"Sticky Wall" Strategies

I’m doing a world café this Wednesday and thinking about having the participants create a “sticky wall,” i.e. having them each write one or more thoughts on large post-it notes and putting them up on the wall together.

I'm curious what people's experience is with the timing of this activity. I can see advantages to doing it at the very start of the harvest, as well as to close it. The former strikes me as a way to get a broader collection of people’s independent reflections. It will also prompt people to reflect on their small-group conversations so that they are ready to participate in the full group harvest conversation that follows.

On the other hand, doing it at the end might provide an assessment of the overall resonance of ideas the group harvest has surfaced.

At this point, I'm thinking of going with the sticky wall posts at the start of the harvest phase, and perhaps using a dot-voting process at the end to get a sense of what resonated with the room. That would involve giving each participant three (or more?) dots and inviting them to place them next to any statements made during the main harvest (that we will have have recorded on a banner) that they believe are the most important outcomes.

Another variant here could be red dot/green dot, where people can use the former to indicate things they disagree with. Our subject is a controversial land-use matter, so there may be some significant disagreements worth highlighting.