OpenCon is a three-day event in the English countryside for everyone who knows that happy and honest relationships don’t have to be monogamous. It’ll combine discussions, workshops and socialising to give you a chance to meet like-minded people, to build our community and to celebrate its diversity.
2012 will be the third OpenCon, following on the back of the last two years’ hugely successful and sold-out events.
About Non-Monogamy
Sue, Joan, and Mary live together in a three-way relationship—they call themselves polyamorous. Lee and Kerry meet up with other like-minded couples to enhance their sex life—they call themselves swingers. Jamal and Toby didn’t let civil partnership stop them from cruising the gay scene together—they call theirs an open relationship. Like many other people, they’ve all discovered that happy and honest relationships don’t have to be monogamous, and chosen an alternative that suits them.
We don’t have to explore this new territory alone. OpenCon is our weekend to get together and share our experiences, our questions, the lessons we’ve learned and the joys we’ve experienced.
During the daytimes
In the daytimes OpenCon will be holding a number of facilitated discussion groups on a variety of topics related to non-monogamous living—an opportunity to hear how other people are living and to share your knowledge and experience.
Discussions at OpenCon are organised into “workshops”—discussion periods of just over an hour with volunteer facilitators. The facilitator’s job is not to be the “expert” on the topic, but to help discussion flow and ensure everyone who wants to has a chance to have their say. There will be multiple workshops on at once.
If you don’t fancy any of the workshops on at a given time, there will also be space open during the day for relaxing and socialising.
In the evenings
In the evenings there will be space for socialising with a community of people who choose to live differently.
Children
OpenCon is an over-18 only event.
Costs
Full participation in OpenCon costs £90 per person.
This includes the full weekend of OpenCon activities, a hostel-style bed for two nights, and all meals (which include vegan and gluten-free options – more here.) Osho Leela also has plenty of double rooms available at an additional cost of £35 per night. There are a limited number of wheelchair-accessible rooms available: please contact us when booking to reserve one.
Of the base cost of £90 per person, £80 is remitted to the venue. The remaining £10 is used to cover the costs of printing, entertainment, and participant emergencies. No one associated with running OpenCon takes any money for their work, and all organisers pay full price for attending.
What OpenCon is not
OpenCon is all about talking and socialising. It’s not a sex club, a fetish club, or a dating service. See our code of conduct for more detail. We have no problem with those sorts of events—we just want to run something different. This is a place to meet new friends.
Your privacy
Not everyone at OpenCon will want the world to know the intimate details of how they live their lives. The code of conduct mandates that you must respect the privacy of other attendees, and we will not be passing on your details to anyone else.
Nonetheless, you should be aware that some attendees may not respect your privacy; for all we know, some attendees could be undercover journalists working for the tabloid press. If you aren’t entirely public about everything you discuss at OpenCon, you may wish for example to be guarded about your real name and other identifying details.
Glossary
It often seems that no two participants in this community can agree exactly on any definition of the words we use, so this glossary can only be a rough guide—we hope you find it useful.
- An open relationship (sometimes open marriage) is one that includes the possibility for either partner to have sex with people outside the relationship with the other party’s knowledge and consent
- A polyamorous relationship is one that’s open to more than one loving and intimate relationship. More information on polyamory in the UK.
- Poly is short for “polyamorous”. Incidentally, you might hear someone say “George is poly”, but I’ve never heard someone say “George is a poly”—it’s an adjective, not a noun.
- Swingers are couples who get together with other couples, or sometimes other individuals, as a way of enhancing their sex lives.
- Non-monogamy is an umbrella term that covers the whole spectrum of honest and negotiated alternatives to monogamy.
- Compersion is the opposite of jealousy—the joy of a loved one being made happy by another. In Britain we might say we feel frubbly.
OpenCon has grown out of Polyday, which has been run in various cities in the UK over the last several years.
