What Happens When You Hand the Mic to the Fulldome Community

On the morning of Friday, April 24, 2026, between 9:00 and 11:30 AM, on the second day of Dome Fest West, we did something a more cautious festival might have hesitated to do. We took the agenda away.

There was no panel lined up at the front of the room. No keynote. No moderator with a clipboard of pre-vetted questions. Instead, there was a stack of blank index cards, a pile of markers, and one instruction. Write down the question or challenge you most want to talk about. If enough other people care, you'll find each other.

The room was forty-plus members of the fulldome community from more than fifteen organizations. Filmmakers and planetarium directors. Distributors, sound designers, immersive artists, engineers, and creative producers. People from Fiske Planetarium, the Boston Museum of Science, the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, Discovery Dome, Worlds and the Center for Conscious Creativity, Cosmogenesis, GRX Immersive Labs, Critical Fusion, fig55, Digitalis, Elevation XR, True3D, and the Giant Screen Cinema Association itself. Independent artists and composers. Engineers who had flown in from three continents. Most of them already knew each other's work, and a meaningful fraction of them had never been in the same room before.

Two and a half hours later, the wall was covered. Three sessions of self-organized small-group discussion had produced eighteen distinct roundtables, dozens of question cards from named participants, and the most candid public discussion this festival has ever held about the state of the dome field. The volume of substance the morning generated is the main reason this blog series exists at all. There was simply too much for a single recap post.

That morning belonged to a format called Open Space Technology, hosted by Tammy Barrett of the Giant Screen Cinema Association. This post is the first in a four-part series unpacking what came out of those sessions. The format and the way the morning was structured are part of the story, so we'll start there. Then we'll lay out a card map of every roundtable, so the next three posts can go deep on subsets of the morning without losing the larger picture.

Open Space, in plain language

Open Space Technology was developed by Harrison Owen in the 1980s after he noticed that the best conversations at his own conferences kept happening during the coffee breaks. Instead of fighting that, he designed a format that is essentially structured coffee break.

The whole thing runs on four principles and one law. The principles are: whoever comes is the right people. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. And when it's over, it's over. The law is the Law of Two Feet: if you find yourself in a conversation where you're neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet and go somewhere else.

That last one is liberating. It removes the social cost of leaving a discussion that isn't serving you, which means people end up exactly where they should be. The room sorts itself.

The format's quiet genius is that the four principles and the one law are not aspirations. They are descriptions. They name what is going to happen anyway, which short-circuits the small social anxieties that usually hobble unstructured time. Nobody apologizes for arriving late, because whenever it starts is the right time. Nobody mourns a conversation that ran out of energy, because when it's over, it's over. Nobody worries that the wrong people showed up, because whoever comes is the right people. By the time the room understands the rules, the rules are already true. That gives every conversation that follows about ninety seconds' head start on substance.

How the morning was structured

Tammy structured the morning into three sessions. Within each session, attendees broke into parallel small groups around whichever question cards drew them. Five to seven tables ran simultaneously in each session. Each table was driven by a single card written by an attendee, and questions did not repeat across sessions. If a topic surfaced at a table in Session 1, that was its conversation, and the next two sessions tackled different questions on different tables.

There was one exception, and it's worth naming because it carries a signal. By Session 2, the AI conversation had drawn enough people that the format scaled to two parallel tables on the same question, both running at the same time, both arriving at their own conclusions. No other card on the wall pulled that kind of demand. AI was the only topic of the morning where the room overflowed its container.

That kind of demand-driven adjustment is what Open Space is built to allow. The structure flexed because the room asked it to. But the deeper signal is what the doubling told us about where the field actually is on AI. When two roomfuls of dome professionals converge independently on the same set of conclusions, that convergence is journalistically meaningful. Two tables, same hour, no cross-pollination, the same broad stance. That's a stronger signal than any single roundtable could have produced. Blog 3 takes the conclusions of those two tables seriously for that reason.

Each table was responsible for assigning a host and filing a single-page report-back form before the morning ended. Tammy collected those forms, alongside the wall of question cards and photographs of handwritten notes, and turned the lot into the official Open Space Sessions Report. That report is what this blog series is built from. The light uncertainty in some name spellings throughout the series reflects the fact that handwriting is handwriting, even at a working festival.

The forty-plus named participants documented across the morning came from a wide cross-section of the field. Fiske Planetarium, the Boston Museum of Science, the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, Discovery Dome, Worlds and the Center for Conscious Creativity, Cosmogenesis, GRX Immersive Labs, Critical Fusion, fig55, Digitalis, Elevation XR, True3D, the Giant Screen Cinema Association itself, plus several independent artists, composers, and technologists. That breadth is one reason the conversations cut as deep as they did.

Why we trusted the fulldome community

DFW has always been a working festival as much as a screening festival. Filmmakers, planetarium directors, distributors, technologists, and creative producers come not just to see work but to figure out what comes next for the medium. We've used panels and roundtables before, and they've been good. But panels are bottlenecks. The conversation goes through the people on stage, and the people in the audience hold their hands up and wait.

Open Space inverts that. It assumes the room is the expertise.

Tammy Barrett was the right person to host. As Executive Director of the Giant Screen Cinema Association, she has spent years working at the seam between large-format cinema and the dome world, and she knows how to hold space for a conversation without steering it. Her presence also signaled something we cared about. This wasn't a DFW-only conversation. It was a field-wide one.

One roundtable from the morning is worth singling out before we get to the rest. Callie Boyle hosted the Helping Introverts roundtable in Session 2 with the deceptively practical question of how to encourage open discussion in a shy group. The conversation she led produced specifics worth keeping. Structured networking. Eliminating awkwardness. Building connection opportunities and taking up space. The phrase that landed for everyone in the room was the difference between being given space and taking space.

Those specifics describe what the Open Space format itself was trying to do for the morning. The room held a meta-conversation about its own dynamics, and the resulting recommendations apply to every other dome event the field will run in the next decade. Conferences, panels, board meetings, pitch sessions, even film festival Q&As tend to over-favor the people most comfortable speaking first. The dome field is full of brilliant people who are not those people. Callie's table was, in effect, the field telling itself how to make sure the next ten years of conversations include the voices that have historically gone first to listen and last to speak.

The most quotable insight from her table was that there is a difference between being given space, which puts the burden on the speaker to claim it, and taking space, which is what introverts do once a structure invites them in. Open Space did the inviting on April 24. Other formats can do similar work, but only if they are designed for it. That insight is portable to anything DFW or its peers will run in the next decade.

The card map: every roundtable in one place

Eighteen roundtables ran across the morning. Below is a card map of all of them, organized by session, with the driving question, a key voice, and the line each table landed on. Posts 2 through 4 take a smaller subset of these and walk through them in depth. This card map is a reference. Whichever post you're reading, you can come back to this list and place each conversation in the morning's larger picture.

Session 1

Industry Roadblocks. Driving card: What is the biggest problem holding back the industry? Voice: Alec Warren, host; card written by Daniel Habib of True3D. Where it landed: marketing and audience are the field's structural gap; market the dome as a venue first.

Inclusive Venue. Driving card: How do we identify underserved audiences and include them in the immersive world? Voice: Thor Metzinger, Fiske Planetarium, host. Where it landed: co-produce with them, not for them; bridge community members; bilingual staff and visible identity.

Positive Impact. Driving card: How do we build programs and content made to impact humanity in a positive and evolving way? A genre? A common mission? Voice: Kate McCallum, Worlds and the Center for Conscious Creativity. Where it landed: outer activism and inner activism; name the genre; arts and media for well-being and healing.

Science and Spirit. Driving card: How can we curate recurring shows at the intersection of science and spirituality? Voice: Simon Haiduk, host; parallel card from Michel Lam, fig55. Where it landed: the value and market does exist; build, create; consider new venues purpose-built for this work.

Production Economics. Driving card: How can we develop a financial model for production that shows profit to attract investors? Voice: Michael Daut, host. Where it landed: create content that inspires; the field needs investor-ready proof points before a unified financial model.

Software and Hardware Integrity. Driving card: How can we manage storage and rendering with ever-increasing resolutions and frame rates? Voice: Dan Larson, host. Where it landed: treat as a planning problem, not a purchasing one; the field needs shared standards.

After-Hours Marketing. Driving card: What are some best practices in promoting and marketing ticketed evening dome shows? Voice: the After-Hours Marketing roundtable, contributors from Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, Museum of Science Boston, The Journey, and Cre8tory. Where it landed: pixel tracking, abandoned cart sequences, loyalty codes, varied time-slot programming, local openers, alumni chats.

Session 2

AI Use. Driving card: How can we utilize AI properly and not lose respect? Voice: Scott McKinney, Fort Collins Museum of Discovery; the topic drew enough demand that the format scaled to two parallel tables. Where it landed: ownership of the prompt; AI as pipeline optimization rather than image generator; process is part of how a work should be evaluated.

Live in the Dome. Driving card: What is the future of live events in dome theaters? Supporting live performance in the dome. Voice: Ed Lantz, framer. Where it landed: plug-in solutions like Dante and video-over-IP; SAT in Montreal, Berlin, and Hamburg as proof-of-concept venues; standards work needed.

Alt Content. Driving card: Will domes and planetariums differentiate the content they offer as topics other than astronomy and music become more popular? Voice: Nick Conant, Fiske Planetarium, card asker. Where it landed: as domes become less like planetariums they need to diversify content; alt content needs its own distribution and marketing infrastructure.

Licensing and Distribution. Driving card: How can my show stand out and be financially successful in distribution? Voice: Michael Daut, host; card cluster including Jonathan Williams's distribution-simplification card. Where it landed: distributors flying blind without venue feedback; affordable but profitable distribution with shared risk.

Helping Introverts. Driving card: How do you encourage open discussions in a shy group? Voice: Callie Boyle, host. Where it landed: structured networking; the difference between being given space and taking space; building connection opportunities.

Session 3

Storytelling. Driving card: Is there room for narrative or fictional stories in fulldome? How do tilted domes change the way stories are told? Voice: Cards from Kira Prince and Eddie Reuss; key voice from Michael Daut. Where it landed: theater on steroids, not a wrap for traditional cinema; yes there's room but who will do it?; audio is the attention director.

Post-Production QA. Driving card: What are best practices for optimizing fulldome post production? Voice: Matt Rowell, host. Where it landed: fix it in pre, not in post; TouchDesigner reprojection; spatial sound design as its own discipline; the VR camera as a human head.

Licensing Decision. Driving card: What are programming managers looking for in dome films they may license? Voice: Alec Warren, decision matrix. Where it landed: seven factors weighed at once: mission alignment, budget impact, audience potential, programming overlap, lifespan, revenue model, capacity.

Mainstreaming the Dome roundtable. Driving card: What can we do to get the immersive dome experience more into the mainstream beyond science and art? Voice: the Mainstreaming the Dome roundtable. Where it landed: articulate what the dome offers that nothing else can; the brand work the field hasn't done yet matters more than any single show.

Collaboration. Driving card: How can the giant screen and fulldome industries collaborate for mutual success? Voice: Karrie Berglund of Digitalis and Sean Ahearn of Elevation XR among the contributors. Where it landed: mission-driven and financially driven collaboration; standardize formats between GSCA and fulldome; enable smaller ideas to flourish.

DFW27 Workshops. Driving card: What practical workshops do you want to attend at Dome Fest West 2027? Voice: Thor Metzinger, host. Where it landed: doing instead of talking; in-dome workshops at user level; live TouchDesigner lectures; audio environmental design as a new festival category.

A field talking to itself

Across all three sessions, a few patterns kept emerging.

The first was that the dome field is creatively rich but structurally uneven. There are artists pushing the form, but the field doesn't yet have shared standards for sound, playback, or post-production. There are venues with passionate audiences, but the audience research that would describe those audiences clearly hasn't been built. There is distribution, but no financial model that consistently rewards risk.

The second was that nobody in the room was waiting for permission. Participants were already building, already collaborating, already trying to solve the structural problems on their own. What they wanted from each other was less a roadmap and more a network.

The third was the most encouraging. The willingness to share, across studios, planetariums, distributors, and adjacent immersive industries, was higher than we've ever seen it at this festival. The report-back forms are unusually concrete. Multiple tables proposed specific webinars. Multiple tables proposed conference work sessions to be carried into the next GSCA gathering. Multiple tables identified next-step research projects that, if executed, would meaningfully change the field's collective ability to argue for itself with funders and host institutions.

A few of those next steps are already in motion at DFW. Others are waiting for someone in the community to pick them up. If a particular thread from these sessions matters to you, the best thing you can do is reach out. We can help match interests with collaborators, surface the work that's already underway, and keep the conversation moving between festival cycles.

Tammy was the only person who sat with every report-back form from the morning. She read each table's notes, transcribed the handwriting, cross-referenced the participant lists, and turned the morning's eighteen separate conversations into a single document. The line that closed her summary, drawn from the entire morning rather than any one table, captured the ethic of the room better than any of us could have.

Tammy Barrett, GSCA

Read that sentence twice. The first half is the part the field has spent the last two decades earning. The dome is impactful. The medium can hold an audience. The work moves people. If you have ever sat under a dome and watched something land, you do not need to be convinced that the medium is powerful. The proof is on the ceiling. The room at DFW26 was made up of people who have spent their working lives proving exactly that, and the morning made clear that none of them feel any need to keep proving it.

The second half of Tammy's line is the part that's harder, and it's the part the next eighteen months will turn on. Building the systems around the medium means audience research the field can rally around. Marketing standards venues can adopt without having to invent each one. Distribution models that don't ask producers to negotiate from scratch every quarter. Technical norms that let work move between venues without re-mastering. Workshop pipelines that train the next generation of practitioners. Genre vocabulary that helps audiences and funders find the work. None of those is glamorous. All of them are the price of admission for a medium that wants to scale on its own terms rather than being absorbed into someone else's.

Tammy's diagnosis is the right one because it tells the field where to put its weight next. The talent is here. The work is here. The audiences are reachable. The infrastructure is what's missing, and infrastructure is what coordination produces.

What this morning produced you can actually use

Before we hand off to the rest of the series, it is worth being concrete about what the morning produced that a reader of this post can take to their own venue, studio, or institution and use this week.

If you run a venue, the After-Hours Marketing roundtable's playbook is sitting there waiting for you. Six tactics, none exotic, all standard practice in adjacent culture sectors, and most planetariums have not yet operationalized any of them. If you run a planetarium that programs evening shows, you can have pixel tracking and an abandoned cart sequence running by next quarter. If you produce dome content, the Licensing Decision matrix is the closest thing the field has to a programmer's checklist, and designing your distribution thinking around its seven factors will make your next pitch sharper. If you are a sound designer working in the dome, the Post-Production QA roundtable's emphasis on fixing it in pre is the cheapest workflow improvement you can make, and the Foley plugin Tom is building is the kind of thing the discipline has been quietly waiting for.

If you fund or partner with the dome field, the Industry Roadblocks roundtable's call for a coordinated audience data effort is the highest-leverage philanthropic investment available to the field right now. Underwriting that work would shift the trajectory of every other conversation in this series. The Inclusive Venue roundtable's request for dedicated co-production work sessions is the second-highest. The Collaboration roundtable's call for format standardization between GSCA and the fulldome community is the third.

If you are a working creator in the dome, the most important sentence in this post is probably Michael Daut's. The dome is theater on steroids, not a wrap for traditional cinema. Designing a dome show as if it were a flat film with curved edges is the most common mistake in the field, and the morning of April 24 was, among other things, the field collectively naming that mistake out loud.

What's next in this series

If you take one observation from this morning, take this one. The most urgent problem the field named was the audience and economics gap. Across multiple roundtables in different sessions, the diagnosis kept arriving at the same place. The dome field has more creative talent than it has shared operating language, and the language it most needs to build is about who its audience is and how the math of running a venue actually works. That's the focus of the next post in this series, publishing later this summer.

Post three, in the fall, goes inside the craft and technical conversations, including the line every post-production professional in the room kept repeating: fix it in pre, not in post. Post four, at the end of the year, asks what the dome is becoming, and what kind of community we need to be to make that real.

If you were in the room on the morning of April 24, this series is your record of what happened. If you weren't, it's your invitation to the conversation that's still going.

Subscribe to the DFW newsletter to get each post as it lands. We'll see you in July.

Voices at the table

With thanks to Tammy Barrett of the Giant Screen Cinema Association, who hosted the morning and compiled the report this series rests on, and to every named contributor across the eighteen roundtables. The names below appear in this post; the contributor list grows in posts 2 through 4 as each roundtable gets its own treatment.

• Tammy Barrett — GSCA, host of the Open Space morning

• Alec Warren — Industry Roadblocks host; Licensing Decision matrix

• Daniel Habib — True3D, Industry Roadblocks card asker

• Thor Metzinger — Fiske Planetarium, Inclusive Venue host and DFW27 Workshops host

• Kate McCallum — Worlds and the Center for Conscious Creativity, Positive Impact host

• Simon Haiduk — Science and Spirit host and card asker

• Michel Lam — fig55, Science and Spirit parallel card asker

• Michael Daut — Production Economics host and Licensing and Distribution host

• Dan Larson — Software and Hardware Integrity host

• Scott McKinney — Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, AI Use voice

• Ed Lantz — Live in the Dome framer

• Nick Conant — Fiske Planetarium, Alt Content card asker

• Jonathan Williams — Licensing and Distribution simplification card asker

• Callie Boyle — Helping Introverts host

• Kira Prince — Storytelling card asker

• Eddie Reuss — Storytelling card asker

• Matt Rowell — Post-Production QA host

• Karrie Berglund — Digitalis, Collaboration roundtable

• Sean Ahearn — Elevation XR, Collaboration roundtable

Further reading: Harrison Owen, A Brief User's Guide to Open Space Technology. Full session report compiled by Tammy Barrett, GSCA, available on request via tammy@giantscreencinema.com.