What an online Open Space needs, and what happens to the harvest

For an online Open Space today you need standard Zoom and somewhere to put the marketplace. In 2021 that was different: back then it took a dedicated platform. Zoom has since acquired the feature that made the difference, and it works better than the workaround it used to require. What has not been solved is what happens to the harvest once somebody types it.

What the form requires technically

The Law of Mobility asks people to walk away when they stop learning or contributing. If they cannot do that themselves, a facilitator has to move them, and the form is gone. Everything that follows is about that single requirement.

What that cost in 2021

For XP Days Benelux in 2021 I co-facilitated a fully online conference for around a hundred participants on QiqoChat, a platform built around this method. It worked well.

How it worked is worth noting: in that version, a separate Zoom link had to be opened for each session room. The platform held the marketplace logic together and pointed participants to the right link. That solved the problem, and it was a detour to achieve something Zoom itself could not do at the time.

What QiqoChat looks like now I do not know; I have not used it since.

What changed since

Zoom has self-selection for breakout rooms, and has had for a good while. Participants see the list of rooms, choose for themselves, and move freely between them and back. That makes the detour unnecessary.

For me that means a dedicated platform for online Open Space is no longer needed. Standard Zoom is enough, with a Google Doc or a Miro or Mural board for the marketplace and the notes.

Four practical things determine whether it works:

• The host enables breakout rooms in the account settings, under the advanced meeting options.
• When creating the rooms, the host selects "Let participants choose room". Without that box ticked, assignment stays with the host.
• Host and participants need Zoom 5.3.0 or later. The host has to work from the desktop app, because rooms cannot be managed from a browser or the mobile app.
• And the pitfall: anyone joining through a browser cannot self-select. That person has to be moved manually, which removes the Law of Mobility for them. Put it in the invitation that people should use the app rather than a browser tab.

Plan for more rooms than you think you will need: that gives people room to move.

What I learned along the way facilitating online

I have also done this with Zoom breakout rooms, including for an online meetup on Sociocracy 3.0 in Belgium, where I opened the space.

The burning question matters even more online. Without a question that truly occupies people, attention drains faster than it does in a physical room, which means the intention behind the session has to be sharper than ever.

Create conditions, don't impose a script. Give people the freedom to pick their own room. Favor motivation over obligation, and keep a separate "lounge" or "hangout" room open where people can linger without an agenda.

People who are usually quieter speak up more in chat or in a breakout room. Side conversations run in the chat alongside whatever is happening out loud.

In the end it comes down to four things: a burning question that truly occupies people, being able to choose where you go, wanting to take part rather than merely having to, and feeling safe enough to speak. When those four are in place, it works, online or in person.

Anyone curious enough to test this can do it in fifteen minutes with a team. Ask one question, "what do we want to talk about," open three rooms, let people choose freely, and after ten minutes invoke the Law of Mobility so anyone can switch.

On paper, the session host holds the pen

In a physical Open Space, whoever proposed the session writes the notes. That is not a rule but a consequence of the setup: they have the sheet, they pin it up.

The result is an uneven harvest. One session gets three lines, another two full pages. Some sheets are barely legible. There are arrows, crossings-out, a drawing. The handwriting shows who wrote it, and the haste in the writing shows how the conversation went.

That unevenness is information. A sheet with three lines tells you something about that session.

Online, somebody else types

The moment it goes digital, the pen shifts. Usually to a designated note-taker, sometimes to whoever types fastest, occasionally still to the session host. That looks like an organisational detail and it determines what the harvest is.

The record becomes an observer's. Whoever proposed the session has a stake in the topic and writes down what they want to take from it. A note-taker writes down what was said. Those are different documents, and the second is more complete and less directed.

Typing happens during, writing happens after. On paper the host scribbles something once the conversation has finished, or in between. Digitally somebody types along while it runs. That person takes part less. In a session of eight people, one participant is effectively not participating.

Everything becomes equally legible. That sounds like a gain and it costs you the texture. Twenty identically formatted text blocks no longer tell you which session was packed and which fizzled out after ten minutes.

The harvest becomes editable. This is the biggest risk. A digital document can be tidied afterwards, summarised, poured into a template. That tidying is done by somebody who was not there, and they remove the rough edges that carried the meaning. Half a sentence that stops abruptly is sometimes the most honest thing a session produced.

What disappears entirely online

The wall. In a room the harvest hangs somewhere people walk past. During the break they read what happened in a session they missed, and that is half the value of an Open Space.

Online the harvest is a file you have to open. Anyone who does not open it misses everything outside their own sessions. That is not a technical problem but a design problem, and it is solved by putting reading time in the programme rather than trusting that people will do it later.

A Miro or Mural board comes closer to the wall than a text document here, because you take it in at a glance and the unevenness between sessions stays visible.

So this is what I settle beforehand

Who types, and why that choice. If the harvest is to belong to the participants, the session host types, even though that is slower. If you want completeness, you appoint a note-taker and accept that it becomes an observer's record.

That nothing gets tidied. Badly spelled, half-finished, contradictory notes stay as they are. Anyone who wants to make something of it does that in a separate document and leaves the original intact.

When reading happens. A block in the programme, during the day, with the harvest open to everyone. Not as homework.

What happens to the document afterwards. Who reads it, who decides, and by when. That agreement carries more weight in an online Open Space than in a physical one, because no wall stays behind to remind anyone.

Hybrid: the difficult middle ground

I would rather not run hybrid meetings. It went wrong most often when a cluster of people sat physically together around one shared screen in a room while everyone else joined individually online: that physical cluster started talking among themselves, and I lost my grip on the conversation as a remote facilitator.

Paying closer attention does not fix that. The setup itself has to change: every participant connects individually, including the people sharing a room, or the group agrees explicit rules that anyone sitting together still joins the conversation on their own.

When part of a group is in the room and the rest is online, a two-tier split appears. The physical group has side conversations the online group never hears. The online group starts to feel left out, and the energy divides between the two.

It can work, but it demands unusually good facilitation: an online buddy for every physical table, and constant attention paid to whoever is online. The technical setup has to run perfectly, which rarely happens. My own preference is to pick one format, physical or online, and treat hybrid as a last resort.

In 2020, online was an emergency fix. It is a legitimate option now. Online tends to work better for participants spread across countries or facing mobility limits. Less travel time then buys more time for the actual content, or for the carbon footprint. Physical stays the better choice for a first meeting, for deep team building, or for topics carrying real emotional weight. The skill is choosing what fits the question in front of you, not what fits the current hype.

What the proceedings show

The proceedings of Open Space on Open Space span thirty years by now and show how the community came to look at working online.

The first Virtual OSonOS ran in 2015: sixty participants on the QiqoChat platform, in a twenty-four-hour format with people joining from across the world. By 2024, an AI experiment was on the agenda in Istanbul.

The question is no longer whether online Open Space works. It is how to do it well.

Source note: based on the proceedings of Open Space on Open Space, specifically VOS15 (first virtual edition), WOS23 (questions on hybrid) and WOS24 (AI experiment). They are all available online at openspaceworld.org.

Where this comes from

XP Days Benelux 2021, around a hundred participants, fully online on QiqoChat. Alongside that, a series of online gatherings during the pandemic years in Zoom, with self-selection for the rooms.

What is above is what I took from that in the form of agreements made beforehand. It is not a theory about online collaboration; it is a list of things you are better off settling before the day starts.