The Open Space Practices
An email on the OSLIST today prompted me to find the story of the Open Space event I did in Alaska with Judi Richardson and Michael Herman. The event was a gathering of 200 middle school students, teachers and counsellors and the theme was “Becoming a Peacemaker.” Over the months that followed Julie sent stories about Open Space blossoming all over Alaska and Michael collected and posted them at his site.
That was also the first time we offered the Open Space practice workshop together in a two day format. We had 60 people in that initial training, and in the next year Michael and I offered it together and separately in Canada, the USA, Ireland, India, Nepal, Australia and New Zealand.
Last week I was with 15 remarkable people near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island offering the most recent iteration of the workshop, a three day version that really builds on the practices of Open Space. We feel now we are truly moving into the realm of practice in a deeper way, teaching learning and writing about it.
So here’s a marker to remember where it all began.
Over the past few weeks I have been working hard in Victoria facilitating the Aboriginal engagement strategy for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement.The work unfolded in two stages, with the first stage being three focus groups on economic, physical and social issues. We used the ICA Focused Conversations methodology to deepen and inquire into the participants experience of their community. Objective data was recorded as mind maps which we then overlay with data harvested from the reflective, interpretive and decisional parts of the conversations.
Following the focus groups, we conducted a large 1.5 day community meeting to gather issues and challenges from the community itself. The first day was an Open Space meeting which brought 60 people together including a number of homeless and virtually homeless folks. This was followed on day two with a World Cafe which we called an “Action Cafe” aimed at discovering strategies for keeping this process alive within the larger development agreement process. We knew we had the right people in the room when at lunch an announcement was made that “a shopping cart was illegally parked!”
Following the conclusion of the cafe, we had fiddling and dancing from some Metis performers and Coast Salish and Kwagiulth drum songs from Victoria’s Unity Drummers.
It has been a rich experience working on this project. For more information, see what one of the community groups, the Inner City Aboriginal Society, wrote about our work. And for more photos, visit the Flickr page for “A Community at Work.”
I have no idea about these tunes, but I suspect they are Armenian or Georgian choral pieces.
At any rate, have a listen to this one, and if you speak Russian (Raffi?) let me know what it is I have stumbled upon.
UPDATE: In the comments, my Friend Raffi Aftandelian writes from Moscow:
I think this is Georgian. The music is from an Abkhaz site. The Abkhazians are another Caucasian ethnic group. Abkhazia used to be part of Georgia, now it’s in the neverneverland of not being part of Georgia and yet not quite recognized as a separate country.
Thanks Raffi.
Victoria, BC
My two favourite processes of the moment, and there are people all over the place looking at ways to combine them.
Today, Christine Whitney Sanchez sends the report from her latest effort, which used OST and World Cafe to work with up to 2000 people at the National Girls Scouts Convention in the USA. The proceedings are online.
Tomorrow I am about to do the same thing, beginning a two day conversation with the Aboriginal community of Victoria. Christine’s efforts are my inspiration tonight.
I was hanging out with my mates and fellows from the Art of Hosting yesterday here on Bowen Island. Any time I get to spend with these guys changes the way I see things.
Yesterday Toke Moeller was describing a game he has developed called Flowgame, which is a way of asking questions and hosting conversations to sustain flow on these questions. In passing he mentioned that in order to play, you have to have a real question, and he described a real question as a question where you have something at stake.
That’s a wicked definition if you think about it. It gets away from questions that are just academic, or that are leading questions, or closed questions and it invites questions which, by their very asking, change everything.
THAT is the practice of invitation.