World Cafe Community

Announcing Level Two

We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting registrations for Hosting World Cafés: The Fundamentals. Level Two of The World Café Signature Learning Program series, this educational event is collaboratively offered by The World Cafe and Fielding Graduate University and co-presented by Fielding Faculty member Bo Gyllenpalm and Amy Lenzo of the World Café Community Foundation. 

The course will be a robust 4.5 week process delivered online through Fielding's distance learning technology and 2 2-hour synchronous events on Sunday May 6th and Sunday June 3rd using MaestroConference. Graduates will receive 6 CEUs.
Download a flyer for the course here.

See the Fielding web page for more details - including the complete course schedule - and registration. More information on the Signature Learning Programs is available on the World Café website.

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We are very excited about this partnership with Fielding. There been a close association between the two organizations for a long time, but this projects brings us into new territory. We welcome the opportunity it opens for the entire World Cafe community - to secure continuing educational and professional accreditation for World Café work, research, and learning programs, and to benefit from the experience and academic excellence that working with Fielding brings.

In addition, this course is a rare opportunity to work with two of the leading pioneers who have brought the World Cafe processes and principles into the online environment (see their articles on this subject in World Café Publications). Bo Gyllenpalm pioneered the use of World Café in an asynchronous online environment starting with the Masters course Organizational Development Concepts and Methods he presented at Fielding back in 2000, and Amy Lenzo has been following his lead and evolving "real time", or synchronous, World Cafés online since 2008 - see the stories on StoryNet.

Here's a statement from Bo:

I am proud and excited about the cooperation between the World Café Community Foundation and Fielding Graduate University. I have been working on this for the last 5 years and my vision is for Fielding to be the academic home for the World Café like Case Western Reserve University is the home of Appreciative Inquiry.

The World Café has been used a lot at Fielding after Juanita Brown presented her dissertation at Fielding, ”The World Café; Living Knowledge through Conversations that Matter”. Having been on her dissertation committee and working with her for more than 17 years it is my pleasure to present an academic online World Café course at Fielding awarding 6 CEU credits.

This 4.5 week online World Café Signature Learning Level 2 course provides a fundamental understanding of the World Café theory and method, applying the World Café principles to bring forth the creative power of conversations and engage questions that matter. Participants will collaboratively develop the capacity to use the World Café design principles in their own lives and work, and gain a basic understanding of the World Café hosting practices.

Bo Gyllenpalm, PhD
Fielding Adjunct Faculty and Trustee

 

World Café Signature Learning Programs

We have now scheduled our next set of Level One World Café Signature Learning Programs!

We will be offering these learning programs in three two-hour sessions online - one in January 2011, and one in February 2012.

Each one is timed to be convenient and accessible to people in different parts of our international community, so you can choose the one that works best for you. 

January 2012
Level One Online - The Americas & Asia/Australia
Offered online in three two-hour sessions
January 6th, 9th, and 11th
(in Asia/Australia that is Jan 7th, 10th, & 12th)
5pm - 7pm Pacific Time
REGISTER HERE

 

February 2012
Level One Online - The Americas & Europe
Offered online in three two-hour sessions
February 15th, 17th, and 19th
8am - 10am Pacific Time
REGISTER HERE

 

We call them Learning Programs rather than trainings, because while you will come out of the series (Levels One to Three) well grounded in the art and craft of hosting World Café, the process is one of collaborative learning rather than pedagogical instruction. Interactive and experiential, these programs are held in an atmosphere of shared inquiry and mutual support.

 

Start your own "learning journey" into the magic of the World Café by registering for one of these introductory Level One events now!

 

Level One is a pre-requisite for the Level Two Signature Learning Programs, so you'll want to take one of these currently-scheduled programs to prepare for our Level Two course being offered online in May 2012 in collaboration with Fielding Graduate University.

Read more about World Café Signature Learning Programs here.

 

If you would like to contribute a scholarship to one or more of the many people who would love to participate in this program but are prevented by financial limitations, please make your contribution using the "Give" button in the left column - be sure to indicate your wishes in the PayPal text field provided.

What the World Café Makes Possible

From Ben Roberts of weDialogue, on what his engagement with the World Café has made possible for him:

On the occasion of this “Harvest Fund Drive,” I find myself reflecting back on what has been an incredible personal journey in which the Foundation has played a key role. A year and a half ago, I began an inquiry into the power and joy of engaging in “conversations that matter,” in the context of my involvement in the political initiatives of “the Coffee Party.” This led me immediately to The World Café as a process and to the work of the Foundation. There I found an inspiring array of resources and an incredibly responsive, sincere, generous and dedicated community of practice that was eager to support me. Talk about “creating hospitable space!” You can read a series of posts in the StoryNet section of our wonderful Online Community describing my efforts; here are links to part 1, part 2 and part 3).

As I learned more about the magic of large group dialogic processes, my interest quickly morphed from excitement about finding a set of tools to apply to this specific political initiative to a sense that I had discovered new and fertile ground for my life’s work in a much broader context. I became especially taken with the possibility for weaving these processes together with the incredible convening power of the internet. Here, the Foundation’s director of global communications Amy Lenzo proved to be particularly supportive. One of the world’s most experienced hosts of emergent dialogue online, Amy generously volunteered to teach me, connect me with resources and even to co-host many of my earliest efforts in convening virtual conversation.

Benjamin is back!

Hey there, I am back :)

I've been away from my role as a host for the Online Community for a few months due to an trip full of amazing experiences with my KaosPilot team in Bogotá, Colombia and some travels afterwards. 

Meanwhile The World Café has gotten a new website and soon the Online Community too will get an update in look & feel.

My role will still be to care for the online community - to approve and welcome new members and make sure they find their way around, as well as offer some potential conversations, groups or people on the site that might be interesting to connect to based on my awareness of the social landscape. I'd like to experiment more and more with social algorithms that I program to make sense of data and find meaningful connections in an abundance of possibilities. On my blog you can see some experiments of mine in that direction.

Here's a little graph that I created from the World Café community member data, using the dates people joined. The red line shows the growth of the community members from 0 to 3440 from it's first day of existence (May 8th, 2009) to day 834 (August 20th, 2011). The blue lines show the number of people that joined per day - the peak was on day 75 when 150 people joined :)

 

So, as you can see, I am inquiring into ways of telling the story of an online community, mirroring back its potential and connecting the members to each other... both by using my social intuition/care and by utilizing my humble but ambitious programming skills to harness meaningful insights from the data we are all providing through our online presence and interactions.

Soon I'd like to offer a tool where you can (if you want) find people who use similar words on their profile or a location search that allows you to find community members within a given radius from your location. I hope that will help you meet interesting people near you as well as be of benefit in your travels! 

Sunny greetings from Aarhus in Denmark,

Benjamin

Community for the 21st Century

We finally have the story of weDialogue's first session of the "Conversations for the 21st Century" series up in StoryNet! Here's an added enhancement you will only see here: an audio recording of the round table of conversation starters with Peter Block, Sarah Whiteley and Maria Scordialos, and Nancy White:

Just to get you to want to see more, here's a sneak peak of Susan Kelly's graphic recording of the conversation starters (click to see it full size):

Conversations for the 21st Century

World Cafe Online Services partner WeDialogue is launching a series of free, interactive public conversations called Conversations for the 21st Century. These events will be telephone-based and use a World Cafe format. Each will focus on a different topic of significance for life in the 21st Century - economics, health, the environment, etc. - and feature a triad of "conversation starters" (thanks to the Heartland community for this term).

The three conversation starters are chosen for their diversity of perspective and together they will seed the conversation with insights based on their work in the subject area.

The first of the series, Community for the 21st Century, is happening on April 1st and will feature Peter Block, Nancy White, and Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whiteley as conversation starters.

Come, be part of the conversation!

More about the Community for the 21st Century session.
or REGISTER NOW (you must register to participate)

More about the Conversations for the 21st Century series.

 

March Community Cafe

Benjamin Degenhart and I are hosting our second online Community Cafe together on March 10th.

Come join us!

All the details (including a link to register - you must register to participate - are on the community calendar. We look forward to welcoming you...

 

Join us for a World Cafe at the Enlightened Business Summit Oct 29

World Cafe co-founder Juanita Brown and Online Cafe pioneer Amy Lenzo are teaming up to host an online World Cafe as the culminating session of a week-long online "Enlightened Business Summit" starting October 25. This is a great opportunity to experience an online Cafe geared specifically to a business audience - if you've been curious to experience for yourself just how powerful an online World Cafe can be, please join us. All the Summit sessions, including the World Café, are free, and we'd love to see you there, as we are exploring the use of this medium for hosting World Cafes not only in business, but in NGOs and other organizational and community settings.

Moving from Insight to Action: A World Café Strategic Dialogue will be held Friday, October 29th, from 1-2:30pm PST / 4-5:30pm EST and we'll be staying an extra 1/2 hour to extend the conversation for those who want to explore further.

Click here to register and find out more about the other sessions. The Summit is co-hosted by Chip Conley, an inspiring business leader and one of the most popular speakers at this year's TED conference.

You can participate in as many calls as you like and interact with both the featured leaders and other participants via the fabulous MaestroConference platform, which is phone based and easily connects you to others around the world for exciting exploration and engagement. We've begun to use this platform very successfully for a whole range of World Cafe style dialogues.

By registering you'll also get free access to the full library of recordings from the Summit.

Please share this invitation with your friends and allies - all are welcome to participate.

Warm Wishes,

Juanita Brown and Amy Lenzo

P.S. If you're interested in learning more about World Cafe Online Services or for help in hosting your own conversations, please contact Amy Lenzo.