Open Space experiment

Our meetings have been getting larger over time, so what we had been doing where everyone takes turns speaking to the whole group was starting to get slow, cumbersome and unfoccussed.

So at our last meeting we ran an experiment where we used the Open Space method. It goes something like this

1. Everyone gets a few pieces of paper, and writes topics that they would like to discuss on them.
2. The paper goes into the middle, and they are clumped together by subject. Be fairly aggressive with the clumping, you don't want too many different things happening.
3. If there are many clumps and you have many people and lots of time, then it may be necessary to come up with a schedule for the conversations that will happen next. The schedule should optimally spread the available people across the available subjects in the available time.
4. Some subjects will not fit with any others, that's fine.
5. Then someone picks up each clump, and walks off to a clear part of the room. Anyone who wants to talk about what that person is holding follows them and conversations ensue. If a subject/clump doesn't get enough people gathered around it, never mind.
6. People are free to switch groups at any time. Some people will not find one group to stick with, and will bounce all over the place. This is fine and enhances cross-pollination of ideas.
7. When you're nearing the end, bring everyone together and have one person from each group share the highlights of what was discussed.

So in effect, you end up with several parallel conversations happening. The participants of every conversation have chosen to take part in it, so they are much more likely to actively participate and find it enjoyable.

In our case, we had enough people for 4 groups with about 5 people in each. We had enough room to have all 4 groups operating at once, so there was no need to have a schedule of conversations set up before hand.

It worked really well! An unusual amount of concrete plans for future actions (with dates and times set!) were agreed on, and (I am more sure than normal that) everyone left feeling like they got what they came for :-)