Welcome to World Café Europe!

Welcome to the World Café Europe blog, which started as a way to harvest and share our collective experiences, thoughts, and insights from the first World Café Europe gathering, hosted in Dresden 3-5 May, 2007.

Since then, World Café Europe has continued to thrive and this year's World Café Europe Gathering was held in Bilbao, Spain on June 5-7th.

One of the primary design principles of the World Café is to welcome and encourage a diversity of perspectives, so please help make this space a true café expression by adding your voice to the conversation (in whatever language you choose) through the 'comments' link below. Your contribution is very much appreciated.

Comments

[Margaret Warton-Woods]

Thank you Amy! Who can resist your warm welcome? This being my first ever contribution to a blog, I had intended to write something on the train from Luxembourg to Dresden. This would have given me the time to reflect carefully first, to say something that is hopefully meaningful and to check my spelling. But of course conversation isn’t like that. So I just jump in and hope it will be OK as it comes. And I hope others will jump in too! Looking forward to meeting old and new friends…

[Wasseem AlKury]

I've had a great world cafe experience at my uni in University of Northern Virginia - Prague. We named it MBA cafe. We discussed two main issues. The first one was, How would a great MBA experience look like? and the second was, What will MBA study do for our Job, society and future. We had many ideas at the first round of talk with my group.

After a small period of time, we changed groups, and i was one of the ambassadors of my group. We exchanged ideas with other groups, it was so helpful to get out with helpful results concerning our MBA study. We drew, wrote, lightened some candles and it was very relaxing atmosphere.

I advice everyone to participate in a world cafe for any subject of interest. Beleive me, it really helps. Wasseem

[Diogo Pereira]

As Wasseem, my collegue from UNVA - Prague, I really harvested some interesting thoughs from our experience at the MBA Café. It proved to be one of the most relaxed and, not only, but also because of this, enlightfull experiences in mind-sharing i ever had. It's defenitely an experience to remember and, most importantly, to reproduce!

[Muhabat Raziyeva]

Hello everybody. I absolutely agree with my group-fellows in UNVA Diego and Wasseem about the world cafe. It is really one of the most nice opportunities to share your opinion, to get new information. Such cafes do really create a living company of efficient dialogue around questions that concern in the real work. I recommend everyone to participate in such really helpfull cafes. Good Luck!!

[Nurzhan Abenov]

It was my first exprience in participating in Cafe conversations. I liked it very much, because it can be very helpfull to find new ideas or to solve problems. It is some kind of brainstorm. There is nice, relax and friendly atmosphere. Thanks my teacher Mr. Morbin who gave me and my collegues in UNVA such opportunity and experience.

[fabiola]

Hello everyone:

Last week in our MBA Management Communication course we have the opportunity to experiment The World Coffee experience. Our class had created an alive network of conversation around important subjects like How might our MBA experience look like? and What might a great MBA experience benefit Life,Future and society?

We founded The World Coffee as a creative process, where one shares and it experiences the knowledge. The process of Wold Coffee help us to involve people in an authentic conversation, to explore opportunities and generate creative and innovating ideas.

The place was our cafeteria with a warm environment, natural light and comfortable seats, a hospitable space, where all feel free to offer their better thoughts. The most important was that we experimented in direct a collective intelligence, an alive network and an authentic dialogue...

Fabiola R.
UNVA-Prague

[Martin Kačeňák, Lenka Valentová, František Nikl]

This was our first “World Café” time. Despite theoretical preparation about procedures, we were unable to really understand magic of moment, intimacy, freedom and unity of minds created by “The Café”.

In preparation we together select challenging topic for us, and we get in. Prepared but steal untouched, and why pretend – I was bit suspicious. After few moments pleasant atmosphere let us discussing topic unusual way – expressing our thoughts with drawing on table (paper covered), freely and minds united. If someone needed get in unity, he asks and we explain our thoughts. In this moment (writing) I realized how strange it must look like for not informed, to see us all (almost 20) be comfortably pressed in small coffee break room.

Our academically selected topic “What might a great MBA experience look like”, ends described as a cup of tea, growing flower, orange or fire of tea candle. Isn't it ridiculous? For us it was something amazing, and we were able to find comparisons and metaphors easily and happily.

I asked my “Café-mates” for their impressions. Here are Lenka's impressions - “Through World Café I have realized how much is our day-to-day contact with other people constricted and how much are our lives under the influence of prejudice, generalization and assumption. We live our lives and we act as we are expected to act. We think narrowly and mostly we can’t imagine that there is a huge world outside of our daily bracket.

For the first I was quiet shocked and I didn’t know how to face World Café challenge. After some time, after I put away my “worries” and “conservatism”, I realized that some deeper, probably intuitive understanding came to me unexpectedly. Now I know, that this experience, in spite of the fact that our café was really short, make us more sensitive and more open to deeper and wider understanding of hidden meanings in conversation than we have before.”

Fanda expressed his experience - “This facilitating technique is very interesting and new to me. It was a good experience. It was a nice and pleasant way how to share ideas and work on some given question or topic. The pleasing arrangement of the tables helped a lot to more opened mind atmosphere. I think that the given time (which was 20 minutes in this case) wasn’t enough to cover the given question. The presence of different people from different cultures enables us to open a great discussion with a lot of aspiring ideas. I believe that a longer time limit for this question would allow us to elaborate even deeper answers. After all, I think that this café was a great experience for all of us and opened the channel for us to share ideas and look for the answers.”

You may wonder why we are so positive about World Café description. Than I advice you to get touch with it – get your own experiences. If you are already so far, we are happy to be “united” with your minds :-)

[Amy Lenzo]

I am inspired and so moved reading these wonderful comments about your different experiences with the World Café!

Thank you so much, each one of you - your willingness to share like this is a blessing to all of us who read your words!

[Jan Rais, David Chomat, Danniel Mardziev, Martina Wojtylova]

Our impression from the Cafe is rather positive. Neither of us has ever done it before so it was a completely new experience, and we must say, we were surprised at how well it went. All of us brought their own ideas and developed and expanded ideas of others. Based on the discussion we arrived at a conclusion that we expect our MBA experience to lead us through our lives (both professional and personal) to a succesful and happy life, although it may involve some "suffering" during studying. All of us definitely want to use the cafe technique in our professional carrier.

[Elena Bidagaeva]

Hi, everyone!
At first I would like to thank our teacher Dennis Morbin for carrying out very interesting classes and providing us with brief and consice information.
It was the first time when I heard about „the world cafe“ as soon as I started attending his lessons. Several weeks ago we practised activity at the university. In the beginning it was pretty difficult for us to follow it because it was new for everyone and we had very scarce idea of what we had to do. It is known that first experience is always difficult. In between, we had an interesting disscusion on the topic of Cafe. The questions being asked were as following :
1. What might a great MBA experience look like?
2. How might our MBA benefit our future life?
As the activity went on, I was finding myself being drawn into ever deeper understanding of the proccess. During the conversation one finds out that the problem or question is more deeper than expected. Every cafe participant had his own point of view, experience to share and suggestion to propose.
As I am one of the youngest students in my group, I could hardly imagine what MBA would bring me in future and what my needs for it were. My participation in the World Cafe caused me to realize the sense of MBA and what I should expect from my current studies. The World Cafe helped me to understand more about the MBA programm and its perspectives. Also it was very exciting that the participants were from overseas countries and different ages. By the end of the activity we had a full list of shared views. And one of the most significant things that I would underline was a situation where everyone felt himself relaxed and natural. I believe it opens doors to broad thinking, brings in creativity as well as contributes to fruitful exchange of knowledge.
It is very intresting to listen to one’s answers carefully and understand the problem. Finally one can come to very suprising outcomes which would not be achieved if came on one’s own, for example during usual dialogue or meeting. It is very effective when everyone contributes his own part to discussion and final decision is achieved cooperatively based on shared opinions.
I find the World Cafe to be very effective and helpful in my future career. Using this method is one of the easiest ways to find a solution to a problem and desired outcomes. At this stage, I intend to apply the method of the World Cafe in future steps to building up team and running business.

[tamsin rose]

Hi, I work in Brussels and I am interested in exploring how world cafe concepts can be used for individuals and groups that don't have a common language. At the moment we tend to use simultaneous translation but that does not allow the informality of small group, round table conversations. Any ideas?

[Wasseem Al-Kury]

Hello Tamsin:
I read what you wrote. I believe that for having better results from a world cafe, it is better to talk in a common language that everyone can understand. This makes participants feel in what others are talking about. I dont believe that having a simultaneous translation is a bad idea, but i prefer that all participants can understand each others easily. Most common language are English and French, so people might use these two language for internation World Cafe. Maybe other people might have other suggestions, but that was mine :) Sincerely, Wasseem

[Sabine Soeder]

Hi Tamsin,
on the Dresden Gathering we've had a World Café in the Frauenkirche in german and english language. one part of the tables was in german and the other part in english. The moderation was prepared in both languages. I think it is possible to have tables with two languages and a translater - which can be an participant in the role of the table-host, speaking both languages or an professional translater, sitting beside the table-host. Important is the harvesting from diffrent languages to one and than back to the diffrent...for the preparation it is important to give more time for the single steps, because everything has to be said two-times.

The next european world-café gathering will be next year in Bilbao, in Spain. I think there will be also tables with spanish and english translaters.

[Ria Baeck]

Hello Tamsin, great to hear you are based in Brussels! We were experimenting the last two years with a World Café format that we called Pro Action Café. Next gathering is on Nov 9th. You can look it up here: http://thehubbrussels.wordpress.com/

The facilitation is done in English, but because of the international commumnity in Brussels, sometimes a table is held in Dutch or French or German... maybe we see you there?

[Eliska Stadler]

Hi everybody,

with a great interest i have read about the world cafe. I have been introduced to "world cafe" at our first class of MBA in Prague by our professor Dennis Morbin and with my classmates we had a few rather interesting conversations on the whole subject.

[Vijay]

Hi everybody,

I read what you wrote. I believe that for having better results from a world cafe, it is better to talk in a common language that everyone can understand. This makes participants feel in what others are talking about. I dont believe that having a simultaneous translation is a bad idea, but i prefer that all participants can understand each others easily. Most common language are English and French, so people might use these two language for internation World Cafe. Maybe other people might have other suggestions, but that was mine :) Sincerely, Vijay