by Harrison Owen

Open Space Technology was created in the mid-1980s by organizational consultant Harrison Owen when he discovered that people attending his conferences loved the coffee breaks better than the formal presentations and plenary sessions. Combining that insight with his experience of life in an African village, Owen created a totally new form of conferencing.

His book “Open Space Technology” is a guide book for those who wish to host open space conferences. In simple language and with clear steps each part of this self-organising process is described and made accessible to the reader. I suppose it helps having participated in one such event before. I myself had been a participant of one open space seminar, after which upon reading his book, I myself hosted first one and since many more in different contexts.

In Open Space meetings, events and organizations, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy, group, organization or community that all stakeholders can support and work together to create?

Open Space conferences therefore have no keynote speakers, no pre-announced schedules of workshops, no panel discussions, no organizational booths. Instead, sitting in a large circle, participants learn in the first hour how they are going to create their own conference. Almost before they realize it, they become each other's teachers and leaders.

Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion or activity, writes it down on a large sheet of paper in big letters and then stands up and announces it to the group. After selecting one of the many pre-established times and places, they post their proposed workshop on a wall. When everyone who wants to has announced and posted their initial offerings, it is time for what Owen calls "the village marketplace": Participants mill around the wall, putting together their personal schedules for the remainder of the conference. The first meetings begin immediately.

Open Space is chaotic, productive and fun. No one is in control. A whirlwind of activity is guided from within by a handful of simple Open Space principles.

For more details on the principles and methodology of Open Space Technology, and how they can apply to the Pioneers of Change community, see the Community section.

Open Space conferences are particularly effective when a large, complex operation needs to be thoroughly reconceptualized and reorganized -When the task is just too big and complicated to be sorted out "from the top." On the assumption that such a system contains within it the seeds of everything that needs to happen with it, Open Space provides it with an opportunity to self-organize into its new configuration. For this to work, however, the system's leaders must let go of control so that true self-organization can take place.

It is a book to read if you are about to host or organise an event of any kind, but also a good read simply for those of you interested in broadening your perspectives on how new ways of organising ourselves in less mechanistic and controlling ways are slowly emerging.

• Reviewed by Marianne Knuth (from reading the book, and additionally inspired by resources on the Open Space Technology Site)

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