I had my first Open Space experience Thursday night at the Agile Iowa user group. It was a great new experience in performing meetings, and it was one of the few times where I’ve been in a meeting where I was actually engaged and getting something of value through the whole meeting.

The two hour meeting consisted of the following:

• 6:00pm: Pass out sticky notes, where anyone in the group can write up a topic for discussion. For example, members of the group brought up topics like “Agile Adoption Across Non-Agile Companies”, “Agile Metrics”, and “Promoting TDD Among Non-TDD Developers”, to name a few. (This actually only took about 5 minutes. We spent the rest of the time touring the Iowa Student Loan facility to see how they had changed their environment to promote agility.)
• 6:15pm: The leader/facilitator collected the stickies and posted them to the board. Each member was allowed two votes toward their top two topics of interest. After everyone had voted, the top four topics were selected.
• 6:30pm: The first set of sessions begins. Two of the four topics are chosen for discussion. Each session is designated a room. Members get up and go to the topic session they are interested in. During the session, one person takes notes based on what was discussed.
• 7:00pm: The second set of sessions begins. Members move to the next session they are interested in and sit down for discussion.
• 7:30pm: Re-group with the rest of the group members. The person who took notes at each session provides a summary of what was discussed, for information-sharing. (We actually didn’t end up doing this, as the second set of sessions went long. This is one thing I wish we would have done.).
• 7:50pm: Hold a retrospective with the entire group. Each member is able to provide input on what went well / what didn’t go well with the Open Space, so that changes can be made to make the next Open Space better.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we all go out and start converting our traditional meetings to Open Space meetings (well, you can if you want…). But it is always good to look “outside the box” from time to time, and try new things.

In the workplace, I see this providing value as an information-sharing / idea-gathering opportunity between co-workers in the office. For example, if you have a problem with “silos” (e.g. teams doing their own thing, not knowing whether other teams are doing something similar), hold an Open Space. And recommend (or mandate) that team members go to different sessions to promote cross-team collaboration.

InfoQ posted a pretty good interview with Jeff Sutherland over what qualifies a team as actually doing agile (Scrum, specifically) rather than just going through the motions.

Particularly, he addresses some of the disadvantages of merely piecemealing agile practices into a traditional team development environment.