What is Large group participation?
It is a major movement of the past decades emerging from the need to have a say in co-creating our future. It generates participation and cooperation by sharing, listening and dialoguing in circles and small and large groups and conteneous interactions. It is not the framework for question and answer in a usual theatrical setting, but rather a a circular, spiral space of free movement and spontanous gatherings to engage in generative dialogues to allow new insights and meanings to emerge and then to weave together their threads in a more coherent tapestry for action. Applications in all corners of life and work, eg. EU - Here is an amazing short film to show a 2 day event at the EU SE co-creation event...with 4 000 people involved. here are methods apllied and co-designed for the actual purpose of an event. Art of Hosting is a short and instant way to experience some of these processes in a sereis of flow of methods and movements to enable generative decision making, yet several of these methods have deep inquiery, well placed theory and a group of people who co-created them originally and then most cases wrote it down to make them avaolable for all interested. Like eg. Open Space Technology, one of the earliest by Harrison Owen The World Cafe by Juanita Brown and Davis Isaacs The Circle by Christina Baldwin Dialogue by David Bohm and Williams Isaacs Appreciative Inquiry, by D.Copperrider The Chaordic process by Dee Hock Aspects of Dragon Dream and Design Thinking, etc.. AoH is a movement of dedicated process hosts and facilitators to deepen practice and shared understanding about the beauty of co-creation by use of all these participative processes, thus we acknowledge the intent and creativity that has brought about many of the exclusive and distinctive processes and we also feel gratitude and service to the ones who have actually articulated them in a way that we may experience and understand them, ie. Gratitude to the Authors and Creators, mentioned above... Also gratitude to those who relentlessly make this experience available in the larger whole of or societal and organisational frameworks, ie. the PRACTITIONERS and the Hosts and Facilitators. These approaches have been used widespread int he past decade as if we had true boom in strengthening and empowering collective intelligence in all walks of life. They have been used for small to large scale meetings and is currently being used by the European Commision to initiate participatory leadership practices and citizen engagement. A wealth of information is available on the website that collects many of these processes, Art of Hosting internationally. The main Art of Hosting website is www.artofhosting.org For examples of where Art of Hosting has been applied in practice, please see this list of projects and this list of cases. What can you expect?
Some of the collaborative learning approaches that inspired us, and which you will have the opportunity to learn are:
*Open Space Technology
*Circle practice
*Pro-Action Café
*World Café
*Appreciative inquiry
*The four-fold practice of participatory leaderhip
*The chaordic path to innovative solutions
*Reflective practice
*Storytelling
