Where I have facilitated Open Space
Nine years of Open Space, from twenty participants to two hundred, in person and online. Each entry below states what my role was.
At a glance
Every gathering, most recent first, with numbers and my role. Feel free to share this link: openspace-facilitation.eu/en/cases/#at-a-glance.
| Gathering | Participants | Format | My role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberating Structures Global Gathering, Eindhoven, 11–12 June 2026 | ~20 | in person, 2 days | co-organiser and facilitator |
| LeSS conference, Amsterdam, 9–10 October 2025 | ~100 | in person, English, 1 day | co-organiser and facilitator |
| Liberating Structures Global Gathering, Brussels, 19–20 June 2025 | ~60 | in person, English, 2 days | co-organiser and facilitator |
| VERA Community Day, Halle, 5 December 2024 | ~60 to 70 | in person, Open Space within a day programme | facilitator |
| International agency, 2024 | ~20 | in person, English, 2 days, with Liberating Structures | facilitator |
| Global Scrum Gathering, Lisbon, 17–19 October 2022 | ~150 | in person, English | assistant to the lead facilitator |
| XP Days Benelux 2021, 25 November 2021 | ~100 | online (QiqoChat) | co-organiser and co-facilitator |
| Lean Startup Summit, Amsterdam, 20–21 March 2018 | ~200 in the Open Space (350 to 400 attending) | in person, 2 days | co-facilitator of specific sessions |
| LeanCamp, Brussels, 2017 | ~50 | in person, 1 day | organiser and facilitator |
Engagements for organisations
For public bodies, companies and organisations, with my role in each.
International agency
A two-day programme combining Open Space with Liberating Structures: partly training, partly hands-on practice. I facilitated it together with a colleague. I do not name the agency.
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
“A big step outside our comfort zone, but a bull’s-eye. This free-form method produced many valuable insights to take further.”VERA, in their review of the Community Day (translated from Dutch)
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, around a hundred and fifty Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Developers and Agile Coaches set the agenda themselves across three rounds of breakout sessions. Programme and speakers
Lean Startup Summit
Co-facilitator of specific sessions within the summit's Open Space. The Open Space as a standalone programme element alongside the classic talks and workshops.
In the practitioner community
Open Spaces and unconferences by and for practitioners, which I co-organised or facilitated.
LeSS conference
Co-organiser of the conference. I set up the Open Space together with fellow organisers, opened the space and set up the marketplace board. Open Space as a standalone element within a classic conference programme. The board was full within ten minutes.
XP Days Benelux 2021
Together with a group of organisers, I organised and facilitated 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.
Liberating Structures Global Gathering
Co-organiser and facilitator of two editions, each two days entirely in Open Space format, for an international facilitation community. In Brussels 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.
“The Liberating Structures Global Gathering at BE-HERE was incredibly well-organized. The Open Space unconference format brought diverse perspectives that enriched everyone’s learning experience. The participant-driven agenda was perfect for this community.”A participant on the Liberating Structures Global Gathering, Brussels 2025, organised by Re-Evented VZW
LeanCamp
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 in Brussels 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 an Open Space Leadership Workshop, and assisted the facilitator at the Global Scrum Gathering in Lisbon (17–19 October 2022), with around 150 participants. Online, I opened the space at an Open Space of a Belgian Sociocracy 3.0 meetup. The first two are described under about me.