An OST Story

Wed Jan 12 12:35:54 PST 2011

Well done! It always amazing to me how well intentioned, bright, involved
people can take so long to acknowledge a blinding flash of the obvious. As I
said in my post immediate, presentations give you yesterday's news. When you
open space (by whatever name) now is the future, and the future is now.
Pretty juicy, and congratulations on your tenacity. 

Harrison

Harrison Owen

7808 River Falls Dr.

Potomac, MD 20854

USA

Phone 301-365-2093

www.openspaceworld.com

www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)

To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of
<mailto:oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu> oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:

 <http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html>
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Jennifer
Hurley
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 2:48 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: An OST Story

History of Open Space Technology in the Congress for the New Urbanism

Caveat: This is my own personal take on this story, and I'm sure that other
people in the organization would have different perspectives.

Since 2001, I've been involved with a national professional organization
that is promoting a reform movement to support walkable, mixed-use
neighborhoods. [For anyone interested in this topic, check out the Congress
for the New Urbanism at http://www.cnu.org.]  One of the activities of the
organization is to put on an annual "Congress".  When the movement first
began (CNU I was held in 1993), the Congress involved about 100 people, with
lively discussions and jury critiques of projects that demonstrated
cutting-edge ideas in planning, development, and architecture.  The
organization has grown dramatically-it now has over 3,000 members, and the
annual Congress attracts 1200 - 1500 participants. As the event has grown,
it has become more of a conventional conference, with many large plenaries
and small panel presentations, tours of projects and neighborhoods with
urban design lessons, and other typical conference events.  

>From the very first time I attended a Congress in 2001, I thought it was an
enormously wasted opportunity to bring all of these passionate, talented
people together, and then just sit in a room listening to presentations from
a few.  And I wasn't alone - people who had been involved from the beginning
bemoaned losing the feeling of a "congress" as the size had grown. I had
experienced OST in a small way as portions of other conferences, loved it,
and read as much as I could find about it.  I started talking about OST on
some of the listservs where new urbanists talked about the movement and the
organization - but there were no bites.

NextGen Starts with OST
A few years later in 2004, a group of young folks engaged in the movement
decided to hold their own event one day before the annual Congress.  They
started talking about it on the listservs and invited people to join in the
planning of the "NextGen Congress".  When they started asking about what
people wanted to do during the event, I suggested OST.  The idea was
immediately picked up, in part because it sounded so easy.  The first
one-day NextGen Congress was held entirely in OST.  The 70 participants
convened a wide range of sessions, and more importantly, made strong
connections with each other.  Each year since then, the NextGen Congress has
programmed their morning session with speakers, but held their afternoon
sessions in OST.

Transportation Summit Tries OST
That was a good start, but I still wanted to bring OST into the core of the
organization.  In 2005, I was sitting at a table where some people were
discussing the format for the next Transportation Summit, a smaller event
(about 150 participants) organized by CNU and focused on transportation
reform.  The group had met for several years and accomplished some of their
initial goals. For the next event, they wanted to figure out what issues to
tackle next as part of the reform agenda.  I suggested OST.  They thought it
was important to have presentations to the entire group about key
accomplishments and developments, so they held a typical
presentation-oriented event the first day, and held the second day in OST.
Participants were very engaged and developed many ideas for future work.  I
believe many of the reform efforts they are engaged in now were first
germinated at that event.  However, the group has not used OST for any of
its events since that time.

OST Supports CNU Initiatives
In 2005, I was also asked to become co-chair of the Planners Task Force
within CNU, part of the committee structure for volunteers to engage in CNU
"initiatives", largely reform efforts in the field.  At my first Task Force
meeting, the topic of "Task Force Structure" was on the agenda, and I
proposed that CNU hold a one-day "Task Force Congress" in OST each year
associated with the annual full Congress in order for people to work
together on existing and new "initiatives".  The idea wasn't immediately
embraced, but in 2006, they decided to hold a 3-hour "New Initiatives Forum"
in OST so that people could propose and discuss new initiatives.  That event
was held two years in a row, and some initiative committees that are still
working were first put together at those events.  Also in 2006, there was a
need to have an interactive discussion about affordable housing as part of
the annual congress, and so we held a 3-hour event just on affordable
housing using OST.

Changing the Name: the Birth of the Open Source Congress
At this point, now that OST was getting some wider (but still small) use in
the organization, the language became problematic.  "Open space" means
something very particular to planners, architects, landscape architects, and
engineers, and it has nothing to do with OST.  Every time we talked about
"open space technology", people thought we were talking about parks.  We
decided to start referring to it within CNU just as "open source", which
picked up on some other themes that had been bubbling within the
organization and the experiments with "unconferences" in other fields.

In 2007, I made a proposal that CNU hold a parallel "Open Source Congress"
along with the regular Congress full of planned sessions.  I had read on the
OST listserv about people trying this option.  The organization didn't bite
in 2007, but in 2008, the NextGen folks, who had been using OST every year
since 2004, helped me organize the event entirely on a volunteer basis.  We
were only able to get a room at the convention center for part of the
conference, so the rest of the time we met in a wide hallway. We weren't
anywhere on the program, but we used tall foamcore boards leaning against
the hallway wall as our Newsroom Wall and attracted participation that way.

Open Source Goes Mainstream
In 2009, the Open Source Congress had its own room throughout the conference
and made it into the program for the first time.  In 2010, I was able to
pass on the core volunteer job of organizing the Open Source Congress to
someone else, and we again had dedicated space throughout the conference and
inclusion in the conference program.

The Next Challenge
Over the last several years, discontent with the conventional conference has
grown. Many of the younger people participate almost exclusively in the open
source sessions.  The open source sessions have failed to attract many of
the older, long-time members, but that group has also been complaining more
about the lack of stimulating new ideas in the conventional sessions.  The
organization is struggling to support volunteer initiatives to move the
reform agenda forward.  Because of the discontent with the conference, the
Board has become deeply involved in the conference planning for the next
year. As an experiment, that have decided to hold one of the "plenary"
sessions entirely in OST.  There are no competing sessions during the
"plenaries", so most of the participants will be exposed to OST.  Parallel
OST sessions will continue throughout the rest of the conference, at the
same time as the planned conventional sessions.

It's been an 8-year journey, but baby step by baby step, OST has become part
of the organization. Even though it has always been somewhat on the fringe,
it has encouraged the participants to take initiative. OST is still on the
fringe in this organization, and this year's spotlight in the mainstream,
while very exciting, is also a bit intimidating.  I've never worked on an
OST event with more than about 150 people, and we expect 800 for the Open
Source Plenary.  I can't tell you how much it reassures me to have this
group to tap for advice!

Thanks for all of your support on my journey!
Jennifer Hurley
__________________________
HURLEY~FRANKS & ASSOCIATES
1500 Walnut St STE 504  |  Philadelphia, PA 19102
p: 215-988-9440  |  f: 215-988-9441  |  c: 267-971-4598
JLHurley at hfadesign.com  |  http://www.hfadesign.com
Certified WDBE through PA UCP, City of Philadelphia OEO, and NJ UCP

* * ==========================================================
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/20110112/34fd90e7/attachment-0016.htm>