How to Facilitate an Open Space Remotely
Welcome to the Open Cyber Space
Recently I participated in my first remote open space. Here’s what I learned.
At first I was really sceptical if the idea would translate well to a remote scenario, given my experience with sessions where some people participated remote. In these sessions, remote participants were very passive. They had a hard time speaking, since the non-remote participant were simply louder and had no delay. Also drawings on whiteboards or flipcharts were not recognizable through the webcam. Participants in the back of the room were not well heard by the microphone and could not understand the remote person due to insufficient volume of laptop speakers.
It turns out that some of these problems go away when all participant are remote, e.g. those related to speakers and microphones.
Other problems are better addressed when they are everybody’s. For example nobody gets the chance to use a physical whiteboard, so we looked for virtual alternatives…
The Marketplace
The first thing you need to address is the marketplace phase. We created a video conference room and shared the link with everybody. Make sure to use a conference technology that can cope with the number of participants you expect. In our case with 30–40 participants joining simultaneously Google Meet was fine.
All participants but the moderator muted their microphones for the marketplace. The moderator shared their screen with the agenda board and gave the usual introduction.
After that the session owners unmuted, described their session idea and put it in the agenda board.
The Agenda Board
For the agenda board, we wanted something collaborative, where every participant was able to put topics in even before the marketplace started. Also we wanted to have the usual grid with slots and rooms where everybody should be able to drag topics into.
We used Google Jamboard, which worked just fine. A Scrum/Kanban board tool (e.g. Meistertask or Trello) might have worked as well. Just use one column for proposals and one column per room and the order in the columns to for time slots.
I think it is crucial to have the board accessible all the time during the sessions. Having a Jamboard URL you could just keep open in a separate tab was pretty good and much better then taking the usual photo, you need to zoom in all the time on your phone.
The Sessions
The sessions took place in more video conference rooms. We created the rooms upfront, so everybody could switch or stay in the rooms just like in a physical open space.
The good thing about this was that transition times took only one click and were therefore more seamless.
I think we can improve how we persisted results in the sessions. This was handled very differently. Again we could use Jamboards, but I personally found them not very great for that purpose using only a touchpad and no stylus like input device.
However, I’d recommend that one person shares their screen and writes or draws while the session progresses. A simple text file with increased text size, a confluence page, a mind map tool or some general purpose drawing tool… just use what works best for you.
Radio discipline is not as crucial in the session as in the marketplace, since only up to 15 people took part in each session. However, it is still important to mute unless you want to talk. Using a conference tool, where you can signal that you want to say something non-verbal might help here, just like good moderation. For us unmuting served well enough as a signal.
A lot of people also disabled their video to save bandwidth. This is good, but I recommend to enable it when you are speaking or want to speak as an additional signal. Also facial expressions and gestures can be an important additional channel especially in heated discussions.
Google Meet is also not able to display more then four videos simultaneously in equal size. I think other tools, like Jitsi or Zoom, provide layouts better suited.
Wrapping Up
Somehow we completely skipped the sharing of outcomes at the end of the open space. I think we were amazed how well it all went despite our own scepticism.
To collect feedback we used a Jamboard again, which worked just as good as a physical feedback wall.
Conclusion
It surprised me a lot how well our open space worked remotely. To me this format has a huge potential that goes way beyond the current situation where we are forced to do it this way. It not only allows to connect with colleagues in different facilities or home office, but also with experts in different cities or countries — time zones might be hard, though.
I’d be amazed to hear from your experiences with this format. How did it work for you? How did the tools work for you? Which ones did you use?
