Background
Become Part of the Revolution!
Most of us recognize that the world is fundamentally changing on every level – ecological, social, political, psychological, and spiritual. We are into this change process and there is no turning back. Given our awareness of these changes, we are presented with a choice: we can take a passive “wait-and-see” attitude or, we can collectively design and create our future toward the most desirable possible outcome. For those interested in the design, you are heartily welcome to join a recently formed project called the Global Open Space (GOS) project.
The Global Open Space (GOS) forum is unique form of conference, which is hosted by the International Systems Institute. This conference seeks to engage people throughout the globe in joining together to create a better more sustainable society. The GOS role is to foster the formation of self-organizing communities of action by making leading edge tools and ideas for social change available in a practical and useful way.
The GOS forum was started in the summer of 2004 to bring together several threads of conversation that had been previously developing along parallel but independent tracks. The founders of the GOS forum felt that together these threads had great potential synergy if they could be woven into an integrated approach. Over the next few years, several virtual sessions and conferences were conducted, including:
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Discussion on community building with sites at the Mt. Madonna school as well as Florida, Washington, and India
Telephone conference with Peter Block
Telephone conference with Juanita Brown, PhD
Telephone conference with Diana Whitney, PhD
Telephone conference with Nirmala Deshpande
Telephone conference with Joe Eger
Telephone conference with Margaret Wheatley
GOS Virtual Conference
The key threads included the following:
The Agora Project. In 1999, an ISI research team began working on The Agora Project, which sought to use technology to enable more democratic deliberation in the public sphere. This work continued for several years, including work by a team at the Fuschl conversation conference.
The Human Development Conferences. A series of conferences that began in Lonavala in 1999 to explore “Human and Economic Development.” Those conversations led to another open space conference at Dharamshala in 2001 where the theme was “What is true wealth and how do we create it?” Subsequent annual gatherings were held in 2002 at Point Reyes, California and in December, 2003, at Mount Madonna,
We are in the midst of a massive up-welling of human potential, creativity, anger, and frustration. We are confused and reactionary, yet bursting with new capacities.”
- Barbara Marx Hubbard, Evolutionary Thinker and Activist
Philosophy Minimize
The guiding philosophy of the GOS is that positive social change can be fostered by linking multiple regional, action-based dialogue groups in such a way that a globally-appropriate collective vision statement and action plan emerges from their midst. Rather than an ad-hoc effort spearheaded by a few well-intentioned individuals, the GOS is a collaborative effort to harness the collective wisdom of people all around the world by facilitating the connection of these regional groups in a systemic way. Our approach employees co-design and collaborative action. The GOS combines Internet-mediated communication technologies with collaboration methodologies that have been demonstrated to be effective in a number of real-world situations.
