Open Space — a Collaborative Process for Facilitating Tourism IT Partnerships

Abstract

The success of IT projects depends on the success of the partnerships on which they are based. However research has identified a significant rate of failure in these partnerships, predominantly due to an overly technical mindset, leading to the question: "how do we ensure that, as technological solutions are implemented within tourism, due consideration is given to human-centred issues?" The tourism partnership literature is explored for insights, revealing that issues connected with power, participation and normative positions play a major role. The method, Open Space, is investigated for its ability to engage stakeholders in free and open debate. This paper reports on a one-day Open Space event sponsored by two major intermediaries in the UK travel industry who wanted to consult their business partners. Both the running of the event and its results reveal how Open Space has the potential to address some of the weaknesses associated with tourism partnerships.

Evaluating collaborative planning methods supporting programme-based planning in natural resource management

“…Weber, 2005) supporting multistakeholder processes in problem identification and collaborative learning (Nauheimer and Ilieva, 2006). The features of Open Space allow engaging various stakeholders in identifying goals and actions, in understanding the decision problem and building relationship in a team (Herman and Jain, 2006;Alford, 2008). World Caf e has been used for local participatory scenario planning for designing ecosystem management policies (Palacios-Agundez et al, 2013) and has the potential to support knowledge exchange and collaborative learning in large groups (Prewitt, 2011).…”