The crafting of an Open Space invitation will be iterative.
I like to have an overarching single question as the title of the event. How broad it is does depend on the subject and also how big the gathering is – invitations stumble when their scope is too wide or abstract or else too narrowly defined.
And then it’s nice to have some personal observations or explanations from people who are already committed to being there. But you can start with these personal stories first and draw out what the question is from there if that’s what works better.
Sometimes, there’s an idea or question that is nagging at you and so that’s where you can start, by just writing the question out and perhaps sharing it with others. I am drawn to asking questions that start “What are we going to do about…?” I think this is because of the way that I think about Open Space primarily as a way to work out the “what we’re going to actually do” bit. This probably arises because I find detailed top-down planning really hard and so gathering others feels like a good way to surrender the whole thing. But when what we are going to do “about” something is already well-understood, it can be better to go for “What are we going to do in order to….?” which gets under the skin of the kinds of outcomes we want. The most important thing is to get something out and then toss it around with others – the initial reactions to the question among your closest collaborators will help you tease out a more detailed explanation of why you want to talk about this and what sorts of people you think ought to come.
Other times, none of that will come out though. You’ll just have a kind of soup of ideas that it feels like it would be good to work on, but what’s the thing that holds them all together? I find this out by just writing them all down, like the advice we give people learning how to draft an essay “Just write everything you already know about the subject” and see what comes out.