World Cafe Community

Interviewed in Collaborative Services

Amy Lenzo was interviewed by the folks at Collaborative Services about World Café - what makes us unique, how the seven design principles work, why the World Café approach resonates across such a wide diversity of cultures, and what we can all do to become better communicators.

Read the interview!

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

We Are Not Ants

We're pleased to note that the World Café has been mentioned in the 2011 Spanish language edition of We Are Not Ants (No Somos Hormigas), a collaboration by four young people from Spain who took Mahatma Ghandi's challenge to "be the change you want to see" seriously.

We Are Not Ants champions positive change in a number of ways - first and perhaps most powerfully it is written from the standpoint of Appreciative Inquiry, and focuses primarily on what is working. They wanted to write a book "against the current zeitgeist of pessimism and world-weariness", calling it a "guide-book for the well-informed optimist on the state of humanity".

The book has three chapters - "Things That Work", "Things That Go Wrong and Need To Be Fixed", and "Initiatives Decicated to Positive Change". Their piece on World Café is in the third chapter, listed under new ways of Communication. 

The authors of We Are Not Ants are converting the ideas in the book into a crowd-sourced directory of social innovation projects or organizations like the World Café Community Foundation that either

• generate new opportunities for people
• promote a more efficient use of material and intellectual resources
• enable a more sustainable use of natural resources

They've invited readers to submit new social innovation projects and groups for publication in future printings, including the English language edition they are currently seeking a publisher for.

We thank them for the shout out and wish them all the best!

Announcing the New World Cafe Logo!

The World Cafe New Logo Contest was a phenomenal success! We received 29 entries from 12 designers in 10 countries around the world. Designs came in from Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., Serbia, Brazil, India, Mexico and Pakistan. They were all extraordinary, and they all interpreted the complex necessities of our criteria in creative and sometimes surprising ways.

We were very pleased with the quality of entries, and it took us quite a while to make the decision and follow standard procedures to resolve any potential trademark or brand issues. We are deeply grateful to all our contest entrants - not only for responding to our call and giving us their best work, but also for their incredible generosity and patience in waiting for us to be absolutely sure we had the right logo.

We are especially grateful to our winner, who showed great professionalism and worked tirelessly to help us achieve our ambitious goal of a logo that can do everything we need it to do.

It is our great pleasure to announce the winner of the World Cafe New Logo Contest - Gabriel Kurauchi from Brazil, and to introduce our new World Cafe logo!

Gabriel is the talented young designer who created this friendly yet professional logo - a mark that is inviting and immediately accessible to our wide range of users; that reaches across generations and is at home in cultures all over the world. It is a design that is classic and clean and reproduces well in a variety of media; a logo that will stand out in a crowded brandscape and tell our story of global connection and communication.

Can you tell we are in love with it?  We can't wait to show it off in our website re-design, which will launch in the new year. Look out for our interview with Gabriel in upcoming communications - we feel he's so talented that we'll all be hearing more about him in the future.

It was no easier to choose the runners up than it was to choose the winning design, and it is our honor, with great appreciation, to present the top five outstanding logos that captured our admiration and consideration.

In no specific order, the runners up in the World Cafe New Logo Contest are:

Designer: Christian Grambow, from Germany

 

Designer: Ana Vujosevic, from Serbia

Designer: Sunil Gajjar, from India

 

Designer: Lara Elijah, from the United States

 

Designer: Kim Philips, from the United States

 

Thanks again to all our contest entrants, and Congratulations to Gabrieil Kurauchi and our five runners up - Christian Granbow, Ana Vujosevic, Sunil Gajar, Laura Elija and Kim Philips!

World Cafe and MaestroMonth

What's easier than picking up the phone to connect and get people talking to each other?

Nothing, right?! Well, what if we could meet for a World Cafe on the phone - break out into small groups with touch of a button and then come back to the large group to share the highlights and harvest our conversations? What if we could experience the intimacy and collective excitement of a face-to-face World Cafe, on the phone?

Well, now we can!

Amy Lenzo, Christine Whitney Sanchez and Gabriel Shirley are hosting a special series featuring interactive events from Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer, David Isaacs, Christina Whitney Sanchez, David Copperrider, Diana Whitney and Harrison Owen. This series, called Beyond Facilitation: Accessing Collective Wisdom, is one week of October's MaestroMonth, which launches MaestroConference, the company behind this revolutionary new phone-based interactive technology.

These 5 events, like all the events in MaestroMonth are FREE. Most of them start at 9am and go through to 11am. For more information about each event and/or to register, go to MaestroMonth.com, scroll down to the event you're interested in and then click the "Details" or "Register" button beneath each one. It's that simple.

* * *

The full MaestroMonth schedule features an array of luminaries across several fields, including many of our close friends and colleagues. :

Business: T. Harv Eker, Michael Port, Robin Sharma, Lance Secretan, Chip Conley, Ray Blanchard, Jeff Hoffman, David Finkel, Lynne Twist, Mari Smith, DC Cordova, Cynthia Kersey, Charlotte & Laura Shelton, James Malinchak, Bettie Spruill, Rinaldo Brutoco
 
Health: Deepak Chopra, John Gray, Candace Pert, Olivia Newton John & John Easterling, Judith Orloff, Joan Borysenko, Norman Shealy, Eric Pearl, Len Saputo, Mary Shomon, Jennifer MacLean, Lee Gerdes, Mona Lisa Schulz
 
Personal Growth: Debbie & Arielle Ford, Dan Millman, John Assaraf, Hale Dwoskin, Vishen Lakhaini, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dave Ellis, Brian Johnson, Mike Robbins, Tripp Lanier & Jayson Gaddis, Zen DeBrucke, Amy Ahlers
 
Societal Change: Gregg Braden, Seane Corn, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Starhawk, Aqeela Sherrils, Azim Khamisa, Steve Bhaerman, Fred Johnson, David Cooperider, Anodea Judith, Lynne McMullen, Richard Rudd, Miki Kashtan, Stacey Lawson
 
Spirituality: Marianne Williamson, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Andrew Cohen, James Twyman, Genpo Roshi, Andrew Harvey, Carter Phipps, Lisa Schrader, Ron Alexander, Lauren Mackler, Paul Hoffman, Paul & Patty Richards, Ellen Debenport, Nicole Daedone, Stephen Dinan & Devaa Haley Mitchell
 
Special Track for Entrepreneurs: Sharon Drew Morgen, Morgana Rae, Ken Foster, Leesa Barnes, Garrett Sutton, Larry Ousley, James Burgin & John Ward, Steve Maxwell, Leslie Grossman, Brian Burt
 
Special Series for Change Leaders: Harrison Owen, Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer, David Isaacs, Diana Whitney, Christine Whitney Sanchez

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!

Hungarian World Café on YouTube

Here's a short film about a World Café in Hungary. It was made by two students from our Eastern European steward Agota Ruzsa's class - Pável Briggita and Tőzsér Adrienn, who then posted it on YouTube.

One of the things that's so amazing to me is how universal is this language we share - of connection and innovation and collective intelligence - and how easy it is to hear and read it wherever we are in the world.

Read more of this story in StoryNet.

Interview with Nancy Margulies

World Cafe host (and so much more) Nancy Margulies, interviewed by Nicole Anne Boyer:

NAB: When and how did you first become involved in TWC?

NM:  About the time Juanita and David were figuring this out, they came out to Sundance where Margaret Wheatly was doing a workshop.  I was up there working with her, doing workshops on chaos, complexity, and self-organization. She had just written her foundational book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. 

When I heard Juanita describe the World Café as a process and a way of understanding the power of conversation, I immediately said “I want to work with you and support you in any way I can” because we had been talking about this “other way of being together”, of being part of a healthy living system, but didn’t have a a specific way to practice it— it was all theoretical. To me Open Space and the World Café were good examples of what Margaret’s theory suggests.

Juanita and I put a poster together, and I started to illustrate and host cafés myself and developed my own variations, like the “Passion Cafes” – think of Open Space meeting TWC where people define their topics and the café tables are organized around those topics. And then the Climate Change café started.  I also used TWC in New Orleans to help the recovery process, and then to help people around the country consider what we can learn from what occurred in New Orleans. 

Café Etiquette

Ravi Tangri has been making some phenomenal videos on the Art of Hosting (hosted on their own channel at BrightCoveTV), which have a lot of value for World Café hosts. Now he's turning his hand to creating some much needed basic instructional videos for the World Café. We love you Ravi!

Here's one he made on Café Etiquette:

Notes from Shambhala 2008

Hi everyone,

I've just recently returned from the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia, where Tom Hurley, who is guiding the global evolution of the World Café network, led a module on Leadership in Emergent Networked Systems. I co- hosted, with Claudia Chender, a young leader from the board of Shambhala, an inquiry into future possibilities for the Shambhala Institute in the arena of multi-generational collaboration, a thread we had begun with the first Intergenerational Dialogues at Shambhala in 2004.

What we thought might be a small group of about 20 to explore the multi-generational possibilities became a group of more than 60 of all ages and stage of life. It was an exciting time, once again revealing immense interest in the possibilities that could emerge if we came together across the generations on behalf of accessing collective intelligence and wise action on issues of common concern.

Claudia stepped forward to join Samantha Tan, Ryan Feinstein and others to help both the Shambhala Institute and the World Café become global learning laboratories for true multi-generational collaboration, an effort which we hope to link to our research partnership with the Fielding Institute for Social Innovation.

All in all, was a wonderful time for me personally, as many friends from previous years were there, including Toke Moller and Nissen, who along with Chris Corrigan led a module on the Art of Hosting and Harvesting. I was asked by the Art of Hosting group to come to their module as a guest "storyteller" to share my sense of the "deeper work" of the World Café–seeing the possibilities of conversation as a co-evolutionary force for constructive change, and the powerful ideas that come when we create the conditions for what Finn Voldtofte, a World Café pioneer from Denmark, called the "magic in the middle"–that special state of collective consciousness–what some call "the field" that enables true creativity and innovation to reveal itself.

I was also deeply honored by the wonderful offer of Ravi Tangri to help inaugurate "World Café TV!".  Ravi spent the week filming varied aspects of the World Café so that we can begin to develop short videos (on You Tube, of course!)  of the World Café process, principles, and deeper pattern with the burgeoning
World Café community of practice around the globe.   Ravi and his wife Kathy Jourdain have been doing groundbreaking work integrating Otto Sharmer's "Theory U Process" with the World Café in their work in transforming the health care system in Nova Scotia. I had the chance to meet with the leaders of this effort at their home the day after the Institute ended.  It was truly heartwarming to see how the World Café is serving these kinds of efforts.

I look forward to continuing to collaborate with Ravi Tangri, Nancy Margulies, Emmett Miller, and others to develop innovative ways to communicate the essence of the World Café and to invite others to play.

If you are interested in learning more about either the multi-generational work, or ways to spread the word about the World Café in your communities please contact us at [email protected].

Warm regards to all,

Juanita