Issue #16: October, 2009
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Greetings! There's nothing like having the lively international World Cafe online community buzzing away to let us all know just how much is happening around the world of the World Cafe! You'll hear some of the highlights of that activity in this issue.
We'll also be announcing MaestroMonth, a stimulating series of free tele-events throughout October, featuring Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Christine Whitney Sanchez, David Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and many of our other friends and colleagues. Christine, Gabriel Shirley and myself will be hosting these interactive sessions using some truly break-through technology that will totally change the way you view your telephone.
This is a real month for events - beyond MaestroMonth, we're featuring the annual STIA conference that the World Cafe is honored to sponsor, and the European Salon we've all been so excited about. Read on for more details on these events and valuable new resources being shared in the Community Cybrary, current stories in StoryNet, and the powerful conversations going on throughout the World Cafe.
Thanks for reading! We look forward to hearing more stories and ideas and sharing of resources from you in the online community. You're also welcome to drop me a line at the address below to share your thoughts about anything you've read here or would like to see.
If you like what you see, and have been as excited as we are about having an online community space to make this vibrant international movement increasingly visible to itself, please consider supporting it by making a contribution - large or small - to the World Cafe Community Foundation. You'll find a link below, right under the "in this issue" listings. Thank you. Your (tax-deductable) donations really make a difference to us and all levels of contribution are deeply appreciated.
Warm Wishes,
 Amy Lenzo, Editorand the World Café Community Foundation
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Every Friday Night
World Cafe at Starbucks
St Petersburg, Florida
October 9
Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer: Multi-Generaltional Collaboration: Shaping Tomorrow, Together
Telephone, in MaestroMonth
October 14
Christine Whitney Sanchez: Getting Our Collective Act Together: Methods for Strategic Collaboration
Telephone, in MaestroMonth
October 16
David Isaacs: World Cafe: Conversational Leadership in Action
Telephone, in MaestroMonth
October 16-19
European Salon on
Dialogue, Leadership &
The New Face of Community
near Vienna, Austria
November 2-4
Now More Than Ever:
Pegasus STIA Annual Conference
Seattle, Washington
November 13
Training: What is
the World Cafe?
Monroe Township, New Jersey
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Send us your World Cafe event dates!
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"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
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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. Read on for the full list.
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What's Hot in the 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 our geographic location. It's not surprising that an international network like ours with so much to talk about has really taken up this opportunity with relish.
After only two months of being "live", there are already 23 groups formed, in 6 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Indonesian. I'll tell you a little about just two or three of them here, but I can't possibly do justice to the forms of dynamic clustering that's going on and I invite you to explore these groups for yourself. If you don't find the group you are looking for, talk to me about how to host it yourself.
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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.
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Now More than Ever: Critical Skills
for Courageous Organizations
The
19th Annual Systems Thinking in Action Conference put on by Pegasus
Communications will be held at the Westin Seattle, in Seattle
Washington on November 2-4.
Here's an excerpt from the introduction to this year's theme:
"In times like these, courageous organizations distinguish themselves from
others by their willingness to question their most fundamental
assumptions; to acknowledge that what they've been doing isn't
delivering the results they want; and to take responsibility for envisioning
and creating new futures."
The
World Cafe continues to sponsor this well-respected event which manages to
integrate a stellar keynote and session line-up (featuring sessions by
Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Tom Hurley, Frances Baldwin and Amy Lenzo
of the World Cafe, and keynotes from Juana Bordas, John Seely Brown,
Peter Senge, Linda Booth Sweeney, and David Whyte) with a collaborative
learning style and orientation that far transcends the usual 'talking
head" conference model. The STIA conference offers truly interactive
collaboration with the amazing people who show up, and it just gets
better every year.
Come learn with us! To register, or for more information, see the conference website.
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The European Salon:
Dialogue, Leadership and Community
Coming soon to Austria and a screen near you!
October 16 - 19th
 Hosted
by a collaborative group of World Cafe and other change practitioners,
this unusual and anticipated event will be held simultaneously in a lovely little hotel
in the countryside outside of Vienna, and online throughout the world.
Beyond the fact that it
is being held online AND in person, one
of the many ways this event is unusual is in its financial structure - the Salon is
being offered free online and "at cost" in Vienna, to make it
available to all who want to be part of the conversation. Another
innovative element is the collaborative hosting and shared leadership
being practiced throughout the process of planning and designing the events; pre, post, and during.
The online conversation about these three subjects: Dialogue, Leadership and Community
and what they might have to do with each other has already been
bubbling on the new World Cafe online community, where we announced a
pre-event World Cafe on Skype a few weeks ago. It was a ground-breaking
event for many as they learned that powerful, deep, and meaningful
conversation can happen online. It certainly stirred up a LOT of
conversation in several locations on the online community.
There may still be a little room at the inn, so if you are drawn to come join us in person, register now so you won't be disappointed. If you need a little persuasion, have a look at the fabulous photos Ulrich Soeder took of the hotel and countryside around it.
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StoryNet
The European Salon on Dialogue, Leadership and Community is scheduled for next month, but we've already started with a pre-event Online World Cafe on the subject, using Skype. In reading the story, you might find the comments from participants particularly interesting, as well as the fascinating array of graphic recording that was done by a number of talented recorders. Who says you have to be in the same city to find meaningful conversation?! World Cafe and the Future Visioning of Urban Landscapes. Dennis Dougherty shares a timely story of a World Cafe he hosted with landscape contractors Cagwin & Dorward, asking the question: " How can new designs, new implementations, and new uses of our urban landscapes better serve present and future generations?"
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Fabulous Resources
Both videos were conceived and commissioned by Christine Whitney Sanchez and they were produced and directed by the incredible people at Everyday Wonder Productions. If you like the little snippet from Peter Block that you see in the "Quotes" section of this issue, left, have a look at the full excerpt taken from his latest book, Community: The Structure of Belonging.
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The World Cafe Community Foundation
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Nancy Margulies posted some of the beautiful 
