I spent the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth of September at Hotel Westcord in Eindhoven, in the middle of the international Open Space community. Two days on, I am still working through what I saw there.
What WOSonOS is
WOSonOS stands for World Open Space on Open Space. The community has met every year since 1994, always somewhere else in the world, always with the same format: Open Space about Open Space. This year it was Eindhoven; last year Istanbul, next year Kenya, the first time on the African continent. The theme was “A continuation of inclusive space.” There was no marketing pitch and no vendor booth. People came together because they wanted to learn from each other how to make room for a real conversation.
Thirty years of history in one room
What struck me first was the mix of people. Some facilitators have been running Open Space for twenty or twenty-five years; a few were already there when Harrison Owen developed the format, and have since done it in war zones, in corporate boardrooms, in villages in Africa. They still show up, because they are still discovering something. Others had come from the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, Canada and the United States, some of them flying across the world for this every single year, drawn less by the event’s reputation than by how real it feels once you are in the room. And then there were newcomers, unsure whether they were doing it “right,” prefacing their questions with an apology for how stupid they assumed the question was.
What stood out was the absence of hierarchy. The person with thirty years of experience and the person with one sat at the same table. The Law of Two Feet held here too: if a conversation stops serving you, you move, even when the person you are leaving is the biggest name in the room.
My own session: when does an Open Space breakout need extra facilitation
I brought a session of my own, on a question I keep wrestling with: how far can Open Space be combined with other facilitation techniques, and when does that actually become necessary? My own starting point is clear: Open Space, with the four principles and the right conditions, is enough on its own for self-organization. The more structure you add, the more freedom and autonomy you take away from the people in the room.
But practice pushes back. The breakout conversations inside an Open Space are often wide open, and the self-regulating principles are not always enough to carry that. It would be wrong for a facilitator to impose techniques on a group at that point, that reaches into the concept itself. What can work is offering rather than imposing: having facilitators available in the room that a group can call on by its own choice, for a check-in, a round, “1-2-4-All” or another Liberating Structure, a visualization or drawing technique, or simply someone to take notes. On the group’s initiative, never the facilitator’s.
People who have been running Open Space since the 1990s leaned in rather than dismissing it. Nobody said “you’re new, you don’t get it.” What I heard instead was “that’s interesting, how would that even work?” We talked through the timing (offering it can work, but never force it), the choice (let the group decide for itself whether to use it), and a risk I recognized myself: this kind of support can just as easily impose the structure Open Space is built to release.
The best moment came from a facilitator who has been doing this since 1998, twenty-eight years. That person told me: “I’m glad you’re asking this. I still struggle with when to reach for which tool myself. There’s no right answer, but the conversation helps.” That is the atmosphere at WOSonOS: nobody claims to have the truth, everybody says they are still learning, even after twenty-eight years.
My own doubt sits in that same tension. I believe strongly that Open Space is enough by itself, and yet in practice I see sessions that would clearly run better with a bit of extra support. When is offering without imposing truly enough, and when is it just structure in disguise? That question came home with me, not only other people’s answers.
No watered-down version
The commercial world is full of “barcamp” or “unconference,” which usually means the principles get loosened wherever convenient. That does not work at WOSonOS. The community feels the difference between someone faithfully following the principles and someone hollowing them out. The four principles are taken at face value there: whoever comes are the right people, even when it is eight instead of eighty; whatever happens is the only thing that could have, even when it is not what you expected; whenever it starts is the right time, even when it opens in silence; when it is over, it is over, even when something “important” never got discussed. And the Law of Two Feet gets explained the way it was meant: if you are not learning or contributing, use your two feet and go somewhere else. No exception. That is the authenticity that has kept this community going for thirty years.
It is never finished
You would expect that after thirty years the principles are settled and the method is done evolving. WOSonOS shows the opposite. New contexts came up: how Open Space works in a war zone, with young people, in a virtual room. New questions came up too: how to combine it with other methods, how to handle diversity, how to facilitate when you are part of the conflict yourself. None of those questions closed; they stayed open, for whoever wants to keep working on them. And a newer generation of participants asked questions the old guard had stopped thinking to ask. The community keeps questioning itself. That, I think, is where its strength comes from.
More than colleagues
These are not colleagues who see each other once a year at a conference. These are people who share thirty years of history: they help each other, work together on projects, invite each other to events in their own countries. The WhatsApp group started for this event will probably stay active, less for business networking, mostly for keeping the connection alive.
Who WOSonOS is for
You might think this is for experts, not for you. But WOSonOS is exactly for people who want to learn, whatever their experience; for people who doubt, because that is what it is about; for people with questions, not people with all the answers; for people who take the principles seriously, not people looking to “just try it out.” Some participants have been coming for twenty years, and they still show up, because they are still discovering something.
Two days on
The conversations are still with me: the session on Liberating Structures and Open Space, the question from that facilitator after twenty-eight years, the silences that clearly meant something. It confirms what I already suspected: Open Space is not a tool you use. It is a way of looking at how people work together. And that way of looking keeps developing, even after thirty years.
If you want to know more: this year’s site is wosonos26.com, and more background is at openspaceworld.org. Or ask me directly. I am still very much learning this myself.
I facilitate Open Space and experiment with combinations such as Liberating Structures. Attended WOSonOS 2026 Eindhoven.
“The space is only as powerful as we can open our inner space” — a theme that came alive again at WOSonOS 2026.