Open Space, an agile way of meeting

June 9, 2009 by Mendelt Siebenga

Last year I went to the European Agile Open conference, two intense days of meeting interesting and interested people and talking about all aspects of agile. I don't think I ever learned as much in two days. The conference was held entirely in the open space format and one impression I left with was that lots of the ideas we talked about there were also applied in the organization of the conference.

This week I had the pleasure of helping to organize my own open space event. The Open Space Code day in the Netherlands. We copied this idea from Alan Dean who has been organizing events like this for some time in the UK. I got the same impression, the dynamics are different, the goal is different but the event certainly feels like an agile project. I want to have a look at the similarities and see what we can learn from it.

What is Open Space?
Open space is quite popular in the agile world. I think this is partly because it feels familiar to most agilists. But for people who haven't had the pleasure of participating in an open space event here's a short introduction. If you want to learn more about this you can visit the open space institute website or read Harrison Owen's book.
Open Space is a way of making conferences interactive and self-organizing. Speakers and sessions aren't pre-planned. At the start of the conference attendees take time to propose sessions themselves. Usually you get more session proposals than the available time and space allow. So sessions are voted on and the least popular sessions are cancelled or combined to form new sessions.

Focus on communication
This is what makes an Open Space feel like the coffee break in a normal conference. And I mean this in a good way. I went to the Microsoft dev-days last year and I even skipped some sessions to be able to talk to more people instead of just listening to speakers.

Open space sessions are interactive. There are no prepared sessions but when you have a room full of people interested in the same subject you don't need preparation. The combined knowledge of people the people in the room is probably greater than that of any one speaker. The trick is sharing that knowledge in an interactive way without anyone dominating. Open Space accomplishes this with the 'law of two feet'. People are encouraged to leave sessions they're not participating in or learning from. This makes sure sessions stay interactive or at least interesting.

Fast feedback
Fail Fast is a mantra often used in the agile world. Agile methodologies add many short feedback cycles to projects to make sure that when you're doing something well you know it and when you're doing something wrong you spend the least amount of time doing that before things fall over. The 'law of two feet' also helps sessions failing fast. Sessions that are not interesting any more bleed-dry to open up space for more interesting sessions.

Prioritized backlogs
Agile teams always try to do the most important work they could be doing at that time. They have a very simple and obvious way of doing that, the prioritized backlog. Just make a list of work-items and make sure that what's most important to the customer is at the top of the list at any time.
The Open Space planning process is just as simple. Sessions are planned at the start of the event and are prioritized by voting. During the event sessions are merged, re-planned and moved continuously to make sure all sessions are the most interesting sessions possible.

YAGNI
You aint gonna need it! Don't make assumptions about the future if you don't need them today. This is how agile teams keep themselves from making large investments of time and resources that will not pay off. Open space also does this. Sessions are not planned until the last moment. People don't like uncertainty so this might not sound like a good thing to you. But in practice this makes sure you don't commit to things that later turn out to be less than optimal.

Self organization
Self organization is of course everywhere. Any group of people will self organize into something, groups of football-hooligans are also self organized. The 'trick' is to steer this self organization and use it to accomplish your goal. Agile projects are very good at enabling self-organization within teams. Teams pace themselves and divide their own work.
Self organization is even more central in open space than in agile. Given a couple of basic rules all attendees will self-organize into groups for sessions. The

So what can we learn?
The biggest surprise for me was to see self-organization work in the formation of teams. Agile enables teams to self organize to do work. It was fun to see larger groups of people actually self-organize into teams to tackle a set of tasks and then re-organize for the next set of meetings. Many agile organizations are flat at the team-level but the teams themselves are actually organized hierarchically. Look at the scrum of scrums for example. I can't help but wonder if we can't be more effective by introducing self-organization on this level too.

Open space can learn from agile too. The only official planning session is at the start of the conference. This makes the session schedule less fluid than it could be. People are allowed to re-schedule sessions but because there is already a plan in people seem uncomfortable doing this. Agile only plans one iteration ahead and this makes the whole process more fluid.

Agile principles work outside of software development. Things may look different because time-scales, tasks or roles are different so things may not be immediately recognizable as agile but it's very informative to compare these ideas. Right now many agile teams are adopting ideas from lean production for example. But there are more practices that we can learn from. Open space is one of them.

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