Ajamah

The first weekend of January 2012, 30 Agile enthusiasts gathered at Agile Coach Camp Norway (ACCN). The participants had different background and experiences from Agile projects and arrived from many different countries; Even Japan was represented!

There was a reason it was called camp instead of conference. Unlike other Agile conferences I have been to, like XP and Smidig, almost the entire agenda for ACCN was reserved for the participants to fill themselves. This was done by so called open spaces. Open space is a fairly easy concept – once you have tried it. But if you are not familiar with it, it can seam a bit intimidating at first, especially if you’re used to going to conferences where you sit still listening to others the entire time.

Basically, a group of people with a common interest organize themselves into smaller groups to discus whatever topic they are interested in (there can also be games, presentations or whatever the group decides).

The open space sessions at ACCN 2012.

Dedicating most of the weekend to open spaces was hugely successful, being both fun and an efficient way of sharing knowledge, learning, stimulate creativity and coming up with new ideas together.

Based on our experience with open sessions at ACCN 2012, I would like to propose some suggestions for others who are considering or planning to organize an open space session – and it does not have to be Agile or technical:

1. Start with giving a brief introduction of what open space is. Remind the participants of The law of two feet: if you feel that you are not contributing or interested, walk to another session (unless you are the one hosting the session, of course).
2. Before the gathering, inform the participants there will be an open space session and ask them to think of a topic in advance that they would like to discuss.
3. Provide enough rooms. We found that there would have been nice to have a couple of extra rooms for those times an open space was not naturally finished on time. That way, instead of breaking up an ongoing discussion, the next group could have use another room. (However, then there probably should be a way of signaling that the new open space has moved to another location.)
4. If the participant are unfamiliar with the locations, give a brief tour of the rooms to show people where the different sessions will be held. We did not do this, but with more rooms that would have been useful.
5. Provide enough facilities, like flip-boards for each team, tape to hang the notes and drawings on the wall for all to see, enough post-its and markers, preferably in different colors.
6. Take pictures of the posters and publish them after the session. This will be useful as notes for both the participants and for sharing the outcome with those who didn’t get to attend.
7. Finally, run a retrospective to get feedback on what was working and what could have been done differently, and share those experiences on the web with the rest of the world.

As a side note, I would also like to recommend the organizers to take advantage of Twitter. Come up with a hashtag and present it for the participants in plenum as to agree on using one single version. This way, the participants may tweet during the sessions and reach out to other interests outside the conference.

How many open space sessions you want, how long you want them to last and how many you want to run in parallel might depend on the size of the group, the topic, the rest of the program and other factors. However, open spaces tend to scale pretty good, and can even be organized with hundreds of participants. We discovered that three sessions in parallel worked pretty good, but if you have more than 30 participants, you might want more sessions as each group should not be too large. Roughly one hour each sessions might seem like a relatively long time, but worked well in this context.

Do you have any experiences, recommendations, views or comments on how to host a successful open space session?