The Story of a Triple World Cafe

I want to share the story of a phenomenon that my colleague Mark Szpakowski dubbed the “Triple World Café”. I co-produced this event in late June of this year with Michael Chender, member of the Governing Council of the ALIA Institute, Mark Szpakowski, and other key ALIA & World Café members, as part of the Shambhala Summer Institute Program.

The Triple World Café experience was an extraordinary experience of collaboration, inspiration and magic among a large and loosely structured team – we learned an enormous amount, deepened old friendships and began new ones, got rave reviews and exceeded everyone’s expectations, but most of all we stepped out on a limb of sheer intention and imagination and felt it miraculously hold our weight.

Here’s how it happened:

ALIA Institute (formerly the Shambhala Institute of Authentic Leadership) and the World Café are long-time friends and collaborators – ALIA has embedded World Café conversations into their annual Summer Authentic Leadership in Action Conferences from their beginnings, and Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Tom Hurley and other experienced World Café practitioners have led workshops at these gatherings pretty much every year since then.

Because of our history of friendship and collaboration, Michael approached the World Café for ideas about how to extend their Summer Programs to people who couldn’t be there in person, and to serve their alumni in particular. We’d never met, but after he and I had a wonderful two-hour conversation exploring the transcendent possibilities of virtual connection(!), Michael came back to me with the ambitious idea of three World Cafes held simultaneously - one at their gathering at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, one on Skype, and one in Second Life. I was excited because I have been doing a lot more World Cafe work in Second Life, and agreed to help him develop the event as a prototype. The idea was that we would continue exploring together with the purpose of evolving and informing their ongoing Alumni programs.

Michael wanted these three World Cafes to be intimately connected with each other so that the participants would feel as if they were there together in one room, and together we devised a number of ways to weave the three strands together into one thread.

First of all, they planned to project images onto one of the walls in the conference room in Halifax - alternate views of the real-time World Café going on in Second Life and a map of names and geographic locations of the people in the Skype World Café.

That happened and was very effective at creating excitement and an inclusive atmosphere – in fact it had an unexpected consequence, which you’ll hear later.

As part of the weaving, we planned for the opening World Café introduction from the room in Halifax to be piped into the Skype World Café through an audio feed. With the help of the sound technician this was no problem. Hearing the familiar voice of the World Café host in Halifax was a powerful experience for the Skype Café participants (who were all, with one exception, Institute alumni) and allowed them to feel especially close and connected to the community gathering at the ALIA Institute’s center.

We also planned for all three World Cafes to address the same set of questions and follow the same timing and number of conversation rounds, and all three were organized to feed into the same final Harvest process so that insights from the Skype and Second Life Cafes could inform the graphic capture in Halifax. The graphic recording was to be reflected back into the virtual Cafes through photographs taken in Halifax, uploaded to Flickr and sent via link through text chat to both virtual platforms.

So as it turned out, everything didn’t exactly work out like that we’d planned it, but this was our blueprint, and I set to work using it to create the infrastructure guides, technical training, communications and scripts that would be necessary to support it all.

Each of the two virtual World Cafes called for carefully thought out logistics and a solid team. The team needed in both virtual World Cafés consisted of a World Café host, Table Hosts for each of the tables, a Tech Support Person to troubleshoot issues that come up during the Café itself, and a Liaison that was in the room in Halifax and simultaneously plugged into a Virtual Café.

Each of the Table Hosts in both mediums needed to be trained in the technology of how to call their table together and dissolve it and start a new one with each table change, and each of the Participants needed to receive some level of orientation to the conventions and technical requirements of their virtual World Café platform. In addition, they needed an AV technician in Halifax to help them connect the sound feed from the World Café introduction into Skype.

The detailed pre-event training sessions and logistical minutiae seem extreme to those of us used to producing face to face World Cafés, but the more practiced and organized the technological elements of a virtual World Café, the more fully the technology can recede into the background and “disappear”. The intent is to keep the focus off the technology and on the quality of the conversation, and that takes careful preparation and clear agreements.

Luckily Michael was not fazed by the daunting list of people and details that needed to be organized. In spite of being a self-professed “Luddite” he bravely took on the role of both Liaison and Host for the Skype World Café, and George Por, Carolyn Baldwin and Chris Grant, who served as the Skype Table Hosts, joined him. Their Tech Support person was Anthony Meyers, and they had additional support from the University person on sound tech duty that day.

I was the World Café Host in Second Life and the final in-world Table Hosts included Doon Bury (Mary Pat LeRoy), Anachie Easterwood, Ravi Amaterasu (Ravi Tangri), and Charlie Loxely (Alexandra Grant-Paul). Widget Whiteberry from Commonwealth Island, among her many contributions to the success of the event, served as Tech Support and Vivienne Cassavetes from the Peacemaker Institute, also, made huge contributions during key points in the process. Last but by no means least in this excellent team was Eos Amaterasu (Mark Szpakowski), who was ALIA’s advance scout already active in Second Life. Mark was an invaluable partner and we worked closely throughout the whole project. Mark was also present in the Halifax World Café, and he played the role of our Liason - we stayed in touch via a Skype line throughout the Triple World Café and linked our timing and the pace of what was happening in all three places.

So, as you can see we had a very tight Second Life team which had been working together for at least two weeks and already weathered a storm or two by the launch of the Triple World Café itself. Many of our participants were members of both the World Café and ALIA Institute communities, and we were all excited to see them show up. There were people there from all over the world, including one from Bangladesh where it was 4am!

There was a slideshow of images made from that day, taken from the ALIA Summer Institute blog they created to accompany the conference.

So let’s see, where shall I start with our learnings?!

Well, let’s start with the questions. Working with the idea of unity amongst the three World Cafes, the task of coming up with the questions was left with the team in Halifax, and they were to communicate them to the virtual hosts the day before the event.

The problem with this was that the questions that worked in the face-to-face conference in Halifax, where they had been exploring a thread of conversation over several days, did not translate well into a virtual environment where many were gathering for the first time. When the team in Second Life got the questions, we immediately knew they wouldn’t work for us. As we all know, finding the right questions is essential to the success of a World Café, so that was the first learning – to either involve the virtual teams when conceiving the questions, or allow them to be adapted to make sense within specific environments.

As it happened, we came up with a great set of questions that made sense for the Second Life World Café participants, and the Skype World Café crew were satisfied with a slightly different wording of the face-to-face Café questions.

Another practical learning was to have at least one run-through with each virtual team, and one with the key people on all three teams. The Skype team didn’t have a dress rehearsal and they ran into several “just in time” learning moments, including a storm that took out one of their Table Hosts. Michael had to pinch-hit as both Café Host and Table Host (Note to Self: assign a back-up Table Host). Thankfully they were able to think on their feet and rose to the occasion beautifully, and they also had the good luck to draw a Sound Tech person who had experience running Skype Conferences.

The Second Life World Café team did have a full dress rehearsal, at least two other training sessions for Table Hosts, and an alternate Table Host in place in case of emergencies. All that preparation helped - we only had a few minor tech glitches and for the most part we were able to leave the technology behind and enjoy a deep and probing World Café conversation.

Here’s an excerpt from my initial de-brief exchange with Michael:

"It sounds like you had the same exhilarating experience of alternating chaos and bliss that we experienced in Second Life! :-) The Second Life learnings sound parallel to yours in many ways - prepare, prepare, prepare, back everything up and know things will go wrong SOMEWHERE anyway. :-) As the host in Second Life I found I really needed to stay in the moment and adapt to the inevitable glitches with as much grace and ease as I could to keep the feeling of "hospitable space" flowing.

Something interesting happened in Second Life that we hadn’t foreseen, which was that two people from the face-to-face event in Halifax got so turned on to what they could see of the World Café in Second Life that they got out their laptops and joined us! This was very exciting, even though it was also a bit problematic since they were both completely new to Second Life, which has a definite learning curve!

Another learning was that you need a little more time for each round in a virtual World Café to accommodate the inevitable extra minute or two each round that it takes to change tables physically and get the technology for each table working. We were a bit behind schedule in Second Life and our harvest came in too late to be counted in the initial sharing, and as it turned out the harvesting process in Halifax was a several step process that gathered individual reflections and clustered them for further face-to-face conversation over the next two days.

One of my favorite surprises came from The Skype Café’s innovation in communications conventions. When I say “communication conventions” I mean the little gestures we agree to use in virtual World Cafes when we are about to speak, or when we have finished speaking - in lieu of the more immediate indicators that we can use in our face-to-face conversations. So for example, we would say/write “next” when we wanted to begin “speaking” in Second Life (which in this case was actually writing in text), and “done” or “dfn” for “done for now” when we had finished.

Borrowing from the Shambhala traditions, in the ALIA Institute programs they are used to bowing to each other as they start and finish their sessions, so they used the word “bow” to indicate they were ready to speak, and again when they were finished. I found that delightful!

I could go on and on, as this was a rich learning ground and we had an amazing team and substantive de-briefing process that was fed from many directions. Some of the feedback from the Skype Cafe participants is up on their blog, and wonderful reading. Everyone felt it was a great success, and I too was very happy with what happened.

In closing, I want to share this video that the talented Arthur Thomas made showing the beauty of this extraordinary event:

Shambhala Summer Institute 2009 from ALIA on Vimeo.