The Global Open Space (GOS) forum is unique form of conference, which is hosted by the International Systems Institute. This conference seeks to engage people throughout the globe in joining together to create a better more sustainable society. The GOS role is to foster the formation of self-organizing communities of action by making leading edge tools and ideas for social change available in a practical and useful way.

The GOS forum was started in the summer of 2004 to bring together several threads of conversation that had been previously developing along parallel but independent tracks. The founders of the GOS forum felt that together these threads had great potential synergy if they could be woven into an integrated approach.

The key threads included the following:

The Agora Project. In 1999, an ISI research team began working on The Agora Project, which sought to use technology to enable more democratic deliberation in the public sphere. This work continued for several years, including work by a team at the Fuschl conversation conference. More...

The Human Development Conferences. A series of conferences that began in Lonavala in 1999 to explore “Human and Economic Development.” Those conversations led to another open space conference at Dharamshala in 2001 where the theme was “What is true wealth and how do we create it?” Subsequent annual gatherings were held in 2002 at Point Reyes, California and in December, 2003, at Mount Madonna,