We’re trying something new to SMOFCons with our program this year. It’s based on the ideas of Open Space Technology — the people who attend a focused conference are more likely to come up with interesting and relevant ideas than any committee of outside people.
How it works: as our opening icebreaker on Friday, we have people write down on individual sheets of paper items that they’d like to talk about. These get stuck up on a wall. Items that would fit well together can get combined. People then get a small supply of stickers (generally five or so). If someone’s interested in a particular topic, s/he puts a sticker on the sheet for that item. Or more than one — if you see that an item isn’t getting the support you want, you can put extra stickers on.
We then look at the items that have lots of stickers, and start putting them into slots on a timeline. At this point, nothing’s set in stone — we can move items around so that we’ll have a minimum of “You scheduled the only two items I wanted to go to opposite each other!” If an item has a huge number of stickers (as, for example, the Fannish Inquisition would have if we weren’t scheduling it as a special item on Saturday night), we can schedule it so that there’s nothing happening at the same time. We move things around, and lock the schedule down.
In practice at a convention about the size of SMOFCon, our Programming director, Tom Whitmore, has generally seen this take between one and two hours to shake out into a reasonable program.
No topics will be rejected a priori — if you think people might be interested in talking about it, bring your topics to the table when we’re generating topics. We won’t take a list of topics in advance; if people want to talk about potential topics on the SMOFCon e-mail list or in response to this post on the website, we encourage that. But the actual items we’ll do will come from what people propose at the convention.
As a thought, you might consider having stickers at the sticker stage with numbers or other characters on them with each person getting a “sheet” of the same. Not for personal identification (hand them out “randomly” or whatever), but to help with the overlap problem up front. Someone can glance at the stickers for each pair of program items that will be placed opposite and if there are lots of dual-stick numbers, you’re helped to not schedule them together.
You may, of course, have something already that works or it might not be a big issue.
I agree with Bob that unless each person has some sort of anonymous (or not so anonymous, depending upon the feelings of the majority) but individualized sticker the difficulty of ‘double’ or ‘triple’ booking people into overlapped items might be difficult.
Of course, considering how easy it is to get side-tracked at SMOFCon anyway, attendance can still get easily messed up.
Also if there are weather delays for a large number of incoming attendees, I don’t see that this would be as representable an initially thought.
That’s not a bad idea — fairly easy to do, and we wouldn’t really need to have people be uniquely identifiable from this; a plethora of similar spot-sets would indicate that there *might* be a problem, and we can address it quickly. Thanks for the suggestion, and I’ll noodle about how to implement it smoothly. In other groups, the “minimizing conflicts” either gets ignored (when it’s done badly) or takes a noticeable part of the time I’d mentioned seeing the whole process take.
Interesting. I’ll be curious to hear how it turns out. My primary concern at first glance is that an Open Space Technology program created at the icebreaker appears to cut out any workshops or other program sessions that require advance (pre-con) preparation.
+1! Like Geri, I very much look forward to seeing how this turns out! Kudos for giving it a shot!
Responding to Geri’s comment — it might be possible to gain sufficient advance support to make it a shoe-in for inclusion… and worst to worst.. no reason why someone couldn’t elect to do something anyways with those folks that were interested — it’d just be on them to find a time/location that works for the interested parties. Think of it as an extended BOF session.
One of the nice things about SMOFcon is that some sessions, and the audience, are somewhat predictable — especially with a California location — it is a very accessible location. This is not meant as a slight — only to say that there will be new conrunners there, so we may anticipate certain sessions that will attract them. Ditto for Worldcon/Hugo Awards, specialized/niche topics of consistent interest like negotiating hotel contracts, etc…
Yes, it’s certainly possible for people to come up with some ideas in advance; and in these days of portable computers and cloud-storage of data, it’s very likely that people could come up with useful handouts on the fly. There’s no guarantee that items come up with in advance will be held; it’s certainly possible to game the system, but it’s less likely (I think) that we’ll end up with a program that people just avoid than the current system. Because people generally have a bit more investment in something they’ve helped create.
Given that we’re intending to use this method to set the program for Saturday and Sunday as an icebreaker on Friday night, we’re considering doing a “boot camp” similar to the one that was done last year on budgeting. And in the spirit of Open Space programming, I’d like to get some idea of what people would like the boot camp to help folks boot up. Any suggestions or thoughts? Post them here. I’ll also announce this over on the SMOFCon mailing list, soon, but I’m giving the folks who read here a chance to weigh in first.
Chris, I’ve been thinking about issues involving newcomers for a while. It’s been pretty much proven that there’s a sharp divide between people who’ve been doing this for a long time — especially that most of them have worked on Worldcons — and people who haven’t.
Unfortunately thus far nothing has worked. The long-term people don’t think a problem exists or are interested in other things, while the newer people have given up. Perhaps a couple of hours when all slots are filled with things that would attract both? Anyone have other ideas?
After looking at the comments accumulated, I can see a potential issue to consider. The “new” people who don’t know enough to know what they most need to talk about by Friday night, or if they do, their idea is overwhelmed by experienced runners who don’t want to talk about that any more.
Keeping an eye out for that (and maybe other) biases in the program, and the ability for someone (maybe a vote of three program-runners?) to nudge an item in is at least worth thinking about.
I’m not suggesting the ability to override a 1 to 50 difference, but to to nudge a 40-50 type split if there seems good reason.
One of the things that happens with OST is that similar ideas tend to get conflated. This is done with the consent of the folks interested, as much as possible. With that, there generally shows up a fairly clean break between “stuff enough people are interested in” and “stuff that isn’t what we want to talk about this time.” (Actually, there are usually pretty clear quartile-like categories: the stuff most people want to talk about, the stuff a significant number of people want to talk about, the stuff a few people want to talk about, and the stuff that’s only interesting to the person who proposed it. If something’s borderline, it’s generally pretty easy to find something closely related to it to roll it into that’s not so big that the smaller topic gets lost.)