Open source conference design
From Sustainable Community Action
"How often do we "meet," without in fact "meeting" one another, mind to mind and heart to heart?" Rosa Zubizarreta / Inspiring Quotes 7
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[edit] What would truly open source conference design look like?
[edit] Open reuse
First and foremost ways of designing conferences, or any real life face to face, group conversations that were not limited in their reuse in any way by copyright. So stuff is reusable, both the actual content of the conference and the design principles (of the gathering) are completely open for everyone to add to and improve. The design stuff - the design principles, and all experiential knowledge that people want to contribute from putting them into practice is share and share alike.
[edit] What features could OSCD include?
[edit] A focus on the face to face stuff
It can include working with technology but is also about, and has a primary focus on the real life, non-virtual, non-electronic, non-technology stuff. There's a huge amount of stuff on using the technology for collaboration but as far as I can see very little on designing social, real life, fact to face events - so that networks of such events could begin to replicate the sort of collaboration being achieved online.
[edit] Ideas, suggestions and guidelines
The proposal here is to develop a set of ideas, principles and suggestions, without any implication that anyone has to accept any sort of whole package approach. The design is about unlocking the potential of gatherings to collaborate, but people come together for a whole variety of reasons, some purely social and there is no implication that gatherings have to be collaborative or collaborative to any particular extent other than that which the gatherings themselves choose.
[edit] Open group work
Having said the above there is the opportunity to focus on how to design meetings or gatherings where there is at least some desire to 'get things done' or be 'more than a talk shop' or more than just a social gathering. Implicit in this is that it is not case of either face to face or online but how to design the face to face events when these are as a matter of course complemented by online collaboration.
[edit] Better names
There may be much better names than OSCD and Open group work. Your suggestions welcome!
[edit] What's wrong with traditional style conferences?
Plenty, mostly about missed opportunities to tap into the collective intelligence, the collective wisdom of the crowd.
Tradional style conferences are often about maintaing the status quo, business as usual. This can be reinforced through a variety of means including:
- layout of furniture, who sits where
- opportunites for the the 'Great and the good', to strut their same old stuff
- opportunties for parachuted in 'experts' to out talk valuable local knowledge
- excluding potential contributors through high prices
- excluding people through use of jargon
- choosing inaccessible venues
- Community conference facilities that end up being out of the price range of the communties they are nominally there to serve
- participants with no intention whatsoever of being productive, but actually preferring passivity. This may happen for a variety of reasons including habit, lack of confidence, disillusionment, and the perception, sometimes almost as a sort of social norm, that the real, if mostly unspoken, function of conferences is to provide temporary refuge from over stressful working lives.
[edit] OSCD in more detail
The space below is for setting out what might be the main headings, which can then link to separate articles for more detail
- OSCD ethos and guidelines: Open reuse, open involvement, inclusion
- Preparing for OSCD conferences: Open agenda
- During OSCD conferences: Sowing the seeds of future collaboration
- Post OSCD conference collaboration: Nurturing ongoing collaboration
[edit] OSCD in practice
Is it possible to devise or find opportunities to practice OSCD?
[edit] Related
 SCA
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 Wikipedia |
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[edit] Video
[edit] External links
- A-Z of Networks and Networking
- Participatory Conferences, The Gurteen Knowledge Website
- World Café hosting guides
[edit] References
- Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit George Siemens, Peter Tittenberger, and Terry Anderson
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