- Open Space within company: Many did not know it first but it was well received (also online)
- Participation ~30 out of 100-150 employees
- There is a great Miro template to use for online open space events:
- Target Audience: No clear definition but not only developers
- Does not have to be restricted
- You could also host multiple open spaces for various target groups
- Should an open space have a defined topic?
- E.g. focus on social skills – it would be possible to open a separate track/category for this
- Possible separation: frontend vs backend
- That happens automatically during an open space
- Might be easier to organize within a company if only certain teams are going/targeted
- Company internal vs public open space
- Who is following up ideas/action items that are created during the open space?
- Internal: People might be afraid to talk about certain problems (no safe space)
- An open space could be as simple as doing calls (off & on topic)
- Marketplace: you simply post the topic & time for your call somewhere
- Open Marketplace is hard if there are not enough people
- There is less pressure on employees to actually prepare something
- You can do that each day – you do not have to wait for the next Open Space to happen
- Motivate people to do a talk about new learnings
- How much time can you take for topics that are not relevant for the company (yet)?
- Trust people, practice shows they are not wasting time
- If you do a talk, will you be the goto support person for everybody on that topic?
- With a lot of home office, it is hard to keep social interactions up. These calls help in this aspect.
- No clear structure, max. 1 hour
- 1 slot per week if somebody wants to do a call
- Do not worry about if others are interested. Share what you are interested in.
- How to create a safe space where people can talk about anything?
- Have somebody from higher management that is there and explains that it is a safe space – show clear commitment from the management and be open for concerns (management does not need to be part later on)
- Do open spaces without management and do presentation to the management later on
- Company wide show & tell every week: people are reluctant to present because C-levels & management is in there. Would make sense to start with smaller talks and emerge from there.
- It is hard to do open spaces within companies because there are always company goals -> there has to be an output which puts pressure on the participants
- Debate vs decision meetings – sometimes it is enough to just discuss
- Experience: first open space did not really produce output that was presented to management, in the second one this developed naturally
- Not every topic needs to have a huge outcome -> over time maybe one topic with a big outcome is enough
- Outcome can follow after some time has passed (connecting ideas later on)
- How to measure the success of open spaces?
- Collect action items & ideas. But what to do with them?
- Open Spaces can just be a team building event to make the team more productive (Goal: good experience, something you have learned)
- Innovation/Ship it Days in a Hackaton like format can be a solution as well
- Can be used for personal development as well
- Practice shows that Innovation Fridays do not really work/fade out
- Experience: Open Space for 5 hours every two months
- Mainly team building
- You can talk about whatever you want
- You can learn about technologies and projects from others
- Management takes the opportunity to ask for opinions
- Real magic:
- communities of practice (e.g. about frontend, backend,…) which are optional
- working group where one member of each team has to take part (operations & security) – not for innovation/experiments
- Time for projects/ideas is provided by the company
- Sometimes very successful, sometimes not
- Keeping track of action items can also happen at regular open space events
- Pitch ideas to get feedback from others
- Thursday talks where somebody would present something
- Worked well in a small company but then stage fright and team internal techtalks came in
- Open Space with customers
- One company did this and there were many things that were not allowed
- Guild of customers can work well but is hard with old fashioned customers
- Internal Developer Conferences
- There is also value in prepared talks
- More effort for presenters
- Two-day format creates a lot of possibilities
- Discussions often only happen on the second day. First day is often filled with prepared sessions.
- Many people that do not want to talk at the first day do that on the second day