Many Spaces: Practicing the Art of Collaboration
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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:
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