[OSList] who are the right people

Sun Jun 12 15:22:47 PDT 2016

Of course, depending on an event's goals, and planning team capacity, you
do as much outreach as possible. My friend Lisa Heft has sometimes offered
a workshop, which I have not attended for I consider myself an
professional, expert OS facilitator, in which LIsa does a lot of training
on what goes on before an OS event. The more outreach you do, the more open
the space.  And some OS events are sorta closed, such as an event for
employees of a organization.

A key part of the planning work is the invitation:  how wide is the invite?

I am recalling a time that I, and several others, organized an event called
Practice of Peace, shortly after Harrison's book of that name came out.  We
invited, and funded the costs, of OS facilitators working in conflict zones
around the world. We had everyone we knew putting out our invitation and,
lucky for us, one member of our team had some great connects in Africa.  We
did not have any formal speakers, other than Harrison speaking of his
then-new book but by having what we labeled "invited guests", who were each
free to do whatever they wanted in OS and, guess what, most of them offered
sessions about their work!

It was a big reach for us to fund airfares for three OS professionals from
Jerusalem, one from D.C. (the event in Seattle area),  one from India, one
from Colombia, one from NYC -- the airfares!!!! We had no capital, just
registration fees so we had no lump of money up front. We trusted things
would work out and we developed some pride as it looked like we were gonna
be able to finance all the airfares, housing and food of our 'invited
guests'. My memory is incomplete but I think we had 8 invited guests to
fund.

We listed the invited guests in our invitation and that invite went all
over the globe.  I am sure it made it to this list.   We ended up with
participatns from 26 countries including N. Ireland, Herzegovina, Nigeria,
Burundi  . .and many I am leaving out.

Now to the point of my story. Just as we were feeling confident we could
finance all our invited guests, a minister from Burundi wrote to us and
asked if there was any scholarship funds. Whew. We had not considered
scholarship money. Airfare from Burundi to Seattle is not cheap.

So. What to do?  Our planning team realized that if we were who we said we
were, open space facilitators, that we should try to facilitate the
participation of whoever was showing up. That guy from Burundi was trying
to show up!!!  And we were the right people to try to help him for there
was no one else. We decided we would fund whatever scholarships we could
and we came up with a brief application. Prosper, the Burundi guy, returned
his application almost instantly. We got a couple other financial aid
requests but could not fulfill many. But we paid for some. And the first
scholarship was to Prosper.

When Peggy arranged to wire over $3,000, which was a huge chunk of our
resources back in 2003, she realized that, for all we knew, this person
claiming to be from Burundi was just looking for money. And, besides, by
then a guy from Nigeria had asked for some help and we have all heard about
Nigerian online scams. (NB:  the guy from Nigeria, Joel, turned out to also
be an awesome guy and on the up and up).  Peggy, if I recall correctly,
took a big breath and reminded herself "this is about who we are" and she
wired that money to Prosper. Poof. It was gone.

But Prosper showed up.  He made contacts that he still works with to this
day, working to heal some of the wounds of genocide in his homeland. Joel
married one of our team, although they are no longer married, and together
they raised seed funding for a leadership center in Lagos, Nigeria.

And all the 'invited guests' that we financed were awesome.

And, gosh, it sure felt like as many of the right people as possible showed
up. We OS facilitators, we did our best to get as many of the people who
wanted to show up to be able to show up.

I am not answering your question. Maybe I am telling this story because
your question included international collaboration.

OS is about trust. The deeper the trust, the more the energy goes out into
the world to the right people and the more readily the right people are
able to show up.  It's like that old saw, often wrongly attributed to
Goethe but which actually comes from the introductino to a book on the
Scottish Expedition (the first westerners to reach a big-deal summit in the
Himalayas) that goes something like this:  until one is committed, there is
hesitancy . . .and then, it goes on, and I don't have it just right, as
soon as one is committed all kinds of things appear to make the commitment
possible, the goal achievable.

If you are committed to having all the right people in the room, I can't
guarantee you that all the right people from everywhere will show up but I
can guarantee that the more your planning team trusts itself and those
seeking to show up, the more right people will show up.

There is no perfect event with every possibly perfect participant
participating. This cosmos is too complex, imho, for that kind of
perfection. Instead, you get something better in Open Space: you get a
tangible, hands-on experience of energy coalescing around a theme, or
invitation, that everyone that does show up cared about enough that they
showed up. Those are the right people.

Can you dreams exceed your grasp?  I hope so. Then you always have more
trust and love to unleash with Open Space.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 2:41 PM, christopher macrae via OSList <
oslist at lists.openspacetech.org> wrote:

> "the people who come are the right people" but sometimes doesnt that
> depend on how much work has been done on the invitation process to include
> all sides including those who may not know they are part of the broeken
> systems
>
> i guess when an open space is about a local community issue its relatively
> simple to see whether everyone has been included but
>
>  my main concern is on issues only global youth can mobilise if
> sustainability is to be our future - and yet while i am interested in
> movements that empower youth  (sytarting with creating jobs) i also see
> sustainability -whether we win it or lose it - as an intergenerational
> compound crisis -
>
> does the generation of trump or clinton understand how much they have
> presided over designing non-sustainable systems?  has mass tv media becomes
> such an intergenerational liar that we no longer have enough bases for
> intergenerational trust?  what 5000 people invitation to open space would
> maximise a movement of networks to combat the national rifle association at
> least on selling assault guns-
>
>  here are these systems that seem so broken - are we deceiving youth in
> implying that enough elders will ever come to celebrate youth's best
> endeavors
>
> I also have a suspicion that eg hackathons viralise their invitations  and
> get extraordinary collections of young participants in ways
> that open space invitation agents may need to get smarter at - if
> intergenerational space is to be convened as much as the coming decade of
> tipping points will require
>
> just thinking aloud- any views?
> chris macrae
> www.globalyouth50000.com
>
>
>
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