Another lovely evening of being Devoted and Disgruntled last night. If you work in, or just enjoy going to, or never really thought about but now you come to mention it, theatre then you should attend at least one of these D&D sessions.
And if you live abroad so you can't make it to London, join the 'ning' by clicking on the link above, and you can participate via message boards, blogs and chatroom online. There's a fast-growing community of UK theatre folk on there already - some incredible people, from performance poets to aerial artists to directors, actors, writers to drama school teachers to critics to photographers and on and on. Brilliant. Come and join us.
We were discussing ways in which the web can play more of a part, actually. At the big D&D events, I'm all for a live twitter feed where people can jot down thoughts and ideas and inspirations as they go, so we get a constantly scrolling screen of creativity, a catherine wheel of sparks coming out of the room, live. And those who can't be with us in the room could follow it and join in.
I want it up on a big screen in the room itself, but some people might find that distracting. I don't know. I think if you don't want to watch it, you don't watch it. But it might be like having a big TV in the room: really tempting to just sit there and watch it scroll by. On the other hand, external contributions could be made to specific topics currently being discussed.
I'm torn between a love of web 2.0 and my techno-geekiness, and the joy of actually being face to face with all these wonderful people in a big room, away from the keyboard. But we could at least have someone on a computer, twittering our thoughts for us and posting other people's responses so they can be added to the main record of the event.
We also talked about how things get actioned after a D&D event. Or if they get actioned at all. The thing is, the same principles and law of Open Space Technology apply outside the room, since they're not actually rules that someone made up, they're just observations of natural behaviour that are not only made permissable but actively shape and enable the process.
They are:
1. Whoever comes is the right people
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it's over, it's over
and 5. The Law of Two Feet: if at any time you find yourself neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go somewhere else where you might learn and contribute.
I had an explosion of activity after the major D&D event this year, none of which actively involved anyone else from D&D, but hopefully my flurry of activity will affect other people, and they might come to a D&D, and so on. So, after the event, whoever is affected is the right people, and whatever action happens is the only action that could have happened, and however long that action goes on is the right time, and if nothing happens, it's right that nothing happens. People just used The Law of Two Feet, and so they should, because if nothing else at least they were propelled to move on somewhere else.
I'm a big fan of participatory evaluation. It's my new Thing. I wish we could do a little more of that, so we have a record of a sort, like the live twitter feed, that shows how many sparks fly off the creative friction at a D&D event, and how many fires are lit by those sparks...
