reinventnow

On Saturday morning, I attended a world café gathering in Berkeley. I hadn’t been in such a large group of passionate, intelligent and warm people in a long time. They were incredibly welcoming of me even though I was a “newbie” to the whole process.

I had never been part of a world cafe process before. Only a few days earlier in the week, I put out a call to the world cafe community about wanting to participate in one (since I had signed myself up for facilitating one at work with our clients in July). No less than five of the group had responded to me directly with an invite to the event.

We spent time introducing ourselves and talking about what each of us had been doing with the process recently. Of course, I had nothing to add about the cafe itself, but talked a bit about the barcamps and unconferences I had been to in the past year.

Then, we launched into the cafe process itself and I was taken deep into conversations about the world cafe process itself and how it could impact the bay area and what kinds of processes and structures we could set up to build some momentum around dialogues and conversations that are the heart of the world cafe process.

I’ll post more about what came out of this gathering, but I think it promises to be very a very exciting time ahead. There’s great potential for fueling the idea of the bay area becoming a cafe region where great dialogues happen all over, tackling big issues related to the environment, self-government, management and more.

I met a lot of wonderful people there including Amy, Tree, Tom, Nancy, Juanita, David, Andrea and more. i’m most excited about working with Amy on how to augment and carry the cafe experience and the world cafe community into and out of the online world. There’s already a growing community of facilitators and participants at the world cafe community site. The future is bright indeed!
More to come…