One thing to keep in mind is the distinction between leadership and management, between sheparding and directing. Leadership entails orders of magnitude of responsibility. It also tends to turn somewhat on your ability to reach past where the current dialogue is at and move things forward (you can’t lead from the middle of the pack). It also tends to turn on your ability to build trust and to be occasionally inspirational.

Keep working at it; you’ll do pretty good.

Some blogs over in the Mozilla camp are talking about leadership. The thrust of the debate seems to be that it would be nice if we could add a dash of it into open source communities. Sure would, but other than it being nice if it was Christmas every d…

And I appreciate that the things that I’m facing — or any of us — are not new, historically. But for us, as individuals, these are new issues. And if open space has lessons to offer, then fabulous, that’s what I’m lookin’ for!

I do think that the notion of decentralized leadership has to be further explored, especially on an international level. Open source has much to teach us, but also much to learn, about this and I’m just beginning to dig below the surface on this.

On a separate note, I don’t know that you can accurately claim and take credit for a “BarCamp model of leadership” given that Open Space has been in use for decades (http://www.openspaceworld.com/brief_history.htm) and that BarCamp’s use of the format was borrowed (or inspired) from Foo Camp. While it certainly has successfully been applied all over the world with BarCamp and you are deserving of some credit for it, I again say that it is simply good leadership you are referencing, not anything new that has been recently invented. That aside, I think what you are really looking for in this inquiry is this: leadership can be ephemeral, moving from person to person around the group (ala talking sticks and other methods) with each person becoming a leader as they share with the group. Hosting conversations as we both do, this is the primary driver of the current day phenomenon - that everyone can be a leader, if only for a short while, when the group is focused on listening to them. That is a form of good leadership, but so is making a tie-breaking decision on a 50-50 vote in which not everyone will be pleased with your choice. We want to model and encourage more emergent leadership in this way, because this experience of leadership will lead to broader self-empowerment and I think, a stronger society. It is the experience one has when seeing good leadership in action that provides the possibility for growth and that does not happen nearly enough in the world today.

Within my study of open space and hosting conversations I have found that the agreed upon structure of the gathering is where constraints can be used to move to some sort of closure - but someone must be the benevolent facilitator/leader to keep people moving within the agreed upon framework/structure. In a very real sense, the actions that need to be performed (such as closing debate on a given issue to move on to the next) are not as important as the intentions with which they are performed. ie, you are not being an ogre for needing to cut off someone who is repeating the same thing over and over again, you are looking out for the best interests of the group - at least insofar as the intentions are not about shutting out someone to keep power for yourself, but the intentions are that of leading the group to its stated outcomes.

If you are just leading an ever growing conversation without getting to its conclusion or the desired outcome, that is not leadership, that is hanging out shooting the sh!t - it seems to be the same problem that the democrats have unfortunately embraced for too long. The structures for operating a representative style government is based on this, but they include limits as well. While one party may misuse those limits/rules to serve their own interests for power, that was not the original purpose of the design. Open participation in a community process is terrific, but in the end, the community has needs for things getting done and that is paramount.

As we all gain more experience with the process of “moving from me to we”, this view of good leadership will become clearer - leadership is still needed and it should not be wed to the common perceptions of greed, mistrust and abuse of power as I some people are trying to do. Because some bad leaders have misplaced our collective trust is not a reason to throw out the principles of good leadership and start your own movement and buzzwords. Discussing the applicability of leadership principles to community driven projects however, is a very worthwhile discussion and I will enjoy reading more of that from Mitchell’s perspective.

- Chris Heuer - cross posted to http://www.chrisheuer.com/

Open Space seems to work great for self-facilitation, and is useful for big-rock issues like the ones you are currently tackling. After the sidewalks are in place, you can probably get some good mileage out of them, but will occasionally need to bulldoze them with another Open Space meeting to notice new traffic patterns.

Hope the analogy conveys sufficiently. Obviously, BarCamp and unconferences work on a similar model. It’s not anarchy, but omniarchy.

Another model that looks interesting, but I haven’t studied sufficiently is Holacracy. It looks a bit cumbersome. Nobody wants to learn a new Roberts Rules of Order, but maybe this isn’t so hard.

I have another metaphor that is really useful for me: Did you ever try to ride a bike with two people who are both steering? The result is a bit chaotic, as each is responding the the place where they are used to having the center of gravity, but with two people on the bike, the center of gravity is between them, meaning the lean to turn ratio is different. It usually works better to trust one person to steer in those cases, which is why hierarchy works so well. In a situation in which everyone is steering, the center of gravity is shifting and not in anyone’s gut. Open Space, or something like it looks like a great way to emerge collaborative steering.

- David