method · all tools
Open Space Technology
Also known as: OST, Open Space
Self-organizing conference format for 5 to 2000 people around a question that matters: participants themselves post the sessions, form the agenda in the opening circle, and move between conversations by the "law of two feet". Four principles ("whoever comes is the right people…") and structured harvesting turn passion and responsibility into a working agenda no committee could have designed.
Prerequisites
- Sponsor genuinely willing to let the agenda emerge — Open Space with a pre-cooked outcome corrodes trust
- The facilitator's discipline is holding the emptiness: less intervention, not more, is the craft
Practical
- Time
- 240-1440 min + 60 landing
- Group
- 5–∞ · large-group, organization
- Settings
- in-person, online
- Materials
- Open wall for the agenda; breakout spaces; a genuinely open invitation question
- Mechanisms
- dialogic-encounter, systems-sensing
- Change scope
- state · repeatable
Instructions
- Where
- openspaceworld.org/wp2
- Availability
- Open online — published at the link, free to read
Source link checked 29 Aug 2026 — unchanged since we recorded it on 28 Aug 2026
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Harrison Owen (1985) — Large-group / whole-system methods
In this directory via IDG Phase 2 Research Report & Toolkit (2022) · HostingTransformation Methods ToolBox
One of the ten methods the Phase 2 Toolkit's "Methods for Scaffolding Collaboration" family names (entry by Thomas Jordan), included as the family's most self-organizing member. Jordan's point stands for all of them: these build COLLECTIVE capacities — the direction he argues the IDG framework must evolve toward.
status: checked · added 2026-08-25