World Cafe Community

Welcome to the World Café Community Blog!

The World Café is a global community of people dedicated to awakening and engaging collective intelligence through conversations about questions that matter... Welcome to your blog! Your active involvement is warmly invited.

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.

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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

"Groups" in TWC Online Community

One of the most wonderful opportunities in the new World Cafe online community space is the capacity we have to gather together in Groups and explore the precise elements of the World Cafe that we're passionate about and/or connect with others in your geographic location. It's not surprising that an international network like ours with so much to talk about have really maximized this opportunity.

After two months of being "live", there are already 23 groups, in 6 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Indonesian. I will tell you a little about just two or three of them here, but I can't possibly do justice to the many dynamic groups that have formed and I invite you to explore them for yourself. If you don't find the group you are looking for, talk to me about how to host it yourself.

One of the very first groups to form in this community was Cafe Latino, hosted by Maria de los Angeles as a place to welcome the very special people who host World Cafes in Latin America. All in Spanish, it's extremely active, seeming almost to overflow with the exuberance and warmth of those who have often been described as the "heart" of the World Cafe.

Another group started more recently by Christine Whitney Sanchez is on Methods for Strategic Collaboration. The conversation here is focused and stimulating, going to the heart of what's core to the work we do, no matter what form we use.

For those of us fascinated by graphic recording, there is the vibrant Art of Harvesting group, where a "knowing" beyond words is nevertheless conveyed through conversations about deep listening and reflection.

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If you have not yet joined us in the new online community, we invite you to do it now! Go to www.theworldcafecommunity.org and sign up today.

Conversation and Community

David Isaacs sent me this quote from Peter Block:

My belief is that the way we create conversations that overcome the fragmented nature of our communities is what creates an alternative future.

This can be a difficult stance to take for we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.

We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list.

We want measurable outcomes and we want them now.

What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.

We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

This is not an argument against problem solving; it is an intention to shift the context and language within which problem solving takes place.

Authentic transformation is about a shift in context and a shift in language and conversation. It is about changing our idea of what constitutes action.

~ Peter Block from his Civic Engagement Series, sponsored by A Small Group.

New World Cafe Online Community Launched!

As new people join the new World Cafe online community every day from countries around the world - Brazil, Israel, Italy, Finland, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, the United States, Russia, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, the Phillipines, France, Ghana, Indonesia, Columbia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Belgium, Spain, Croatia, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Yukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Peru, Dubai, Slovenia, Tahiti, Venezula, Jamaica, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Bolivia and Austria - there is a palpable sense of a new kind of community - a truly global World Café - taking form.

If you have not yet joined us in the new online community, we invite you to go to www.theworldcafecommunity.org and sign up today. Find friends and allies, deepen your learning, band together and take action, start the conversations and launch the projects that are closest to your heart - now's the time!

Read on for some of the new features and benefits that are available to us now ...

Conversation

by Tom Atlee, of the Co-intelligence Institute

I want to expand the concept of conversation.

The Latin and Indo-European roots of "con" and "vers" connote "turning together".

This deeper understanding opens up new meanings.

When we speak our truths and hear each other deeply, letting each other's voices and ideas and stories and passions shift us, we turn together.

When we dance or listen to music, and our bodies and attention resonate with its shifting vibrations and emotional resonances, we turn together.

When we all share the same perspectives, hopes or horrors within the vibrational embrace of mass media and the webs of telecommunications -- 911, elections, earth from space -- we turn together.

When we respond adaptively to the situations we face -- individually or collectively -- we are turning together with the energies and realities that reside within those situations.

When we as a community come together in times of crisis, rather than splitting apart into adversarial or self-aggrandizing camps, we are turning together.

As all plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen, and all animals breath in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, we turn together in and as one great cycling flow of oxygen and carbon, 
releasing the energies of Life.

As our one small and beautiful planet spins out its days and nights, and circles the sun into seasons, and glides with our whole solar family on one vast arcing arm of our spiral Milky Way galaxy, we turn 
together.

We are in conversation -- all of us, all the time, at more levels than we know -- turning together.

Waking up is our emerging realization that we can converse more consciously, learn to do it more knowledgeably and heartfully, inspired and inspiring, and thereby evolve together with -- and into 
-- greater wisdom, wholesomeness, and grace... turning, together.