World Cafe Community

Alex Bretas

I was having a Skype conversation the other day with David Isaacs, co-founder of the World Cafe, and a young World Café host named Alex Bretas Vasconcelos from Sao Pablo, Brazil.  

Alex had called us together to talk about an educational initiative he's just finished crowd-sourcing funds for called "Education Outside the Box" (check out his video - it has English subtitles - and scroll down to hear a video message of support from Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Café).

During our conversation, Alex started talking about his experience as a participant in one of the first Hosting World Café: The Fundamentals courses we hosted at Fielding. It was exciting to me to hear how strong its impact had been on him. Here's an excerpt from what he said:

 

After giving permission for me to pull out this piece of our conversation, he asked me if I wanted him to write something about his experience, so of course I said yes. Here's what he wrote:

It was a wonderful time taking the World Cafe Signature Learning Program, since it was both a challenge and an opportunity to me to get in touch with people from all around the world and practice my English. Beyond that, I was deeply curious to take a better look at the World Cafe, and at that time I was beginning my personal journey of discovery when it comes to host conversations that matter.

It was also an opportunity for me to read Juanita Brown's dissertation, a masterpiece which is always coming back at me in diverse forms. Now, I have a deeper knowledge about hosting practices both in a theoretical-reflexive level and in a experiential level, and the Signature Learning Program was co-responsible for that.

Peer-Learning

The World Cafe Hosting: The Fundamentals course we're hosting next month through the Institute of Social Innovation at Fielding Graduate University is offered in a peer-learning format.

"...What the @#!* does that mean?!" you may ask.

Well ... let's start with what peer learning ISN'T, at least in this case.  
Peer learning isn't being left to your own devices without guidance or attention. My co-presenter Bo Gyllenpalm and I will be paying close attention to your learning process, and we'll be there to respond to your questions and offer help at crucial times.

Peer learning isn't about an unstructured environment. This course has been carefully designed as an immersion into the World Cafe method, and the principles that give the method its form. Deepening your understanding of these principles will give you the solid ground you need to design, host, and harvest World Café events in any sector, and help you evolve your hosting practice no matter what your level of experience.

Peer learning doesn't use the standard one-to-many model of education, although you will have access to all the written and multi-media resources you need, as well as engagement with some of the most experienced and innovative World Cafe hosts in the world.

There will be weekly assignments and expectations, but within that structure you are the one that determines the pace, and ultimately the depth, of your learning.

But peer learning isn't just student-led learning; it's an interactive, participatory process that relies on real engagement. You have a lot of responsibility in this course - for your own learning, yes, but even more importantly, for the level of your engagement with others. In this course, your peers are your most powerful allies; the depth of your engagement with them will determine the depth of both their learning and yours.

Make no mistake - this course will ask a lot of you. It's not something you can skate through and watch a video later to catch up on. It is a robust, professional-level learning experience at a premier graduate learning university. You will come out of it with academic and professional credit, and a foundation for your World Café hosting practice that you simply could not get otherwise, even after years of practice on your own. Why? Well one reason is because you have a circle of quality peers to learn with and from.

There are research studies and significant statistics to back this up, but on one level peer learning is just common sense. If you think about, it's the way we as human beings have always learned - from and with each other. And it's one of the World Café's basic premises that together we know more than any one of us alone could possibly know.

The fact that we all learn and grow through the networks of meaningful conversation that make up our lives and work is the foundation of Conversational Leadership. And it's key to many of the principles that inform not only World Cafe hosting practice, but all participatory engagement. In other words, it's a great muscle to build and keep well-exercised.

Peer-learning is not just a one-way street, either. Bo and I both learn a LOT from participants every time we offer this course - about the course and what will make it better (this will be the 5th one we’ve offered so you KNOW it’s going to be great :-), but also about our own hosting practice and what makes us better, more effective World Café hosts.

So come join us - we look forward to learning with you! (The 2014 course starts September 28th, and the early-bird registration discount ends September 8th)

In a Place Called Home

Poem & photograph offered by David Isaacs, co-founder of the World Café

In a far away place that seems a lot like a place called Home,

there lives a small voice who speaks softly and calmly.

It says:  Awaken and Stand Up and Listen!!!

Listen to the breath of the surf lapping at the shore of your soul.

Notice its’ continuous ebb and flow....

Reflect your attention on it in the same way that the moon and sun touch its surface.

Allow it to wash over you, caress you, provide nourishment and courage

to breathe, to walk, to embrace its’ patterns of being.

In this place called Home look around again and listen again with the surf’s rhythm in the background of your awareness.  The voice speaks again:

Go forth and seek other beings who have questions
and invite them to sit with you by your hearth
Then breathe all of your questions into the fire
Allowing those few with deepest meaning to emerge
and honor them as sacred words
and allow them to enter your collective heart
and let them be there in Peace and Quiet.

Until again a new question emerges in your midst
which you may trust is one that is shared in other places
all over the Earth.
In this manner your question is mirrored by other listeners
and you may now remember into the consciousness
that these sacred questions have brought to light
in this place called Home.

This place called Home is like a cafe
where the community comes together to share
their ideas, insights, challenges, opportunities
and, of necessity, their deepest questions.

This Home Cafe has brothers & sisters coming together in countless spaces & places
The communities of Home Cafes are a World Cafe
where all conversations and questions are united
in common cause to common creativity.

In this way humanity is awakening to the nature of Home
and seeks its way forward to that memory of the future
in which we remember our connection to life
to coming Home to our community of Peace.

Death Cafés

Has anyone heard about, hosted, or been part of a Death Café?

They are impromptu cafes in homes or literally in cafes, where people gather to talk about their experiences, feelings, fears, ideas, etc. about death. I've been hearing about them a lot lately and am really intrigued ... given the power of the subject, I bet they can be quite amazing.

Here's an article about one held at the edge of Beachy Head - an infamous "suicide cliff" on the South Downs in East Sussex where I used to live. The article is by Claire Davies and was published in Aeon Magazine.

Comments from 2013 Hosting Fundamentals Courses

Here's what graduates of the 2013 course are saying about the World Cafe Hosting Fundamentals course at Fielding:

"I am a French facilitator based in Paris.  As I was about to start my own little company, I took Amy and Bo's class between February and April of 2013.  At the end of April, a facilitator that had trained me before called me up and asked "Is your World Café training over yet?"  She had a major client who was ready for a series of World Cafés with 100+ people each, the dates were changed and it turned out that she wouldn't be available.  Because I had been trained by Amy and Bo, I was the person my trainer chose to call, which provided me with my very first paid assignment as a freelance facilitator!  I teamed up with a consultant and with a fantastic graphic facilitator and I hosted several sessions for that client.  Our sponsor couldn't believe the level of energy that was in the room!  At the end of the first World Café, a participant came to me and said "I can see it now: I'm not alone"!

* * *

"I'm loving this programme, and find it really helpful in getting me to think more about what I'm doing. I can't remember anything I've done in years that has been so practical and 'right on'. Thank you!"

* * *

It was such a powerful session, just like the whole course. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be part of this class and I think it helped me keep centered and positive in a very challenging time in my work life.

* * *

Learning From Each Other: 10 Tips for Maximizing Hosting World Café: The Fundamentals

10 Key Tips, gleaned from wisdom generated during the Hosting World Café: The Fundamentals courses at Fielding:

1) Complete the Reading Before the Course Starts
This is probably the most valuable advice we heard, and the one most often repeated. The course is fast-paced and once it starts you'll want to immerse yourself fully in the assignments and peer conversation. Having done the required pre-reading will give you confidence, valuable knowledge, & a solid basis for fruitful participation.

2) Post Your Weekly Assignments Early in the Week
You'll be doing the bulk of your coursework in rotating World Cafe "tables"; each week you'll join a new table and get a new assignment. Each assignment has two parts: 1) responding to a question, and 2) building on each other's responses.

This is a team process, so by posting your response right away on Monday you give not only yourself but your whole table the best chance of receiving maximum benefit from the week's knowledge-building process.

3) Devote Regular Times to Your Coursework
This course has a regular rhythm and finding your own beat within it will help you keep up and get the most from the assignments and your World Cafe conversations. You'll find your own pace, but most participants find that devoting an hour or so, at least two or three times a week, is a good rhythm.

4) Fill in Your Profile & Read Each Other's
One of the challenges of working online is getting to know your fellow participants without being able to see each other or get visual cues. One of the simplest and most useful ways to learn about each other is by utilizing participant profiles.

Upload a photo of yourself and share personal details in your profile that will give others an idea of who you are beyond your role or position. Give links to websites that will reveal more about you if you have them. When you join a new table, start out by reading the profiles of the people you are with. Refer back to people's profile often to get perspective on who you are working with and gain insight into their thinking.

5) Participate, Participate, Participate
Given the largely peer-learning format of this course, the key to receiving the most value and best quality of learning from it is, quite simply, participation. If ever there was a case to prove the old maxim "you get out what you put in", this is it. What's most interesting here is that in this course, as in life, you're not in it alone. The quality of your participation automatically raises the bar for everyone else, as theirs does for you. Your active contribution can help stimulate a culture of learning and collaboration that yields exceptional results for everyone, not only during the course but also extending far beyond it. 

6) Attend the Optional Study Groups
One of the most popular improvements we've made to this course over time has been to extend opportunities for personal engagement through additioal optional "real time" sessions. These synchronous sessions are highlights for many participants and they are highly recommended. Use this time to learn from senior World Cafe hosts who will join us for occasional session, engage each other and utilize "real time" conversation to understand your weekly assignments, and get support for anything you need help with.

7) Frequent the Watercooler
While the ongoing discourse of the curriculum will be happening at the Café tables, we also have a "watercolor" or forum where informal or over-arching conversation can take place. Many participants in the course have said they wished they would have made more use of it, and asked that we put more focus on it when offering new courses. This is also the place where you can ask general questions of the group or request help from the presenters, as well as explore other topics you find valuable.

8) Take Advantage of the Senior World Cafe Hosts Presenting Your Course
This is a rare opportunity to be mentored by Bo Gyllenpalm, one of the early European contributors in the development of the World Cafe process and a pioneer in applying the World Café principles and method in an asynchronous environment. Bo was on the committee for Juanita Brown's dissertation (which is one of the core reading texts for this course) and an extraordinary resource. We don't know long Bo will be a presenter, so work with him while you can.

Bo's co-presenter Amy Lenzo pioneered the World Café process in a synchronous online environment, and has been a key member of the World Cafe Community Foundation since 2005, guiding the development of the World Café Signature Learning Programs since its launch. Working with her offers excellent opportunities for deepening your grasp of this work, understanding the new modalities for presenting it, and engaging the larger world of World Cafe practitioners.

9) Come Prepared for an Adventure
Although it is offered through an accredited graduate university and can be quite academically rigorous, this course is perhaps a little different than classes you may have encountered in the past. It calls for opening your mind to new possibilities and suspending reliance on old beliefs and assumptions that may be limiting you. It asks you to embrace the idea that the wisdom you seek may be standing right before you in the hearts & minds of people who were strangers before the course started. Embrace this spirit of adventure to really receive the treasure waiting for you on the journey.

10)  Claim your Credits
The course offers 6 CEUs (continuing education units) and 19 CCEUs (coaching continuing education units), which you can claim with Fielding's help to support your ongoing professional requirements and/or extend your academic or professional credentials.

Gems from the last Fielding World Café Learning Program

Here are some comments excerpted (without attribution) from Capstone Papers written by participants in the Hosting World Café: The Fundamentals course with Fielding Graduate University last Spring. They are answering the question "Describe what you have learned in this course":

"This course has taught me many nuances of working with diverse perspectives and combining many styles of communication. It has deepened my appreciation of the art of finding the best question for the issue. To test the questions for latent assumptions. To make sure the question will reach for the sharing of people’s stories and experience rather than ask for a binary answer or statement of dogma."

 

"A deeper level of responsibility showed up in relation to my role as a table member. To be active and to be present matters to the quality of the conversation and to the overall well-being of the group.  And deeper still is the responsibility that I am carrying away- to invite and engage dialogue around conversations that matter..to do with what I've learned something productive and positive and powerful enough that spirits are called together."

 

"What's fascinating is that a simple process based on principles can generate such deep connections. And of course the fact that while the actual experience for the participants could last only for a few hours, the rigor that is required in setting the context, diversity of the group to ensure inclusiveness and the laser sharp questions that get people to pause and share from deep within. What I absolutely love about the process is how quickly it helps people drop closely guarded 'positions' to genuinely connect and evolve something that's larger than the sum of the parts."

 

New Features for the World Cafe Online Community

Hi there,

I'd like to introduce a new tab to you on our Online Community, it's called Features. Under it you'll find four tools that were already there but at different places (and i updated the Tag Clouds!) and you'll see two new tools that I just finished programming! As some of you know I am keen on experimenting with ways to access, navigate and comprehend "virtual/face2face-hybrid-organisms/entities" like the World Café Online Community. These two represent my latest manifestions in that inquiry:

1) The Sitemap Graph is my best current attempt on visualizing the Online Community as a whole; still not the content, but at least the complete content-structure in the form of a graph! Once i was into graphs i also made a membergraph and an animation of the sitemap-development since 2009. Let me know what you think of it. 

2) The Nearness Radar allows you to filter out those members, amongst all 4000 (almost), that are within a certain radius of your location. That is finally air-distance based, yes > transcending national borders for search.

Please be assured that these two tools only use the information that is publicly accessible (without login) on the Online Community anyway.

... And let me use this opportunity to share another tool-idea with you. It would also only use publicly accessible data, but work with it in a way that causes issues for some people and I want to be sensitive to that.

My thinking is the following; 4000 members... that gives almost 8million different possible groups of 2! And seriously, not the best host in the world could not make sure that all of those 8million, who could benefit from being connected, are actually getting a chance to connect to each other. In my opinion, that's where the power of computation comes in.

So, concretely I am thinking about an algorithm that suggests you to visit other profiles based on the use of words you both share in your profile/posts/comments, based on the membership in groups you share, based on your physical location or even based on your resonant (or particulary dissonant?) star-signs. Basically a match-making tool. The same concept that dating-sites are using and the same concept that Facebook uses massively (but secretly). How about having that same here; but out in the open, transparently, honest and with professional intentions? Everyone of course would have to be able to choose not to be displayed in any matching-results.

And here's where I am keen on hearing your thoughts; how would you feel about such a tool? Under which circumstances would you find it useful? Should people be given an opt-in chance or an opt-out chance upfront? My ideal image of how this would play out, is that people will polish their own profile-information in order to appear in more meaningful search-queries and a few hundred new meaningful connections will be made every year. My worst-case scenario would be that people will find it intruding and actually reduce their profile-information or leave the Community altogether. What do you think?

Warmly,

Benjamin Aaron Degenhart
Global Communications Team of the World Café Foundation

Contribution/s from Japan

We recently received a most welcome and moving letter from Mr Tomoyuki Tsunoda and the Art of Hosting/World Café community in Japan. It contained a check, and this note:

"Art of Hosting in Japan held a Charity Dialogue event on January 18th, 2012, in Tokyo. We called for donations to the World Café Community Foundation to say "thanks" because the World Café process is easy to use and provides a lot of fun that is needed now to recover our communities against the damage that has been done by the Tsunamis.

We Japanese need a lot of conversation, a lot of dialogue, to rebuild our communities and everyday life. The World Café process helps us hold such conversations.

So we say, Thank you World Café!"

To know that our friends in Japan are thinking of us and wanting to support and acknowledge the Foundation even with all they have to deal with there at home, means everything to us. These are true friends, and we are so grateful for their many contributions to the World Café, financial and otherwise. Our hearts remain with them as they go through the joyful and painful work of rebuilding their homes, communities, lives, and country after the multiple disasters of last year.

The letter was signed by:

Kazuaki Katori
Tamio Nakono
Hidetake Enomoto
Chizue Takeuchi
Rie Kuroi
Syuu Uraya
Tomoyuki Tsunoda
Mami Yoda
Nao Ashida
Misuzu Ninomiya
Yoshihiko Suko
Emiko Taguchi
Kaku Suzuki
Izumi Takii
Kazumi Yagi
Emi Owada
Yoko Itagaki
Kazue Takashige
Naoki Ishidoya
Ryota Yamauchi
Mamoru Oosone
Masaru Kojima
Kouya Nakaoka
Kouhei Noda
Tsuyoshi Kurosawa
Hiroyuki Matsumoto
Takashi Nisio
Toshiko Iwashima
Ayako Satou
Daiki Hayashi
Akikazu Hayashi
Hiroshi Okuyama
Kentarou Fukui
Syouko Matsumoto
Yuka Kamoshida
Yuuko Takahashi
Yoshiko Fukase
Kayo Fujiwara
Misato Matsubara
Takuya Murakami
Masaaki Mezaki
Hiroshi Ooki
Hiroko Nakajima
Miyako Sakatsume
Masaya Furuse
Ryoutarou Hayashi
Bob Stilger

Saying Goodbye to California

A Letter from World Café co-founder, Juanita Brown:

As many of you know, David and I are in the process of moving our home and base of operations from the San Francisco Bay area to our family farm in the mountains of North Carolina, near Asheville, in order to be closer to my 90 year old mom and other family members, including David’s grandchildren on the Eastern coast of the United States.

Even though we are excited about this move and know without a doubt that it is the right thing for our lives, we are sad to be leaving our beloved home on Tomales Bay, just north of San Francisco where much of the World Café book was written.

It was here that I first fully encountered the joys of the natural world.  To experience seals, herons and pelicans up close and bear witness to the ever changing light outside has been a never ending source of deep nourishment.  To walk along the rocky shore, truly “being home” inside myself for the first time in my life was a great gift which I shall always remember.

We are placing our Tomales Bay home for sale, with the hope and faith that some wonderful person, family or group will find this, as we have, a home of dreams and a place of retreat, reflection, and creative endeavors.  Our dear Amy Lenzo, Global Communications Director of the World Café has helped us create a flyer (Download BaylightVista_flyer) and website to share this unique opportunity—as Tomales Bay is a protected area of the coast where further development is restricted and homes of this nature, size, and incomparable location are few. We’d be grateful for your passing on this special offering to other kindred spirits you think might be interested (because it's for sale by owner until May, this is an especially timely opportunity).

And now we are starting on another great adventure—an adventure of partnering across generations with my mom and a group of younger leaders from the local community to deepen the legacy of the Millie’s Mountain for future generations. Ashley Cooper and I were interviewed by the Alia Institute for their Fieldnotes e-magazine accompanied by a little 2 minute video of what’s unfolding here made by Thomas Arthur of the EarthAnima Project. (Thank you Thomas!)

We welcome your thoughts and feedback and would love to hear of any experiences and learnings you are having in partnering across generations in your own organizations and communities.

And thanks again for sharing the news of our beautiful home for sale in Tomales Bay.

With warm wishes,

Juanita