First of all, to establish a topic of an Open Space is not easy job....but I can bet you that is a fun-challenging task.

If you have to organize a OST event and you have to estahblish the topic, here is what we have done:
Planning the meeting:
1. First we needed to do some research, we tryed to find out who else is knowledgeable outthere and can help us in writing the topic for our OST event. Our delicious is here in case you wonder what we discovered and mine too.
The planning for the brainstorming meeting is as, or even more important than the meeting it self. We took the aim of the event and we had a discussion that was structured into 4 parts: what we need to know, what we need to discuss, what we need to do and what we need to decide in order to reach the aim of the meeting.
Each of the elements resulted after this discussion where written on the flipchart and they translated into the agenda of the session as: the "need to know" become mainly frontal/handout/ppt presentation; the "need to discuss" become the focused conversation after the presentation in order to clarify and bring everybody at the same table, the 'need to do" become the result that we are looking for and keeps us focused during the meeting and it also showed us the way (method), the "need to decide" turn into how we will reach a decision method. We plan all this for a 3 hour session.
Here is how it went at the meeting:
1. Objectives and results were introduce (no rules esth this time do not know why?)
2. Project managers briefed us about what we already knew (ost event & ost method) , we thought this was a littel bit too by the book, but you can be surprised.
3. We establish the characteristics of a "good theme in OST in general and in particular for our target" as a starter.
4. Using the characteristics a triggrer words, we start the brainwring process and this is what turned out. :)
5. Using dotmocracy slightly modified to suit our needs, we selected the ideas. I am not a fan of this process, we felt that we did not took enough time to analyze all the ideas, it was hard to move one since all ideas have something to offer.
6. We cluster the ideas selected with the hope to get more clarity and with the hope that we will succeed to integrate all in one ... :)
7. Using ideas as keywords we start to build the sentences that will be the next theme for our OST event.
8. All this took more or less 4 hours.



What we discovered during the process:

• that nothing better was invented since slice bread, than cardstorming, .. maybe hexagonstorming (cards in hexagonal shape :)).
• that dotmocracy is not the cutest solution for decideing - latter i will write a post on this blog about it
• that lateral thinking is the greates ever had-pain-generator AND, AND a fantastic way to get to the exact passionat ideas that you are looking for