Many Spaces: Practicing the Art of Collaboration
Community Engagement, Information Technology, Initiative R&D, Strategic Communications | 
No comments Last week, The Canoe Group produced the Oregon Arts Summit 2009 for the Oregon Arts Commission, titled “The Art of Collaboration.” A standing-room-only crowd of over 300 participants converged on the Tiger Woods Center of the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton. The Summit design was grounded in concepts from Parker Palmer, an educator best known for his book The Courage to Teach.
The Arts Summit invited attendees to join together to “co-learn” with selected domain experts in plenary session in what we called the BallRoom (distinguished by large yoga balls adorning the stage). Each speaker (all invited from different industries) addressed his/her key learning for an initial 15 minutes in plenary session, and was then joined by an onstage collaborator for a short, unrehearsed Q & A session.
On a strict schedule, the pair retired to another space, The Studio, to continue their dialogue with those who chose to follow from the plenary session. Meanwhile, the next speaker began the same process again in the BallRoom.
During the move-breaks (15 minutes of networking between each primary speaker), the Summit offered 8-minute off-the-cuff briefings on topical and substantive issues in The Collaboratory. Some attendees chose these move-breaks as times to text-message or tweet, others decompressed with coffee and snacks. The six move-breaks, and the hour-long lunch break got everyone moving their bodies on a regular basis, an antidote to sitting in long sessions.
While we have written about the event in a recent J-Stroke article, the layout of the event had at its hub the Collaboratory: a place for people to gather and experience a variety of collaborative tasks including the following:
- Experience 8-minute briefings on a variety of topics, from the state of arts funding to a reading of the Declaration of Creative Rights by its author, Kim Stafford.
- Register for the Arts Education Network of the Oregon Arts Commission, a project The Canoe Group is partnering on throughout this year.
- Create a group project, the 50 Year Oregon Collaboration Timeline, using a visual tool and content provided by the Summit participants.
- Contribute to the Oregon Cultural Trust
- Learn about a wide number of organizations/activities related to the arts in Oregon.
- Watch a group of University of Oregon Graduate Students work on the Timeline as they collaborated to decide what is important, accurate and significant over the past 50 years.
To use an extended metaphor to describe each of these spaces, if the BallRoom is the initial “tasting” of content and The Studio is the “sit down meal” devoted to a domain/practice/speaker, then the Collaboratory might be best described as the “tapas bar,” where people meet to have small samplings of collaboration, content and creativity. Collaboratory also has a more formal definition.
Here is one result of the day’s efforts, the 50 Year Oregon Collaboration & Innovation Timeline. (If you work in an office setting, you may want to turn down or off your speakers.)
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The Canoe Group uses timelines to help our customers reconstruct a common set of understandings about a series of events, a shared history if you will. This was our first effort to distribute the content creation across 300 event participants. Viewing it makes us proud to be Oregonians. And the response has been very positive.
So back to the original source: why does Parker Palmer tell us co-learning is important? Palmer says, “To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” The 2009 Oregon Arts Summit aspired to create such a space… in fact many spaces, all engineered to practice the Art of Collaboration. May we all learn something from the effort.
Do you have something you’d like to share or have a question about this post or collaboration in general? Leave a comment and we’ll be happy to engage in a conversation with you.
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