Kicking In closed doors with Open Spaces

The Way of the Healer or Caretaker is to pay attention to what has heart and meaning. Paying attention opens us to the human resources of love, gratitude, acknowledgment, and validation. We express the way of the Healer through our attitudes and actions that maintain personal health and support the welfare of our environment.

- Angeles Arrien, The Four-Fold Way

2011 was the year that changed everything I know about conferences & community.

I have been a technology professional since 1999, but it wasn’t until 2006 that I started attending User Groups and conferences. In 2008, I started submitting talks and speaking at some of these in Colorado, where I lived at the time.

In the Spring of 2011, shortly after joining Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist, I attended the DevLink conference in Nashville, TN. It was like many other events and TechFests I’d attended over the last few years, with one twist: It had this quirky track called “Open Spaces,” led by Alan Stevens. Intrigued, I decided to check one out.

What I saw in that first session was something that flipped the traditional conference model on its head. Rather than a technical talk with a presenter standing and an audience eyes front, I saw a circle of chairs, a flip board and a few dozen people locked in an animated discussion on a topic. Instead of sitting back to listen to a speaker, everyone in the circle of chairs was a participant. Everyone was invited to share their knowledge, or probe the experts in the group for their insight.

Within the first five minutes, I saw that some of the richest conversations were and deepest learning was taking place in these sessions, and I ended up spending most of my time at the conference bouncing from one group of chairs to the next. I watched people jump in and out of sessions as they saw fit, and conversations flow to the interest of the people who took the time to sit down and participate.

I experienced, for the first time, what I would come to realize is one of the best ways to have meaningful conversations and bring teams, companies and communities together. Open spaces have become my favorite part of any conference, and something I highly recommend to anyone.

So what are open spaces, and how do they work?

What is Open Space Technology?

Open Space Technology, or OST, is a format for creating a self-organizing meeting or event. Harrison Owen created the format in 1985, after he observed that the most interesting part of the conferences he attended were the coffee breaks. So, he set out to create an entire conference of coffee breaks.

“Open spaces happen at a conference all the time. You see a group of people talking and walk up to them. Then you find out they are talking about something you are interested in and wish you would have been there from the start. That’s kind of what Open Spaces does for me.” — Derek Schwechel

Key to the OST format is the phrase “self-organizing.” The agenda, topics and speakers for an OST event are not dictated in advance and are the responsibility of every individual who chooses to attend.

OST has been used by governmental organizations like NASA, associations, and enterprises. Over the last 30 years, it has also caught fire in the technology world. OST is the driving format for Unconferences, BarCamps and many traditional conferences, like That Conference.

Principles of Open Space

While OST is notable more for its free-wheeling nature and what it doesn’t dictate than what it does, there are still a few key principles that drive the format. Note here the use of the word “principles” and not “rules.” Principles create a framework that give us the freedom to innovate and bend a format to fit a context, while remaining true to what makes the format so powerful in the first place. The principles of OST are:

• Whoever comes are the right people.
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
• When it starts is the right time.
• When it’s over, it’s over.

True to the self-organizing ethos of OST, these principles underscore the fact that attendees, topics and even plans should “flow like water” to adapt to what has “heart and meaning” to the passionate people participating in the event.

The Law of Two Feet

There is one law governing OST, and it’s an important one: the law of two feet. According to Harrison Owen:

“If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.”

— Harrison Owen

It’s a simple, yet powerful law, and it backs up the principles above with something of an edict that frees participants to flow between conversations in a way that maximizes their engagement, as well as the value they bring to a discussion. If you’re in a circle and you find your interest waning, get up, move to another. Within minutes, you’re likely to find yourself in the midst of another conversation that has captured your interest and passion.

The Marketplace and The Importance of Circles

An important organizing construct in OST is the circle. The circle is a powerful symbol in open spaces, and underscores that everyone attending the event has a voice, a place, and that there is no anointed expert or final authority convening over the group.

When a facilitator convenes the open space event, we “open the circle.” During this time, every participant gathers in a large circle and the “marketplace of ideas” is opened, a time in which attendees can suggest a topic that they want to discuss with the group or in a breakout circle. Anyone attending the open space can convene a session, and everyone is encouraged to do so if something stirs that feeling of “heart and meaning” in them.

During the bulk of the event, breakout sessions are held in circles, either in smaller circles for parallel sessions, or a single circle if the group is smaller.

Finally, at the end of the open space event, the group comes back together to “close the circle.” As with the rest of the open space, this is a collaborative event, and a time for each participant to share something they learned, a recap of a discussion they lead, or feedback about the event itself.

Heart & Meaning

There’s a phrase I’ve used a few times already in this post, and which you’ll find uttered around open space practitioner communities (like the OSList) from time to time: “heart & meaning.” I am convinced its borrowed from the works of Angeles Arrien, who speaks often about “paying attention to what has heart and meaning.” For us, for others, for our communities, the call to pay attention is a call to empathy, something that anyone who knows me will find I’m particularly passionate about.

This is the core of what makes an open space a powerful format for any conference, team, group or community. Everyone who chooses to take part in an open space — whether convening a session or not — has the power to inject their own heart and meaning into the event. Conversely, if we unshackle ourselves to share our own heart and meaning, while paying attention to the heart and meaning of others, we have an opportunity to have unforgettable interactions.

At their core, OST is about participation and collaboration. It’s about giving every participant a voice. A voice in the sessions convened; in the makeup and size of each session; in the flow of discussion in a session itself. Every person, from the convener to the attender injects the open space with their own “heart & meaning,” and the end result is a dynamic flow of ideas and information that cannot be predicted, engineered or even replicated from one event to the next.

So why does all this matter?

Voice.

OST matters because it invites members of a team, group and community to level-up from passive consumers to creators of their community, team event, or conference. Let’s underscore this by example, and look at how an open space differs from a traditional, speaker-led session.

Often, in a speaker session, the speaker drives 90%+ of the content. They prepare slides and demos. They have a thesis to their talk, and arguments or examples to support this thesis. Attendees consume the content from the speaker, though they can drive some small percentage of the content through questions asked of the speaker. While these sessions are quite valuable, they represent a passive form of learning on the part of the attendee.

“When I had my session on Impostor Syndrome, I was fully aware that people might get a lot more value out of actually discussing their experiences instead of or in addition to hearing my research and views on it. I’ve really enjoyed attending open spaces that discuss war stories or best practices, as they allow a lot of give and take during the time that’s available.”

- Ross Larson

In an open space, the content is 100% driven by the attendees. The convener may be an expert in a topic and is welcome to kick off the discussion with some thoughts, or frame the discussion around a topic, but every person in the circle influences the direction and tone of the conversation. As with a speaker session, learning takes place, but the expectation is that it is far more active, in nature.

The fact that open spaces provide a voice for every individual to express what has heart and meaning to them has a wonderful side-effect that I’ve observed many times: They are an amazing vehicle of creating and deepening community.

How Open Spaces create community

Open Spaces are powerful in how they form and bind communities together. I’ve seen this time and again over the last several years.

One of the most powerful examples of this, based on my experience, is how That Conference deploys OST. During our time together at Microsoft, Clark and I became quite fond of the open space format, and utilized it in 2011 when we added an OST track to the HTML5.tx conference in Austin, TX. Though a much smaller event than That Conference, it was quite well-received.

The following year, during the first That Conference, Clark and crew decided to take the same approach, and provide an open space portion of the conference that ran in-parallel with the curated portion of the conference. And the community wasted no time exploring and then embracing the format.

And over the last six years, open spaces have grown to become an active and vibrant marketplace of ideas. This year, we filled every open slot, and we saw the largest participation ever for the event. If I had to guess, I’d say — though I’m biased — over one-third of conference attendees convened or joined at least one open space session.

“I am an introvert and shy by nature… but after bumping into a few people and noticing we were all having the same conversations around Designers/Developers, I decided to host an open space. I was a bit nervous doing it… What if the conversation doesn’t go anywhere? What if there’s dead air? What if I say something everyone else thinks is stupid? But I went ahead and did it anyway… and for me, it was one of the most enjoyable parts of [That Conference].”

- Jeana Clark

How Open Spaces deepen community

Human beings, by our nature, tend to put up walls and close doors because these make us feel safe and unthreatened. Open spaces kick those doors in and invite us to feel safe through understanding that we’re all in this together.

One of the most powerful side-effects of the open space format is how they bleed beyond the traditional “conference talk” boundaries and foster deep connections. As whole people, we are not just programmers or designers or Ops people. We are parents and children and friends. We are introverts, extroverts and ambiverts. We are worriers. We battle impostor syndrome. We are looking for a change or job, a change or pace, or just a change of scenery.

Most of all, we want to know that we are not alone in any of our hopes, fears or feelings.

Human beings, by our nature, tend to put up walls and close doors because these make us feel safe and unthreatened. Open spaces kick those doors in and invite us to feel safe through understanding that we’re all in this together.

When open spaces work, people convene sessions that speak to these topics. When “heart and meaning” takes center-stage, communities come together to discuss the issues beyond frameworks or cloud vendors. Not to replace these, but to acknowledge that personal and professional development do not exist apart from one another in a vacuum. To acknowledge that being the best you that you can be in your career requires more than technical skill.

When open spaces work, you get honest conversations about Angular vs. React and sessions on impostor syndrome alongside them. You get earnest discussions about how to rediscover true political discourse in a divided climate and discussions about how to bring GirlsWhoCode events to more communities.

“I attended [That Conference] for the first time this year. Some of the best moments for me were in Open Spaces. I led a group and attended others. I wasn’t even sure if anyone would show up for the group I hosted, but was pleasantly surprised when joined by some like-minded people ready to share their insights and experiences.”

- Jane Lynch

When you give everyone in a community a voice, and you invite them to inject their heart and meaning into that community, you get something of greater import than any organizer or leader could inject into that community by fiat alone.

How you can get involved!

If you’ve read to this point, you might be thinking “ok, I’m sold. How do I get more open spaces in my life?”

The beauty of the format is that OST doesn’t require a conference or a formal event. Open spaces are perfect in local user groups, as well as for teams and organizations of all sizes. So if your first thought when hearing about OST is “my team would really benefit from this,” why not convene an open space at your next offsite or all-hands? Yes, you! You don’t need a certification to facilitate an open space. You just need some passion and basic understanding of how to organize the event. You can read Harrison Owen’s book for an in-depth overview, or email me at bsatrom@gmail.com with questions. I’d be happy to help any way I can.

Looking to attend a conference that feature open spaces? Chances are, if a conference is using OST, they’ll tell you! And if they’re not, ask them to consider adding the format, or volunteer to facilitate!

And, of course, if you want the best open space experience in the midst of one of the most vibrant tech communities around, join us at That Conference in August of 2018! I’ll be there, and would love to meet you and to learn about what has heart and meaning to you.

Thanks to Jeana Clark, Ross Larson, Jane Lynch & Derek Schwechel for sharing their open space experiences & Clark Sell, kpd for their feedback on this article.