Where I have facilitated Open Space
Nine years of Open Space, from fifty participants to two hundred, in person and online. Each entry below states what my role was.
Engagements
Scrum Event
Open Space facilitation for the largest agile event in the Netherlands, together with the Agile Scrum Group team. The day runs as an unconference: after the keynote, two hundred Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Developers and Agile Coaches set the agenda themselves across three rounds of breakout sessions. Programme and speakers
VERA — Community Day
VERA is the e-government support centre for the province of Flemish Brabant, connecting local authorities around IT policy and digitalisation. At its Community Day, VERA brought together local councils, social services, police zones and inter-municipal bodies. I facilitated the interactive part, where participants discussed ethical digitalisation, information management and data-driven working in small groups. The audience reached well beyond IT: policy officers, communications, civil registry, and heads of finance and organisational control. VERA's write-up
Conferences I helped organise
At these events I was co-organiser and facilitator. I helped build the form end to end: the invitation, the setup, the marketplace and the day itself. There was no invoice, because you do not invoice an event you are helping to create.
Liberating Structures Global Gathering
Two days entirely in Open Space format for an international facilitation community. Sixty practitioners from several countries built the agenda themselves. This is the hardest audience there is: people who know what you are doing and why, and who could do it themselves.
LeSS conference
Co-organiser of the conference; the Open Space I set up with two others. Open Space as a standalone element within a classic conference programme. The board was full within ten minutes.
XP Days Benelux
Co-organiser and facilitator of a fully online Open Space on QiqoChat, the platform built for this form. This was the year when online was not a choice but a necessity. QiqoChat reproduces the logic of the marketplace: participants see which sessions exist and move between them on their own, without a facilitator having to shuffle anyone around.
LeanCamp
Co-organiser and facilitator. A Lean Startup-minded audience: experiment fast, learn from the market.
Within transformation programmes
As a consultant I used Open Space with clients, inside ongoing programmes. Mainly in banking and the public sector, within guilds, tribes and communities of practice. Groups of up to fifty participants.
In one digital transformation I ran the Open Space repeatedly, across 2020 and 2021. Repetition changes what the form produces: what was a concern in one session can be an initiative already under way in the next.
What these sessions mostly produced was exchange. Concerns that would otherwise have stayed in the corridors, and ideas nobody had written down yet. Sometimes concrete improvement initiatives came out of it. That is a more honest answer than the promise you often read, and it is why repetition matters.
Also involved
I trained in Steve Holyer's Open Space Leadership Workshop, and assisted him at the Global Scrum Gathering in Lisbon in 2022. Both are described under about me.