Virtual Open Space Unconference Lessons Learned

One day a student asked, “What is the most difficult part of painting?” The master answered, “The part of the paper where nothing is painted is the most difficult.” — Painting Zen

In ancient times, our ancestors shared stories and oral traditions around the fire. I recently facilitated a virtual Open Space Unconference with a group of friends working in technology and thought I should share my lessons learned. I wanted to foster a community that was built on some of the principles of open space: intellectually honest conversations, transparency, and psychological safety. While I learned from our conversations from a content perspective, I’ll be covering tips from a logistics perspective.

1. Schedule a dry run with a test audience. Ensure that Zoom breakout rooms can be created, renamed, that all users can edit the Marketplace Bulletin Board (FunRetro.io is a good Kanban board) that you created and run through a facilitator’s guide. Ensure the facilitator’s guide has a clear set of instructions and that audience members have time to ask questions before you go into breakout rooms to minimize confusion.
2. A co-convener or co-conspirator that can take on part of the facilitation, monitor breakout rooms, and the main room for assistance.
3. Guide participants on how breakout rooms work. They’ll want to know the ins and outs of fluttering from breakout room to breakout room and weaving from the main room the breakout room. The other breakout room didn’t have any co-conveners, so they were confused as to where to go at the bottom of the hour, so they ended up leaving.
4. To solve the above issue, schedule at least two rounds of two concurrent sessions to provide participants the freedom to move around.
5. If there aren’t enough participants for the entire Open Space, have a Plan B ready. The participants can vote, and the two topics prioritized with the most votes will be what’s discussed in the remaining time. If the group is too small, the format may need to be switched to Lean Coffee.
6. Time management is especially important. This means that the directions must be concise, on point and the co-conveners should be keeping track of time. After participants introduce themselves, they should pass it on to another participant so that the intros go smoothly.
7. Conduct a retrospective or Happiness Door to learn how you can improve your Open Space event.
8. Experiment and learn through inspect and adapt cycles.
9. Open Space should be at least two hours to spark rich, fulfilling, and deep conversations.
10. Dr. Alison Walling, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University said, “One additional thought is to include a priming activity at the beginning to foster a learner mindset. Activities that prompt the positive emotional attractors in the brain (Richard Boyatzis teaches this) such as an appreciative inquiry question help open up the pathways for learning, creativity and collaboration.”
11. Hua Szu Yang, former Product Lead at CBRE said, “…What we did well — Get comfortable making calls in real time to discard topics, help new topics gain mindshare, and merge related topics into their most productive form. Flexibility helped us to have fruitful conversation.”
12. Oluf Nissen, former Agile Coach at Adobe said, “Going with the flow when things went a bit sideways on the tech.”
13. Birgit Nieschalk said, “Use only a minimum no. of tools and choose simplicity over sophistication. I usually prefer Zoom + Google docs as most people are familiar with the usage. Every new tool you use needs time for explanation (and takes time away from the open space) and/or you lose participants that leave frustrated.”

I’d like to run another Open Space event again with other co-conveners and co-conspirators. If you’re interested, please let me know.