2009 17th WOSonOS
OPEN SPACE REPORT FORM
Topic Name Open Space’s International Web Portal – Presence, Access, Co-Creation
Topic Number 1e
Convenor Artur Silva (Portugal) and Lisa Heft (USA)
Participants (including Bumble Bees) Mark Pixley, Gail West, Shu-Fang
Insights, Questions Raised, Possible Actions, Recommendations, etc:
There is so much more to converse about and we look forward to having these sorts of conversations in the circle – with everyone on the OSLIST.
We talked about how many people seem to be conversing – both on the OSLIST and to each other – about how they would like to have a collectively-held World Open Space website that is easier for anyone at all to add pages, notes, images, RSS feeds, links, photos, videos, chat, creation of groups – all those things that are possible on some current social networking sites. In essence, a collectively-co-created and growing breathing site which does *not* replace the amazing self-organized OSLIST but adds an additional community meeting space / resource-sharing space which beautifully reflects Open Space itself.
Artur has been looking in the ‘ NING ‘ – a platform (am I using the right word ?) which can be designed easily for these multiple rich uses and which people can easily join to visit conversation threads, access resources, create regional (for example) groups, and so many things.
A really great example of a well designed NING site is the one for the The World Cafe Community.
Rich beautiful design which brings you in to the texture of community, elements you can use / create / access, and some lovely welcoming by several World Cafe facilitators – including anyone who wishes to do this role of invitation, welcoming, holding space for the online community.
And as people see a need, a passion, an interest – they jump onto that site and add something to the creation. It is very exciting to see new groups opening up every day – one person in South Africa (then you come back and there are two, and growing !), a Russian group (and the Russian characters show well graphically), and more and more. Very self-organizing, very accessible even for people who may not do technical stuff regularly.
Mark Pixley shares that NING is not accessible to people from China – he is creating www.ost-Asia.org/drupal/ on the ‘drupal’ platform – which includes elements of blogging, forums, rss feeds and more – similar to NING it seems. He likes it because it is an open source tool. He feels it is a lot like Wordpress, with greater functionality, however there is a steeper ‘learning curve’.
We all agreed that the values system of a co-created, self-organizing space reflects the values of Open Space.
Shu-Fang shared the NING is a great platform especially for communities (for example ours). There have been NING sites for social workers sharing resources and connection for disaster response (post-typhoon), for example. She thinks NING is a great idea for a collectively-held co-created self-organizing Open Space worldwide portal.
Artur mentions it would be great to have greater access into our tools and community, and also greater presence from all the Open Space Institutes around the world (as they wish – what we think he means may be... broaden out this whole rich amount of resources and tools and conversation with an expanded online portal – so more people who are not ‘into’ OS can find us, access tools and so on.
Everybody mentioned that it is very important to have everything – including if there is a membership element – completely free / zero cost to all participants. Access, open-ness, co-creation, anybody adding something, reflection of Open Space itself – were very important to everyone in this live conversation and those people who have been sharing their thoughts with us.
Lisa – not very into technical stuff – finds that the World Cafe NING site is very easy to use, shows community in a lovely very ‘present’ way, and she loves how it grows just like a living organism. She is not one of those people who goes onto the web to have conversations but is more one of those people who responds better to things / conversations coming directly to her in-box. She has observed there seem to be those two cultures of people – some who go onto the web / online to interact with community / sites that way, and some who respond better to ‘push’ technology which sends things (not just ‘you have a message’ – but the real, complete message) to / through her in-box.
We look forward to hearing your ideas, everyone, as well and to this conversation on the OSLIST.
