World Cafe Etiquette

Cafe Etiquette, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

If you're at all familiar with the participative facilitation style known as 'World Cafe', this pic might be useful to you if you run sessions.

Please feel free to spread it around.

I painted it late late late last night for Louise van Rhyn to use in today's workshop. She ran a World Cafe session, and I did Visual Facilitation of everything, recording the processes and outcomes in real time as the day progressed.

It's my interpretation of one of the diagrams World Cafe uses. Their one is a little on the bald side, so I decided to busy it up, and fit it into the look and feel of the type of stuff I was producing today.

We printed out loads of copies for the delegates. But we ended up just showing it to them on Louise's projector.

My work-in-progress was shown on the rear wall of the room all day. And that was really interesting. People were really having fun with both the World Cafe part of the gig AND my presence as a live artist.

Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to divulge the name or details of the client, as the session was confidential. But I may be able to erase the details so I can show you the pics. We'll see.

Right now, I'm just emailing all the pics to the client so she can distribute them to all of the people who were present today. And then it's off to sleep I go.

This painting was made on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc, shuttling between CorelDraw 10, ArtRage 2.5, and Photoshop CS2.