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"How often do we "meet," without in fact "meeting" one another, mind to mind and heart to heart?" Rosa Zubizarreta / Inspiring Quotes 7

Southbank1 — South Bank, nr. St. Pauls, London
Photo credit: Philralph
Added by Philralph

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.

What features could OSCD include? Edit

A focus on the face to face stuff Edit

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.

Ideas, suggestions and guidelines Edit

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.

Open group work Edit

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.

Better names Edit

There may be much better names than OSCD and Open group work. Your suggestions welcome!

What's wrong with traditional style conferences? Edit

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.