Opening Space to Remember Harrison Owen

Picture at right of Harrison Owen on a boat, top left image of his white colored house in Camden Maine, lower left Harrison in a circle with fire and port of Camden. Picture via the OSList

Open Space Technology and the amazing people who stewarded it in the world were and are some of my most important teachers. One of them was the person who birthed OST, Harrison Owen, who passed away earlier this month into the largest Open Space ever. There will be an online OS to celebrate and remember Harrison. Here are the details, shared with encouragement to share widely.

Honoring Harrison Owen ~ A community comes together

“Camden by the Sea, Virtually and Globally”

April 8th is when it starts… 10AM Eastern USE Time/7am Pacific US Time

Place and Space: on ZOOM

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5694939869?pwd=YUY3Q3puekZ5THljNjFoU2dCTjNuQT09

Greetings!

It is time for us to gather and to honor Harrison Owen; to share stories and to express our love for him and each other.

Two weeks have gone by since he died on March 16th, 2024.

Such sadness and grief we have all felt and are still feeling.

The expressions of love and gratitude from around the world for Harrison have been overflowing; the stories of Open Space moving and inspirational. In planning this upcoming virtual gathering, Barry Owen carried the Open Space torch for his dad. Trusting we should leave the space open, not rushing too fast in setting a time and place for us all to meet. It’s how it is when we sit in a giant circle, with lots of space in the middle, writing and announcing our topics. It’s what people have done, head and heart, with such passion and emotion. 

Barry also reminded us in the planning: “to not work too hard”.  It’s what dad would have wanted, he said.

So, he, I and others, have waited until NOW, until the right time to invite everyone. Day by day, the pieces for this future reunion came together.

Why not create a Virtual Gathering that has the spirit of Camden by the Sea? Back then, Harrison would simply rent a space, tell people where and when, and that was it. The stories from those days live on, beautiful memories of Camden Maine, the place that Harrison called home to the very end.

We then called Lucas Cioffi at QiqoChat. Can you help us? We wanted to take a minimalist approach. As always, Lucas was quick to support our ideas.

Together we imagined the Law of Two Feet in action with multiple Zoom breakout areas for conversations and blank spaces to write notes and post pictures. Nothing more. No formal facilitation or hosting, just us, welcoming each other together, holding, and opening more and more space. Trusting this beautiful process of Open Space that is so much more.

Harrison’s presence would be felt, as our official facilitator. After all, he’s already opened the space for us and is holding it still while napping along the way.  

The date of the gathering came to us in a flash. Why not April 8th to get this started, on the day of the Solar Eclipse. There seemed to be such significance to that date, as if a cosmic inspiration, the 8th day of the 4th month of 2024. Harrison at age 88 being the pure expression of an infinity symbol. And indeed engaging 8 billion people in meaningful conversations is a timeless endeavor.

We also decided that there would only be a start time (10 AM, Eastern Time), no end time, again in the spirit of Open Space “when it’s over it’s over” which implies that life in Open Space will never be over.

The intent is that people from around the globe will flow in and out, on their own time zones for a day or two or more. As for every closing circle, it will be over when it’s over.

Everyone is invited: Harrison’s family and friends, our global Open Space community and so many other colleagues and friends from around the world.

Please help us spread the word ~ everywhere, anywhere and in any way.

With love,
Barry, Suzanne, Lucas, and many others 

This…

The implications of our online lives as been in my mind since I first sat in awe of my first online community, Electric Minds. Over the years I have seen great good, but even greater swaths of harm. I’ve never thought it was all about the technology. Nor have I experienced technology as some neutral platform upon which we act. Technology is NOT value neutral. And everything that is wrong cannot be blamed on technology. Today a piece by the brilliant danah boyd nailed it. (And read the whole thing. It is superb. It leaves us with the question, why aren’t we centering children in every aspect of our ecosystem. Tech is not the solution.)

view of Nancy's grandchildren from behind on a sunny spring day

The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.”

danah boyd

One more snippet…

By all means, go after big tech. Regulate advertising. Create data privacy laws. Hold tech accountable for its failure to be interoperable. But for the love of the next generation, don’t pretend that it’s going to help vulnerable youth. And when the problem is sociotechnical in nature, don’t expect corporations to be able to solve it.

danah boyd

I am a noodle

Here is one rescued from the draft archives when I was poking around today.

A great blog post by Keith Hamon exploring the idea of rhizomatic learning, but here is the quote that knocked my socks off when I drafted this post. A metaphor that stuck.

Think of a plate of spaghetti. Keith Hamon is one noodle strand intertwined and thoroughly embedded in the mass of noodles, and my sense of myself or your sense of me as a discrete entity totally depends upon where along the noodle strand you or I happen to be focusing and what other noodles intersect me there.

via Communications & Society: #change11 Defining the Rhizome.

Exploring Other Ways of Knowing

Last summer I was reading multiple books at the same time. (Well, you know, I don’t actually read them simultaneously!) Notably, two non fiction, which is not my common summer practice. Two standouts were Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Everybody Come Alive by Marcie Alvis Walker. Serendipity in action. The writing of these two amazing women both brought, and continue to bring, me a deep, embodied sense of other ways of knowing. The ways different than the ones I use in my life, mostly without awareness. These books helped me to begin to notice the limitations of my own views and stances. And the importance of querying myself to understand where I’m coming from as a stepping stone to being open to others’.

This week another piece of writing, this time from Bayo Akomolafe came across my screen and this sense, this idea of our separateness and togetherness, of what we do or do not identify with and how we presume power over it or not jumped out again. He was asked to provide an alternative definition of nature than the Oxford English Dictionary and he wrote:

So, I offered this:

‘A theoretical, economic, political, and theological designation from the Enlightenment era that attempts to name the material world of trees, ecologies, animals, and general features and products of earth as separate from humans and human society, largely in a bid to position humans as masters over material forces, independent and capable of transforming the world for their exclusive ends.’ 

It’s as far as I could go without waxing poetic about nature as a colonial trope for biopolitical interventions. What felt important to say was that ‘nature’ is a performative, speculative gesture, a ritual of relations that rehearses a dissociation from the world. A subjectivizing force. A lounge in the terminal of the radioactive Human.

Now to notice how I am “performing…”

What are you doing with Hybrid events?

goofy old picture of Nancy
Old picture to connect with the fact that I last wrote about hybrid meetings in 2013!

Hey friends, at least the seven of you who still read here – wink wink. I’m working on some writing about doing Liberating Structures online and one section which needs inspiration is a short section on hybrid gatherings. I last wrote about hybrids in 2013 so it has been a while. I’d love any of your favorite pointers. THANKS IN ADVANCE!

UPDATE: Please read the fab comments from my friends below. There is actual useful insight but it is in the comments!!!