Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family. I was here for the conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society, where I participated on a panel on innovative dialogue methods (and yes I noted the irony in my remarks) and later led a World Cafe where I presented some of the sense-making processes I’ve been working on. I was here on the recommendation of Junita Brown who has been in some good conversations with evaluators around the use of the World Cafe for evaluation purposes. Originally Amy Lenzo and I were scheduled …
The four of us on the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team are all global stewards of the international Art of Hosting community of practice. We have all attended or hosted at least two of the global stewards gatherings and we have been deeply involved in the creation and growth of the Art of Hosting community over the past decade. As such, the Art of Hosting is our lineage. It’s where we met. It’s the most important community of practice in our lives and it continues to shape our work. And Beyond the Basics is very much rooted in …
I get asked this question a lot. It makes me laugh because truthfully there is very little “technology” to an Open Space Technology meeting. You just need some paper and markers and some tape and away you go. In fact you don’t even need that. So why is it called “Technology?” Well, I have known the story for a long time, but today I goaded my old friend Harrison Owen to tell it again, and he did, beautifully, on the OSLIST: It was 1989 in Bombay (now Mumbai). My friend and colleague, one V.S. Mahesh, a senior member of the …