Agile 2005 Open Spaces Part II

One of the sessions today, discussed the use of Open Spaces within an organization to address cross team issues. Any large organization that has many teams that depend on common infrastructure and have common requirements, need to ensure that they are addressing those requirements in a manner that is consistent across the teams. The use of the ‘Open Spaces’ concept provides a forum in which to allow teams to raise concerns and through a collaborative effort come to a solution, that is the responsibility of the members of the Open Space to ensure is correctly implemented, this is beneficial not only to the teams (as now they have a solution), but also the business, as an issue that could have easily stalled development efforts in a more Waterfall approach has been resolved quickly.

One thought that I had regarding the potential use of the same idea for my company, was the idea of a Virtual Open Space, a virtual version of the Open Space approach. We have consultants that are graphically dispersed across 4 locations, and getting people together in a single physical place, is a logistical nightmare, so a logical extension of the Open Space idea, would be the construction of a Virtual Open Space. What I am not completely clear about at the moment, is how this would actually work, and if this is not just a wiki or blog, it certainly has given me some food for thought, and I will provide feedback once I have come to a conclusion if this is something that actually makes sense, and how this would actually be implemented.