Long-term followers will know that I'm a fan of Open Space Technology as a way of (self-)organising groups to get things done. It works (kind of) for a dozen people (like we had at @SteemCampUK) and scales up to the hundreds over several days. It's not rocket science - most of the "work" is helping people to keep it simple and not overcomplicate.
My friends at the theatre company Improbable ran a pilot Open Space using Zoom and a site called qiqochat which is basically a mechanism for firing up zoom sessions and helping people make notes about them - lots of things have breakout rooms, but they're usually organiser led - I would assign you to a group, send you there and summon you back - rather than participant-led - you get to decide which, if any, sessions you go to and you can pop in and out as you wish.
The one last week was organised for a theatre-making community. I called a session called "What did you learn in the first decade of the 21st Century that might save us in the third?" and my notes are below.
Session Title: What did you learn in the first decade of the 21st Century that might save us in the third?
Session Convener: Lloyd
Participant names: Lloyd; Dd; Margot
In these years I started blogging, podcasting and videoblogging; I first used Open Space Technology on a regular basis; I created a number of meetups in London for online people to meet offline; I learned to make my own media in a rough and ready, DIY way using only materials and equipment that I had to hand and created networked "audiences" for it.
I came into that decade experimenting with being able to make art and distribute it on the web and interact with the other people who found it. In doing so I learned that it was OK to make art and put it into the world without anyone else's permission or approval. In the process I found that there were lots of people who thought it was their job to hand out permission or approval, but that decade for me was about initially trying to please them and then pushing through to the point where I didn't care anymore and just did my work.
I think that this Facebook World has reimposed some of that gate-keeping on us (though I admit my complicity in that)
Now that everyone (or at least one definition of everyone) has better access to networked online conversations I'm interested in how we can experiment with new forms (like the one we're doing today) and not just get squeezed into established "meeting" or "phonecall" formats. I thought about my first podcasts in 2004/5 as like little voicemail messages that I was leaving for all my friends (and anyone else) on my blog. As a result, I both extended my network and enriched the connections between people I knew, not deliberately but more as an accidental by-product of us talking about the thing I'd made.
I wonder what relationships get built around these zoom interactions and how the conversations online can be talked about elsewhere. It's almost like it's a bit rude to talk about what happened in a zoom call - perhaps because people come to it for different reasons not expecting to be reported on. Perhaps this is part of the perennial problem we have with under-reporting of Open Space sessions.
I think for me this is all about swinging back from being mostly a consumer of media and networks and conversations towards being a creative participant, getting back to the edge of what technology can do. Today's been an exciting and stimulating experiment in this.
I'm quite excited about it. This is a part of my work that has been cut off for me during lockdown and was possibly going to take a long time to come back fully for many people. Watch this space. I'm going to do some experiments and then be canvassing for people who might be interested in HiveCamp/SteemCampUK using this method.
