Our group of 14 Community Organisers from around the UK converged to investigate how, within just 2 days of planning; could we stage a UK wide Meet Up for 200 plus people, in just 11 weeks’ time?
Almost all of the participants are fledgling Art of Hosting practitioners with less than 9 months experience, so as such; we had a collective understanding of the processes but a crushing timescale to contend with.
Our Talking Piece took charge, the humorous looking and handmade farcical face started the event with an uplifting and spontaneous waft of laughter, but the story behind the Talking Piece drew our group together, reconnecting them and seemingly created a group better than the sum of all of its individual parts.
The only plausible solution or practice to investigate our question had to be Open Space Technology.
Incredibly the answer to our question was actually hidden in plain sight; we discovered that by apportioning the work and tasks that we had only 11 weeks to complete into three groups of responsibility we had a methodology to make the meet up event possible
You may not be surprised to learn that our groups were Guardians of the Space, Masters of Ceremonies and Training.
This helped us make speedy progress and allowed the participant to really take shared ownership of the on-going work and shared responsibility.