World Cafe Community

"I share, I appreciate, I experience joy": World Cafe in Russia

Our friend Raffi Aftandelian told us about a second World Cafe hosted by a corporate coaching company in Moscow. The World Cafe was entitled "Coaching is about change: I share, I appreciate, I experience joy."

He sent along this report in Word, for those among us who read Russian. Download Coaching WC

From John Inman

John Inman sent in this story of a World Cafe he and his colleague John Blakinger hosted in Oregon recently:

"I hosted a café with John Blakinger of Bend. We both were participants at the annual Symposium sponsored by The Performance Center and we partnered to deliver a powerful café on letting loose of the old story and moving to the new story. There were only 15 of us but the café was excellent.

John and I opened with a series of slides to frame the conversation with a theme that I drew from Peter Senge’s and Betty Sue Flower’s presentation at the 08 Pegasus conference. Based on this and some other concepts that John wove into the introduction, we had each table formulate a question that mattered based on what they drew from the slides. John and I participated at tables as well so a small café can and will work very well.

Of course we had paper on each table and markers. Dishes of smooth rocks instead of flowers set the stage for the peaceful setting.

Then rather than choose a question, we embraced all four questions and build conversations around the question at each table and allowed the learning to blend the insights organically.

After three rotations, we convened in circle and shared. I first led the team in a conversation to draw out insights from the process and reflect on the learning, companionship, and insights gained from the process. Then John led the team through sharing of the insights gained from each table based on each question.

I had not used the variation of the process before and was fascinated that see that each tables presentation overlapped so much based on the blending of ideas that we could barely discern that the questions being answered at each table were different. Wonderful process."

World Cafe hosted by Coach for Peace

From Coach for Peace and Association Resources, a World Cafe in the Geneva region of Switzerland and France, with some fabulous visuals - photography, video, doodles and drawings. Check out their website section all about the World Cafe!

German Mayors enjoy the World Cafe

In a totally Girl-Geek style, Gabriela Ender, creator of the OpenSpace-Online software, shared this little story with me via Plaxo:

"Several month ago our dear cooperation partners, the Association for German Towns, asked me to help to bring a group of innovative mayors into good dialog during a traditional face-to-face conference.

I suggested to do a 2hours World Café with them, they agreed and so in February 2009 they had their first World Café. In 2008 the Association had already conducted two OpenSpace-Online conferences with mayors (next OpenSpace-Online conferences for them are in planning). Now the time was ripe to allow also meaningful face-to-face dialogs among attendees (mayors) between panels and speaker sessions at their traditional conferences.

I prepared and facilitated the World Cafe as simple as possible, so that the process and I was at the same time a good role model for the mayors to take the World Cafe format into their towns to use it by themselves if appropriate.

It was fun for all the participants, for me and it was a big success. The spokesman of the Association for German Towns said, that our World Cafe session was the highlight of the entire 1,5 day conference. A few days later the Association put photos and a nice video about the whole conference at their website, but unfortunately only open for network members."

World Cafe in Korea

David Tamoschus recently sent this pdf with the story of a World Cafe he hosted for a multi-national company in Korea. They called their event a Space Cafe, and David's story includes many details of their unusual design.

Download the pdf here.

World Cafe in First Grade

Several heart-warming stories have come in lately about the World Cafe being used in schools with young children. Read this one about a World Cafe in First Grade, by Stacey Stevenson. Stacey is from the Explorer Elementary Charter School in San Diego, which is part of a network of nine charter schools and a graduate school of education. (the story was submitted by Jean Kluver):

World Café is a teaching technique that helps students think deeply about issues by asking them to find evidence of various trends and concepts in what they are reading.  At Explorer, we use World café often in the upper grades.

When we do World Café in first grade, we modify it quite a bit, since some of the children are not yet reading and writing and their attention spans are short. It actually can take us up to 2 or three weeks to prepare and go through the whole process. The text that we analyze is usually a picture book or a chapter book that I am reading to the children.  Last year, for example, I read them James and the Giant Peach and we did a World Cafe on several of the chapters.