Category: Speaking

As part of my holidays I spent three days at the OSonOS, which is the annual conference for Open Space practitioners. For those who don’t know Open Space Technology here’s an excellent intro. To me it is quite simply an incredibly efficient meeting form, which treats people as adults capable of making their own choices.

It was an excellent conference. I loved meeting people from all over the world, and I really enjoyed getting deeper into Open Space. And the venue was fantastic. It was held at Bramstrup a little south of Odense in a barn. It may sound weird, but the place was beautiful and worked perfectly for our needs. Meals were taken in the old cow stables and the food was equally excellent. If you’re planning some large meeting in Denmark, consider Bramstrup as your venue.

As always Open Space worked its magic, and the sessions we had were productive, constructive, interesting and lots of fun. You can see the entire report from the conference. I hosted these two sessions: Short OS meetings and Freedom and OS.

Lars points to a very funny piece about the Open Space session i hosted in april for Collaboraid.

I had no idea that I do “power hand gestures”, but I kinda like the sound of it.

The newly started network for free agents have asked me to speak at their first seminar on september 4th. I’ll be talking about happiness at work, and how free agents can get it.

Hey, I forgot:
* Seeing Collaboraid (started by my good friend Lars Pind) win the Reboot award for startup of the year
* Helping Lars brainstorm for his wedding speech over a beer

Collaboraid is a very worthy winner, and here’s a story that shows one of the reasons why. I’m glad to know that you can succeed and have fun working with openness and generosity, and I congratulate all the guys at Collaboraid. Share on!

Reboot6 is now over, and I’m totally beat from being the Open Space host. It’s the first time I’ve hosted this many people in Open Space, but it went very well (if I do say so my self).

Here’s what I enjoyed most about Reboot6:
* The excellent speakers
* Cory Doctorow’s armoured T-shirt – possibly the coolest T-shirt in existence
* Marc Canter singing
* Reboot posts totally dominating blogbot this weekend
* The first beer after the conference – man it tasted good
* The excellent mood and energy even 10 or 12 hours into the conference
* Thomas‘ hosting
* Microsoft showing up with 20 people, 3 X-boxes and a big screen TV and being cool abut being semi-slammed at the conference
* The barbecue
* The openness that went into both the planning and the execution of the conference
* The Honorary Reboot Award Winner, the guy who singe-handedly brought the internet to Denmark (or is that brought Denmark to the internet) in 1982. A quote from him: “I did say back then, that this thing might even become bigger than the fax”.

I warmed up for the Reboot conference tomorrow by watching this clip of Douglas Rushkoffs talk from Reboot4, from which stems the following quote: “If a new technology doesn’t help you meet people or get laid – why bother”.

Every year, open space practitioners meet to learn more about the open space method from each other. This meeting is of course held as an open space meeting – I mean, what else?

And this year, this “Open Space on Open Space” is in Denmark, on august 23-26. You can read about it here. I’ll definitely be there, trying to learn from and contribute to Open Space practice all over the world!