World Café is a way of being together in conversation.
It’s a way that respects each person’s contribution, meets difference with curiosity, and cross-pollinates stories, information, and insights in order to learn from and with each other.
As a form, World Café is both deeply intimate and infinitely scale-able (up to many thousands).
How does it work?
Participants sit at small café tables (no more than 4-5 at a table). The tables are covered with several large sheets of paper and a variety of colored pens are provided at each one, along with a vase of flowers or something beautiful.
After an introduction to “Café Etiquette” from the host, they take about 20 minutes to respond to a question posed to the whole group. Participants doodle and draw on the paper tablecloths as they talk and listen to each other.
At the end of that round of conversation, they move to another table and take another 20 minutes in conversation with a new group in response to the question posed for that round, adding their doodles to what’s on the paper tablecloths (or replacing the paper with a clean sheet).
Participants then move to a third table with new people and respond to the question for that round, continuing the doodling and drawing.
After three (sometimes more) rounds of conversation, the whole group comes back together to hear from each other in a “harvest” of what happened in the rounds of conversation, usually led by the host. This harvest is often reflected back to the group visually through the skills of a graphic recorder working in front of the room along with the host.
How does it work online?
The practice of an online World Café is much the same as it is in a face-to-face World Café, although your tech host moves you from table to table (thanks to technology like MaestroConference). The main difference is that you tend to activate your imagination and senses more fully in an online World Café – mostly because you can’t see each other in the small groups (although the technology is catching up to that too).
Without sight, you may even find yourself listening a bit more closely, which can have the side benefit of adding even more depth to your conversations.
Other than that, some things are a little different when mediated through technology – tablecloth doodling is either done with paper and pens individually at home, or written with shared editing tools like Google Docs, and the final harvest may be shown in real-time through screen-sharing technology.
[A stable internet connection is essential if you are using a computer as part of your tech set-up, and a good head-set can make a big difference. Beyond that, it’s quite simple but it does help to be familiar with the technology used in online World Cafés, so the more often you participate the easier it becomes – see the “Easy Peasy Tech Guide” to, well, make it easy.How long does it take?
A full World Café usually takes about two and a half hours, whether face-to-face or online, but a pared-down-to-basics version with experienced participants can be done in as little as an hour and a half.