A recent post on Twitter (sorry, long lost) about a session on Open Space Technology meetings at WikiSym caught my attention, mostly because of the name. After attending BarCamp Boston this year at MIT, I was intrigued with the format and remember thinking it would be great for company-wide or team meetings. It seemed like "Open space meetings" might be a similar idea, so I checked it out.

BarCamp is "an international network of user generated conferences" (Wikipedia) with a particular topical focus. BarCamp Boston was focused on web technology, but the format has been used for an array of different conference topics. If you have the opportunity to attend a BarCamp on any topic that is of interest to you, you should. It's an eye-opening education in decentralized organization.

The schedule at BarCamp Boston 4

 Trying to figure out what Open Space Technology is, from a practical standpoint, can be an exercise in frustration. After reading several pages on the OST web site and corresponding wiki, I was convinced that OST was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but couldn't have described what happens at an OST meeting in any detail. Even the Wikipedia article on OST is filled with lofty benefits and outcomes and lacks a step-by-step description of what it is. Finally, I went to Wikipedia's entry on BarCamp and read that "FooCamps and BarCamps are based on simplified variations of Open Space Technology". I thought so!

Not having been to an OST meeting, I can only describe the model as implemented at BarCamp. For the impatient, here's the jist:

• Everybody meets in a big open area. OST talks about sitting in concentric circles, but at BarCamp is was just a big milling-about area. I don't see how sitting in a circle would improve the process.
• There are big post-it cards and markers at a table. Any one with something they want to talk about (as a presenter or as a member of a discussion panel) writes a brief topic on a card and puts it into a staging area - a wall with a bunch of cards stuck up on it.
• People mill about and put check marks on the topic cards in the staging area that they're interested in attending. This is genius, as it encourages people to propose ideas and find out if anyone else is interested before committing to anything.
• People who put cards up gauge the group's interest in their topic based on comparative number of checks. There's no minimum, but it becomes clear quickly which topics are hot and which are not. Duplicates can be combined during this process.
• After a specified time, would-be presenters/panelists can choose to move their cards to a grid on a different wall, with columns for each room and rows for each time slot. At BarCamp Boston they used a chalk board for this. There's a set amount of time for this process before the first session(s) begin. Full day or multi-day sessions break this process up into half-days. Sessions before lunch are scheduled in the morning. At lunch time, the afternoon schedule opens up. This is nice as a topic that didn't get much attention in the morning can hang around, and might show more interest later in the day.
• Sessions are either group discussions or a more formal presentation or demo. At BarCamp, most were somewhere between the two. It's a very casual atmosphere with a highly interactive audience compared to traditional conferences.

BarCamps are conferences, and this format couldn't have worked better. But OST is interesting to me in that it applies a similar concept to meetings. Thinking back to the few company-wide meetings I've attended (with 15-150 people attending), they've been dry, boring, and not very productive.

Using OST or a BarCamp-style could really energize a company meeting. Some changes would be needed, of course. I can think of a few (and some of these are mentioned in the OST ramblings):

• You'd have to set a topic or goal for the meeting. It could be super general, like "What should we focus on?" or more specific like, "How can we increase sales in Arizona?"
• You'd have to manage the output of each session. OST puts this on the session organizer, which seems like a bad idea. I'd assign a scribe, somebody who probably won't be doing a ton of active participation, to sit in the back and enter session output into a wiki site.
• When finished, a small team would take the wiki notes from all the sessions and clean it up for mass consumption.

And voila, you have what I think would be an incredibly productive meeting. I'd love to hear from folks who've used a meeting format like this at their company or organization.