
>> along, from whatever outpost or client site or wherever else they couldn't
>> leave for the ONE big event.
>>
>> do we know enough yet to be able to make this sort of thing,
>> osonos-around-the-world, really easy?  even as those who just like to hang
>> out locally, in this weird way, wtih a bunch of old friends, and new ones,
>> making the whole mess of it seem totally normal -- still do just that.  hang
>> out.  locally.  but now they'd have how many localities they'd have to
>> choose from.  sure sounds like worldwide open space on open space to me!
>> what are the issues and opportunities for letting osonos get really easy AND
>> out of control?  <grin>
>>
>> berlin is where *osonos* really started to go global, giving rise to all
>> the translating at openspaceworld.org, might we make another leap ten
>> years later?  in the earlier years we used to count how many countries were
>> represented.  what if we started scoring how many different countries and
>> languages were hosting?
>>
>> maybe it starts this year, by redefining "simultaneous" -- thank you
>> christine!  or maybe all this simultaneous stuff is one more thing to not
>> do.  i dunno.
>>
>> m
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Michael Herman
>> Michael Herman Associates
>>
>> http://www.michaelherman.com
>> http://www.ronanparktrail.com
>> http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
>> http://www.openspaceworld.org
>>
>> 312-280-7838 (mobile)
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 5:00 AM, christine koehler <
>> chris.alice.koehler at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Michael,
>>>
>>> Several OSonOS on different continents won't happen quite simultaneously
>>> this time, but almost ! We are hosting an event in Paris 2 weeks later...Of
>>> course  it means that we won't be able to have Skype or whatever
>>> conversations.  Which is a pitty in a way : our event is supported by the
>>> computer museum, that offers the space, next to it . So it would probably
>>> have been the best place to host  multi-places sessions, with kind of video
>>> conferencing on a big wall or whatever... They've asked us what material we
>>> need, and we said "none. Open Space is just simple" ;).
>>> On the other hand, it will enable those who will go to Taiwan and  who
>>> love to travel and meet new friends and see new places to continue to
>>> Europe. Paris and La Grande Arche are worth visiting, for sure !
>>>
>>> Regarding the simplicity of hosting you refer to, I'm in the midst of it.
>>> And I have to say... well... it is not that it is not simple, it is that I
>>> cross my fingers so that people will come ! Although, thanks to Luc, we have
>>> this beautiful space offered, which we couldn't have afford otherways,  we
>>> have some security charges to pay (public spaces need guardians...),. Taking
>>> financial risk makes it a bit thrilling, although it also makes the fun of
>>> it ;).  If you want to help us, please spread the word all over Europe !
>>>
>>> Christine from Paris
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Christine Koehler
>>> Consultant-formateur
>>> www.christinekoehler.com
>>> 06 13 28 71 38
>>>
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>
>
>
> --
> CHRIS CORRIGAN
> Facilitation - Training - Process Design
> Open Space Technology
>
> Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot
> Site: http://www.chriscorrigan.com
>
>
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