The One Law:
Owen’s one law is called the ‘Law of Two Feet’ or ‘The Law of Mobility’. If at any time you are neither learning nor contributing, you can use your two feet and go elsewhere. When participants lose interest and get bored, or accomplish and share all that they can, the charge is to move on. Don’t waste time – either your own or others’!
As you can see, the entire basis of these tech nights is to keep folks engaged, learning, and exploring! Any participant can suggest an issue – but they must have a real passion and the ability to start and lead a demonstration or discussion. OpenSpace fits in well within the Agile methodology. And what is that you ask? Well Agile is a project management style pretty common in the tech world. Essentially you build products by using short cycles of work that allow for rapid production and constant revision. By only concentrating on a few items each cycle, you’re able to accomplish a lot, and change easily should the project evolve.
While we use Agile quite frequently at ASI, OpenSpace was a fairly new concept to many of us. However, we’re finding it exceedingly encouraging, welcoming, and approachable. Our Tech Nights are still a work in progress, but our list of topics is growing – as is the interest!