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<FONT FACE="Times New Roman"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><B>History of Open Space Technology in the Congress for the New Urbanism<BR>
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<I>Caveat: This is my own personal take on this story, and I’m sure that other people in the organization would have different perspectives.<BR>
</I> <BR>
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 <a href="http://www.cnu.org.">http://www.cnu.org.</a>] 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. <BR>
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>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.<BR>
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<B>NextGen Starts with OST<BR>
</B>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.<BR>
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<B>Transportation Summit Tries OST<BR>
</B>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.<BR>
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<B>OST Supports CNU Initiatives<BR>
</B>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.<BR>
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<B>Changing the Name: the Birth of the Open Source Congress<BR>
</B>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.<BR>
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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.<BR>
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<B>Open Source Goes Mainstream<BR>
</B>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.<BR>
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<B>The Next Challenge<BR>
</B>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.<BR>
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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!<BR>
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Thanks for all of your support on my journey!<BR>
Jennifer Hurley<BR>
__________________________<BR>
HURLEY~FRANKS & ASSOCIATES<BR>
1500 Walnut St STE 504 | Philadelphia, PA 19102<BR>
p: 215-988-9440 | f: 215-988-9441 | c: 267-971-4598<BR>
<a href="JLHurley@hfadesign.com">JLHurley@hfadesign.com</a> | <a href="http://www.hfadesign.com">http://www.hfadesign.com</a><BR>
Certified WDBE through PA UCP, City of Philadelphia OEO, and NJ UCP<BR>
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