Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Fwd: Mechanisms for Resolving Community Challenges

[Jenny Guy (jenstermeister]

Rob, I'm intrigued by your open space sessions.  Does it work to address
issues where there are a lot of hurt feelings, in this relatively
unstructured way?   We have been doing pretty well with including a lot of
process work in our meetings, but I think this might be a good addition.

-Jenny


On 10/24/07, Rob Sandelin <floriferous [at] msn.com > wrote:
>
> ...One of the things we have found useful
> is called open space.  We sometimes allot the last half hour of a meeting
> for member designed discussions on any topic they want to propose.  There
> are usually three or four topics, which members declare and then the group
> breaks into smaller groups for discussion, brainstorming and relating over
> the topics.  These open space sessions allow us time and space to deal
> with
> anything that comes up, and it's entirely open ended. If a topic is
> proposed
> that nobody is interested in, then when the groups break up, that topic
> goes
> unattended. People freely choose what topics to join, or just hang around
> socializing.  Open space is turning out to be a good seeding place for
> ideas
> which later turn into future meeting or other action items.
>
> Rob Sandelin
> Sharingwood Cohousing
> Snohomish Co, WA
>