ACT - Co-creation Toolkit - The World Café

The World Café aims to facilitate collaborative dialogue and knowledge and idea sharing in a creative way through a living network of conversation and action. As the name suggests, the facilitator creates a café ambiance of small groups sitting around tables, which encourages participants to discuss issues and questions. After a specified time, the participants move to a new table, apart from the table host (one host per table), who then recaps the previous conversations to the new table participants. As a result, the following discussions are cross-pollinated with the ideas from previous conversations among other participants. At the end of the process the main ideas are summarised in a plenary session and follow-up actions are discussed. The event lasts a few hours – a minimum of four hours and a maximum of an entire day, depending upon the topic and ambitions of the project (Slocum, 2003: 141).