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 Two Feet 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 facilitated a fully online Open Space 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 Two Feet for them. Put it in the invitation that people should use the app rather than a browser tab.
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.
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.