Hey everyone,
For those of you going to TLCC this year in San Diego, I wanted to give a quick plug for the Open Space sessions which will be running. I went to the conference last year and didn’t quite realise what Open Space was until I got there, so I thought I’d try to give you all some advance warning!
Essentially, Open Space is a self-organising method of facilitating group discussions. So unlike all other Tessitura sessions, where the topics were decided by the planning committee months in advance, none of the topics for Open Space will be decided until the first meeting (the Opening Circle, as they call it).
And this is where it gets exciting: you’re going to be at a conference with around 2,000 other arts professionals. Is there any topic that you would like to discuss with them? If there is, BRING IT TO OPEN SPACE. You never know who else might want to talk about it. Under the rules of Open Space, participants are free to move around and try as many different conversations as they want, so you can pick up a lot of useful information in a very short period of time.
Here’s a short two-minute video which explains the whole thing:
https://tessituranetwork.box.com/s/gpcnuyrttcsgs6n6pc3hw9crpn7qp68o
As a personal example, last year, I wanted to discuss how to combat the aging audience in classical music, threw the topic into the Open Space circle, and a day later, I was having a great discussion with a dozen other enthusiastic people about the topic.
So if this sounds exciting, you only need to do two things: