The World Cafe

Expanding Opportunities to Participate

by Amy Lenzo | Dec 12, 2007 | Community, Gift Economy

Friends of the World Café are stepping forward to help guide the co-evolution of the World Café. Together we are cultivating the spirit and practice of stewardship. We invite your partnership, participation, and contribution!

Key stewardship circles include:

Global communications. Talented individuals in numerous fields are helping evolve tools for communication, connection, and collaboration throughout the World Café network – through writing and publishing, creatively hosting the book and its translations into the world, expanding the World Café’s online tools, gathering and harvesting World Café stories, and developing video and other multimedia products.

Global stewardship. An emerging group of global stewards, representing those who are already engaged in stewarding key World Café initiatives or regional networks, is beginning to co-evolve new patterns of collective leadership and guidance on behalf of the network as a whole. Participants explore what’s present or emerging across the network as a whole, foster cross-regional connections and mutual support, and nurture the sense of unity at the heart of the World Café.

Learning and conversational leadership development. Experienced World Café hosts are now developing the “next generation” of learning tool, materials, and processes needed to introduce the World Café and conversational leadership to new audiences and help World Café hosts deepen their practice. New World Café learning opportunities are also being developed, including in-depth World Café design seminars, workshops on core capacities like the art of formulating powerful questions, and learning journeys on “conversational leadership” and related topics.

Research and theory development. World Café hosts, researchers, and social innovators around the world are collaborating through a partnership between the World Café Community Foundation and the Fielding’s Institute for Social Innovation both to develop and disseminate the World Café as a methodology for participatory research and collective knowledge evolution, and to explore applications of the World Café in key areas such as change leadership, organizational development, and societal learning.

Resource development. Friends of the World Café from diverse fields are helping discover and develop creative models for resourcing the strategic priorities of the World Café, including the key processes and people that provide ongoing stewardship of the whole.

Place-based and regional stewardship. Dynamic networks of World Café hosts, conveners, and champions are developing as people meet and collaborate across sectors in specific communities, countries, and regions. Regional stewards help knit these networks together, convene communities of practice, and catalyze regional initiatives. Active networks exist in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and are developing in a growing number of cities around the world.

Highlights of 2007

by Amy Lenzo | Dec 12, 2007 | Announcements

This has been a year full of tremendously exciting developments. Highlights include:

• Launching a new World Café website in February, followed by the continuing expansion of our online presence. It now includes the website, the online community space, two blogs – including the newly launched World Café Community blog – a global directory of World Café hosts, the new World Café e-newsletter, and much more.

• Hosting pioneering World Café programs in every part of the world, in many different fields and sectors. These included the three-day World Café Europe gathering in Dresden, Germany, which featured eight simultaneous World Cafés throughout the city; dialogues at the Tällberg Forum in Tällberg, Sweden, where senior corporate leaders, government officials, and social entrepreneurs used the World Café to deepen their conversation about critical global issues; multi-generational collaboration for community development in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and many others.

• Creating a partnership with Fielding Graduate University’s Institute for Social Innovation. Working with World Café hosts, researchers, and social innovators around the world, we aim both to develop and disseminate the World Café as a methodology for participatory research and collective knowledge evolution, and to explore applications of the World Café in key areas such as change leadership, organizational development, and societal learning.

• Five more translations of the award-winning book The World Café. In addition to English, it’s now available in Chinese, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish – and more translations are underway!

• Ongoing development of the World Café stewardship network. Friends of the World Café are now passionately engaged in stewardship circles focused on place-based and regional stewardship, learning and conversational leadership development, research and knowledge evolution, global communications, and the discovery of new processes for resourcing the World Café, among other areas.

Dialogue Project

by Amy Lenzo | Dec 6, 2007 | Language, Video

Here is a wonderful video of an interview with David Isaacs and Juanita Brown, including clips from a World Café that David and Nancy Margulies hosted. This video was created as part of the Dialogue Project:

Climate Change Cafés in Reno

by Amy Lenzo | Nov 29, 2007 | Stories

This report came in from Wendy Mason of Reno, NV, about a regional initiative to address climate change:

"On November 11, the Nevada Coalition for Climate Protection (NC4CP) hosted an introductory meeting regarding The Climate Change Cafés. Over 30 attended with another 10 responding that they supported us in our endeavors. Our goal was to see if there was enough interest in Reno, Nevada to make the effort of putting on the Cafes worth it. We were also looking for a few more volunteers to join our team.

Climatecafe042

The meeting was a big success. We had many short presentations (synopses of the following books: World Café, Blessed Unrest and Low-Carbon Diet) and short informative videos like Paul Hawken speaking at last years Bioneers meeting, and a few videos from Dr. Emmett Miller. We also showed a very cute one-minute video called Wombat and presented a short overview of what the city of Reno was already doing to address the carbon emission issue.

We met in a very nice art gallery right by the river in the downtown area, with music in the background and fresh flowers, along with a nice assortment of finger foods, coffee and tea. We had the space and enough time that we were able to invite people to stay around and visit with us after the meeting as well as fill out a survey we had designed, which almost everybody did.

At the close of the meeting we asked who was interested in bringing these Cafés to Reno and everyone put up their hands. So, we have decided to move along towards the goal of presenting the first Café in early spring 2008.

We appreciated all the support found on this blog and the World Café site."

The Wisdom in is the Room

by Amy Lenzo | Nov 10, 2007 | Graphic Recording

Wisdom

Day 3: Conversation Space Debrief

by Amy Lenzo | Nov 9, 2007 | Stories

At the end of the conference, Conversation Space hosts gathered with Ginny and Janice from Pegasus, who had organized much of the conference organizers and supported this space in being created, in debriefing about the Conversation Space experience.

We started by taking them on a journey through our time together, using the richly illustrated graphics around the room, with those of us who were in the space at various time sharing our memories of what worked and the patterns we saw emerging.

We noted that several of the people who showed up on the first day because the other sessions were full ended up returning again and again throughout the entire conference.

Someone said how they’d seen so many friendships and shared work projects born in this room.

We were able to create a culture that flowed over into the lunch periods and the un-hosted time.

It offered a space for people to integrate what they were taking in, time to bring the information down from their minds to circulate in their hearts and bodies as well.

We shared how important it was that there was a window on the outside world, giving us the constant reminder of the larger context in which we are all held. The ability to see nature, in the trees and rain, and to feel her presence in our midst was crucial to many of us.

Beyond

We all concluded that this was a successful experiment that will definitely be expanded in next year’s offerings at the 2008 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference in Boston.

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