Unconference (Open Space)

A gathering with no keynote speakers and no agenda, until the people arrive and make one.

Description

We have run the Parts Work Unconference every few months for about four years — we have genuinely lost count, we think somewhere around fourteen — and it is where most of our thinking about groups comes from. The format is Open Space Technology, invented by Harrison Owen, who noticed that the best part of most conferences was the coffee breaks and so built an event that was mostly coffee breaks with some structure added. We adapted it for online and for sensitive material, which mostly means we allow closed rooms.

There is no programme when we start. Everyone makes it together, live, in a part of the morning we call the marketplace. Anyone can offer a session: a topic, a question, a practice, a half-baked idea they want to think out loud about. There are no keynote speakers, because everyone is the keynote speaker.

There is exactly one law, the Law of Mobility: you are free to move. If a session lights your parts up, stay. If they go hmm, not this, you are not merely permitted but encouraged to leave and find what does. You don’t owe anyone your staying. And one invitation, which is to bring Self-energy — to your own parts and to everybody else’s.

Why this belongs in a glossary about parts: the format does to a group roughly what Self does to a system. Nothing is overruled, everything gets a place, and the shape emerges from what is actually present rather than from what somebody decided in advance ought to be present. It isn’t chaos — it is a jam session, or a dinner party: a few reliable rules so that nobody gets hurt and the music can happen. The structure has to be genuinely dependable before the improvisation is safe, which is also what protectors need before they will let anything happen.

If you or your parts like knowing exactly what comes next, the first twenty minutes can feel disorienting. That’s normal. It settles fast.

What Unconference (Open Space) is NOT:

Not a conference with a looser schedule, and not group therapy. Also not leaderless: somebody holds the container quite carefully, they just don’t hold the content.

Examples:

A session on IFS and grief, proposed that same morning by whoever wanted it.
Leaving a room halfway through because your curiosity went elsewhere.
An opening circle and a closing round, both of which are load-bearing.

see also:

Collective Systems; IFS-Informed Communication; Rituals; Self-Leadership; Boundaries