[OSList] who are the right people

Sun Jun 12 15:48:41 PDT 2016

therese thank you- i had always assumed practice of peace had been one of the largest invitation processes ever celebrating open space- its kind of you to share chapter and verse
at the start of the year i spent 4 days in the company of don beck thanks to MIT alumni led buy John Kiehl 
I maybe completely wrong here but with open space if you have a particular kind of spirit and have been lucky enough to spend some time with harrison you can probably do something useful as a novice open spacer quite quickly especially if you have a deep love for the people trapped in a broken system but can keep your own view of answers out of the open space stage- 
i cant see how to app don beck quickly - the best i can get to is see if you can write 7 news stories on the same  broken system crisis from the main colors/ie stages of cultural development that have crashed into each other
i mention all this as don beck out of texas still has a very active alumni group out of san diego trying to mediate israel/palestine- if this remains a deep concern of anyone on this list i can try and find the right protocol to introduce them to don beck if thats of potential good
chris macraeglobalyouth50000.com help the world bank hack itself at the world bank youth summit this week 
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      From: Therese Fitzpatrick <therese.fitzpatrick at gmail.com>
 To: christopher macrae <chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk>; World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org> 
Cc: "oslist-request at lists.openspacetech.org" <oslist-request at lists.openspacetech.org>
 Sent: Sunday, 12 June 2016, 18:22
 Subject: Re: [OSList] who are the right people

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 macraewww.globalyouth50000.com  

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