On April 1st, amidst all that was going on in my family, I had the chance to step into a different “space” and participate in WeDialog’s first online world cafe on “community.” Since this was a “audio” online experience, I grabbed my pens to try and add a visual aspect for myself. Here are my images:
But hold on to your socks, because Amy Lenzo also recruited two of the BEST graphic facilitators to listen and scribe what they heard, Nancy Margulies and Susan Kelly.
. Here is some of the text from the WeDialog official harvest page:
“Conversations for the 21st Century” launched on Friday, April 1st, with more than 200 people participating in a three hour conversation on the topic of “Community for the 21st Century.” The series is a production ofweDialogue, 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, 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).
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.
via Community for the 21st Century – The World Cafe Community.
I simply LOVE these harvests. Brilliant. And hosts Amy and Ben did a terrific job. I look forward to the next offering from WeDialog.