The World Café, a process and set of design principles for having meaningful conversations about topics that matter, has been around since 1995. I have recently had two very interesting conversations about the possibility and practice of taking the World Café dialogue process online. The energy and enthusiasm in both exchanges, with Kathryn Alexander, an OD consultant in Arizona, and with Amy Lenzo from The World Café, was infectious. This is just one of many examples where we as facilitators can extend the reach of what we know how to do well – bringing groups of people together around a focused set of topics for a purposeful conversation – with the use of online collaboration tools.
Kathryn and Amy used very different technologies – Kathryn used FacilitatePro group decision support tools and teleconferencing services while Amy used Second Life and Skype. Their methodologies were also somewhat different, adapting the traditional World Café format to the group and the questions at hand. Here is a brief synopsis of Kathryn’s approach (in my own words) and some of the lessons that I took away from the conversation.
Taking World Café Online
This experiment consisted of a group of 45 people and a planned set of seven virtual rooms or café tables, each with a different discussion topic. The process for participating in this World Café went like this:
- First, the participants joined a central teleconference for an introduction and welcome. Participants also joined online where they had access to a shared agenda with each of the seven topics listed.
- Participants were then invited to select four of the seven topics to participate in and rotated through the four, in whatever order they chose every fifteen minutes. To participate in a given topic, the participants clicked on the online link for that virtual café table to post ideas to a shared electronic flip chart and comment on other people’s ideas.
- In addition participants were asked to dial in to a unique teleconference number for that café table – when they dialed they were welcomed by a table host who helped get the verbal part of the conversation going and managed the allotted time in pretty much the usual way.
- At the end of fifteen minutes the participants were invited to select another topic and join another table.
- At the end of the hour everyone was again invited to join a single teleconference in order to hear some closing remarks. The documented portion of the conversation was immediately available as a takeaway.
This initial experiment seems to have effectively bridged the virtual divide while maintaining most of the qualitative elements of the World Café experience
Takeaways From a Successful Experiment
- Organize the virtual rooms or café tables around a series of planned topics helped people plan their time and participation.
- Keep the same table host in one room throughout to hold the space, facilitate introductions and gently guide the conversation around the virtual table.
- Include a written as well as a verbal component – capturing ideas on a shared online flip chart as well as listening to each person talk.
- Provide some quiet time to type some initial thoughts before going around the virtual table to hear from each person.
- Adapt the World Café ground rules to make them more relevant to a conversation where we cannot all see each other. Simple adjustments such as speaking one’s name before commenting, giving people your attention and not multi-tasking, drawing a virtual table on a notepad so that you can visualize who else is in your conversation, managing air time, etc. make a big difference.
- Continue the conversation online after the session – keeping the shared online flip charts alive for people to return to, re-read and add further comments upon reflection.
- Provide a written document of the conversation as a takeaway.
- Think through the options for anonymous versus attributed online input and how this shifts the dynamic of the conversation, positively or negatively or just differently.
- Keep it simple: use a series of teleconference numbers to manage participation at the different virtual café tables. Consider using newly emerging teleconference services that include options for breakout groups.
Nancy White (www.fullcirc.com) started a conversation about Virtual Cafés a year ago and Amy Lenzo has posted a very interesting description of her Virtual World Café experience at: http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/07/10/the-world-cafe-community-virtual-cafes/#comments. She reports that online World Cafes using a variety of electronic media reach back almost 10 years. With the acceleration in virtual meetings and online collaboration in the past twelve months I wonder what new stories there are of this kind of online facilitated dialogue. What is your experience in how to create the right space/setting; how to plan and facilitate such an event; how to balance verbal conversation and online participation and the value of each?
Posted by Julia Young