Open Spaces — what kind of sessions could I run?
As a proponent of Open Spaces/Unconferences, I often have a number of different ideas about what I could propose at an Open Space, I think about the ideas and chat to people about them. Having attended unconferences for many years, I also have the whole range of sessions I’ve been to as inspiration so I wanted to share a few thoughts.
You don’t have to be the expert
Not everyone is comfortable with proposing a session at an open space. Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard:
- “I haven’t prepared anything”
- “I’m not an expert”
- “I’m not sure my idea for a session would work”
- “What if people don’t turn up?”
At an Open Space event you don’t have to be the “expert” to propose a session, you can have a passing curiosity, have played with something for a little while, or even propose a session about what you’d like to learn. (Even at traditional conferences, many speakers propose sessions on a whim, they use the looming deadline of a talk to drive their own learning.)
Just a few ideas…
Some types of session need more preparation than others, but here are a few ideas:
Presentation
Let’s start traditional, you have some knowledge that you want to share. So, how much effort do you really need?
Traditionally, you could prepare a slide deck and rehearse the talk, learn how to fill an hour and maybe leave a bit of time for a few questions at the end. This can take hours or refinement to get “right”.
Alternatively, you could put some slides together quickly, roughly, that get the message across and just start talking without rehearsing. Allow your presentation to be open, allow people to ask questions, allow yourself to go off on a tangent, does it matter if you don’t cover everything if you’ve stopped to dig deeper into one specific area? You could accept “it ends when it ends” and go into far more depth. You may end up “mob learning” and googling for some answers, because you don’t have the be the expert.
Discussion
This is exactly what the title says, you have something you would like to have a discussion about, people will turn up and debate the topic you have chosen. A discussion probably takes less preparation than a presentation, you really just need the topic and some of your own ideas but there are a few thoughts to help you along:
- Set the scene at the start, spend a few minutes explaining what you want to talk about and why this has come up, background can help.
- Facilitate the discussion, so that all voices are heard.
- Choose an appropriate format for the discussion, so in a small group informality is fine but if a lot of people turn up maybe do a park bench, or a fishbowl.
- Get someone to be a scribe, having a record of the discussion that you can refer back to later is a great idea.
Coding session
You may want to do something technical, a Code Kata, a Mob Programming session, or just a presentation where you are live coding.
You should be clear about the aim of the session, so tell people what you are trying to learn or achieve.
For Code Katas, you should have read up on the code kata beforehand, maybe tried it out. If you want people to be pairing, working alone then its a good idea to remind people to bring laptops.
When Mob Programming on something other than a kata, you should know the code you want to look at, give people the background and the aims. Give some time to discuss the approach and then let people dive in.
“I want to learn about…”
If you are interested in something new, something that you haven’t tried, something that you are curious about, then propose a session and be open “I don’t know anything about [XXX] but I want to learn about it”.
One of a few things will happen:
- Someone who knows something about it will turn up and help guide your learning.
- Someone else who is interested, but knows nothing about it, will turn up and you can learn together, bounce ideas off each other.
- No one turns up… this can be hard to accept, but it’s OK, you can still learn about it how you normally would, google it, maybe turn it into a presentation for next time.
Video/Book Club
At Redgate, we are aiming to hold regular Open Spaces, which give us the time to run a regular book/video club.
Pick a book, work out how many chapters you need to read before the next Open Space and then propose the discussion as part of the marketplace.
Find some videos that you’d like to watch, propose that you watch them together in a room and then have a discussion about the video afterwards.
Educational Games
Can you take an idea, a principle, a thought and turn it into a game? Can you make the learning fun? Can you get people moving around or being creative?
At the last Open Space, I ran a session where we acted out sorting algorithms while bell ringing. People engaged with the activity, people had fun, the discussions were interesting and made me think about how humans order themselves by height, how we apply domain specific heuristics before falling back to “localised bubble-sort”.
You need to know what you are trying to do, what you want to achieve, how the game is going to work but it doesn’t have to be perfect, it is OK to inspect and adapt. The people attending the session can give valuable feedback and you can always run an improved version at the next Open Space.
There are many more…
At Redgate, we have 10% time, one afternoon each week we are given time and space to grow and learn. Attending the Open Space is part of that time for that week but there is almost nothing you should be able to do in 10% time that you could not propose as a session at the Open Space.
Don’t be afraid to propose something, whatever you do doesn’t have to be perfect. Focus on learning and collaboration, be open to new ideas, and have fun.
