Community for the 21st Century

“Conversations for the 21st Century” launched on Friday, April 1st, with more than 250 people participating in a three hour conversation on the topic of “Community for the 21st Century.” The series was produced by weDialogue, the new partnership between Amy Lenzo and Ben Roberts, which was formed to offer online services for the World Café Community Foundation.

Participants came from around the world - the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, Asia, India and Australia, responding to email invitations from the hosts, conversation starters, special guests Heartland Circle, the Powers of Place Initiative, Berkana Institute, and the Tamarack Institute, our sponsors the World Café Community Foundation, and a wide variety of friendly networks and a robust social media campaign using Facebook, Twitter and various other blogs and online communities. Over 550 people registered.

A 20 minute round-table of “conversation starters” (a term coined by Heartland in their Thought Leader Gatherings) - Peter Block, Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whiteley and Nancy White - set the context for the full World Café conversation that followed.

Together, the conversation starters offered a wide range of perspectives on what “community” means to them and the ways that they see it evolving as we create, in Peter Blocks’s words, “a future distinct from the past.”

There is a 22 minute audio file of the conversation starters' words on the World Cafe community blog (for some reason the audio file wouldn't embed here).

One of our conversation starters, Nancy White, shared a quote from Akaya Windwood of the Rockwood Leadership Institute that has continued to resonate ...

"I am clear that my fate is inextricably linked to the work of some young woman in Cairo whose name I will never know. We are mutually accountable, even if we never meet."

Nancy's musing on that quote, "What does it mean to be in partnership with unknown kin? What is my relationship to the woman in Cairo? What might be my covenant with her? Who are you counting on? Who needs to be able to count on you?", spoke to the topic of community brilliantly.

We were very fortunate to have experienced World Café graphic recorders Nancy Margulies and Susan Kelly with us - Nancy for the morning session and Susan Kelly throughout the whole day. Their gleanings from the conversation starters follow.

From Nancy Margulies on Sarah Whiteley and Maria Scordialos, who started us off with their perspective about nature as the cornerstone of community, and the role of place:

(click any of the images for a larger view)

Nancy Margulies on Peter Block:

And Nancy Margulies on Nancy White:

Here is Susan Kelly's view of the conversation starters as a whole:

(click to see the whole thing enlarged)

Whew! Thank you Nancy and Susan!

Next we began a full World Café, breaking into groups of four for three twenty minute rounds of conversation. Our questions were 1) “What brought you here today? / What does this subject mean to YOU?” 2) “What have you heard so far – either from the conversation starters, or in the first round of conversation, that has challenged or expanded your ideas about community?” And 3) “What are the opportunities or possibilities that have emerged from this conversation that are personally most exciting for you?” Our conversation starters participated in the breakouts as well, which was a nice experience both for them and the rest of the group.

Here is Susan's recording of the three rounds and a kind of overview of the whole event:

After the three rounds of small group conversation, we came back together for a rich and lovely full group harvest, as captured by Susan’s graphic recording below. We began this phase with a minute of silent reflection on the question “What is the seed you will carry with you from what you have heard and said today?”

Here are some of the thoughts we gathered:

As this event was sponsored by The World Café Community Foundation, we felt that it was appropriate to do a brief “ask.” Deborah Goldblatt spoke to this, outlining the work that the Foundation is engaged in and some of the new developments taking place. We’re happy to report that we were able to raise a modest amount of money as a result. [And if you meant to make a donation but have not yet done so and are reading this now, it’s not too late! Please click here. Your support helps keep the vital work of the Foundation-including this Online Community-going.]

Next, we offered a “Call to Action,” where we invited our conversation starters and participants to briefly offer resources—events, organizations, publications, websites, new ideas, etc.– that might be of interest to people on the call. We heard from about a dozen people and then invited everyone to include their contributions via a "Google Doc" form we posted to the new “Conversations for the 21st Century” group here in the online community.

Our next conversation will be “Collaboration for the 21st Century” on May 20th at 12pm Eastern/9am Pacific. We are delighted to have Juanita Brown as one of our conversation starters, with the other two TBA. Here is a link for early registrations.