Conversation Week 2007

rEPORT

conversation week vision and intention

Conversation Week 2007, March 25-30, was a week-long, world-wide, face-to-face dialogue initiative. Through the conversations, participants engaged with the important questions of our times, learned crucial speaking and listening skills and together celebrated the power of conversation to change the world.

Conversation Week proposed this experiment: “What if everyone in the world asked the same question at the same time and shared what they learned?” The goal was to empower people worldwide to convene a meaningful, respectful discussion in their community. Trained Conversation Caféhosts organized over 100 registered small-group conversations (and many more unregistered ones) about the most important questions of our times.Friends, neighbors and strangers gathered in cafes, libraries, homes, churches and public halls and, using the Conversation Café process and agreements, spoke, listened and learned as they engaged with one of the 10 Conversation Week questions. Afterwards, hosts and guests answered a web-based survey as well as blogged on the Conversation Week site, allowing the world to hear the insights and appreciations.

Conversation Week marked the Conversation Cafe’s fifth birthday. Begun in the Summer of 2001, Conversation Cafes were formally introduced in January 2002 to the Seattle community through Conversation Week. They had spread throughout the city and after CW across the nation in response to the need for dialogue after 9/11.

In an over-mediated and troubled world, building citizen capacity for dialogue is crucial to counter declining trends in civil discourse, social capital, and civic engagement. The ability to participate in a meaningful dialogue is a central right and responsibility of a citizen in a democracy; without a citizenry skilled and comfortable with dialogue and/or deliberation, a democracy cannot function as it is intended. High-quality conversation is a requirement for democratic systems to garner the co-intelligence, or collective wisdom, of the citizenry.

conversation week partners

The Conversation Café Initative hosted Conversation Week and the OrangeBand Initiative partnered with Conversation Cafes, adding its symbol for promoting meaningful conversation. OrangeBands serve as invitation to a conversation about issues that matter - the wearer decides what matters.

In addition, Dropping Knowledge and Skype added technical support and the Co-Intelligence Institute provided staff and outreach support. The World Café, a long-time Conversation Café partner, did outreach to their global network of hosts.

Planning began in October of 2006 via conference calls; the team met face to face December 13-15, 2006 to design and launch the project.

conversation week team

Vicki Robin, Conversation Café founder and Coordinator, was the overall visionary for Conversation Week 2007 as well as primary, writer, fundraiser, communicator and project oversight.

Susan Partnow, Conversation Café founder, was the primary host trainer and adapted the Conversation Café host manual for Conversation Week.

Kai Degner, OrangeBand originator, served as the Conversation Week coordinator and webmaster, as well as a host trainer, video maker and overall tech whiz.

Heather Tischbein, Board Member for Co-Intelligence Institute, organized the host mentor team.

Ian Mannheimer, project manager for dropping knowledge, was a liason to dk for technical support.

Lorie Wood, Conversation Café administrator, communicated with CC hosts via bulletins and newsletters and with Vicki Robin took over coordination from Kai Degner in the final month.

conversation week principles and design

Our basic principles were:

  • Empower people to host their own conversations
  • Keep it simple
  • Stay true to the Conversation Cafe process and agreements
  • Be avenues to the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation for those interested in learning more
  • Design with the future in mind, i.e. the next Conversation Week!

These led to the following design and implementation choices:

  • CW SERVED HOSTS WHO IN TURN SERVED THEIR GUESTS: Conversation Week was designed to support and empower hosts to conduct CW conversations, not a support site for people to find conversations that others organized. We chose to keep it a low-demand, self-organizing pilot project. We provided hosts everything they needed via a rich website, including:
  • a manual[1],
  • a set of 10 questions vetted by dialogue and sustainability experts globally (see below)
  • a choice of phone or video training,
  • an online way to register their conversation,
  • a mentor assigned to each host who signed up
  • a sample invitation and press release[2],
  • an on-line survey[3] to report on their conversation,
  • an on-line way to blog about their conversation and
  • a series of emails to anchor understanding and enthusiasm for the CCs and CW
  • several host support conference calls.
  • CW USED CC METHOD FOR SIMPLICITY: Conversation Week officially used the Conversation Café process and agreements as a core conversation process because it was the simplest method to teach and use by non-professionals. However, we invited anyone to use any dialogue method to host a conversation during CW, and use the 10-Questions and report via the survey and blog on their learnings.
  • CW 2007 WAS A PILOT: Conversation Week 2007 was designed as a pilot to learn how an annual, global “earth day for dialogue” might happen. In this frame, we could be learning rather than results oriented, using targets (number of hosts, number of guests) to drive learning but not as measurements of success.
  • OUTREACH VIA NETWORKS, NOT MEDIA: Outreach to enroll hosts happened through networking and the website, with a special focus on already trained Conversation Café hosts, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation members, World Café hosts, Coaches and a variety of listserves of sustainability activists. Since we were serving hosts, not being a magnet drawing thousands to the scheduled conversations, we kept outreach viral and relational.
  • ATTENTION TO INCLUSIVITY: Language, design and processes were crafted to ensure the campaign is accessible to the mainstream and would invite, not alienate, the popular audience and the full range of the political spectrum.
  • RELICABILITY AND REPETITION: In all phases of the project, the organizers kept in mind the potential for Conversation Week to become an ongoing event. We believe we came up with a replicable and sustainable model.

conversation week mentors and hosts

To support first-time hosts in having the best experience possible we recruited 20 seasoned Conversation Café hosts to serve as mentors. They made themselves available via email and phone to their assigned hosts to answer questions and give advice and/or simply reassurance. The mentors also met several times by phone to prepare them for their role and connect them with one another. They themselves had excellent suggestions for Conversation Week and were, as longer term hosts, grateful to be asked and to be connected with one another.

conversation week questions

The Conversation Week Team reached out to thinkers, activists and dialogue experts around the world, looking for the right question or questions to spark lively conversation anywhere. We then opened vetting via a survey to the general public in part to test the strength of each potential question and in part to open the creation process to a wider public, increasing ownership of the project.

We developed the following list of criteria for a good dialogue question.

  1. Open, without embedded cultural, political or ideological assumptions.
  2. Inviting both head and heart. People can respond with both their feelings and their thoughts.
  3. Honest. It has not already been answered conclusively – yet finding an answer is crucial to moving forward.
  4. Experiential. People can if they choose tell a story or recall an experience that relates to the question.
  5. Inclusive. Anyone at the table could have something valuable to say – whatever age, race, gender or education level.
  6. Generative. Can’t be answered with a “yes” or “no” or a platitude.
  7. Relevant. Even though broad, applies to many of the real issues we each and all face.

In consultation with activists and sustainability experts around the world, we developed a list of 31 potential questions that met the above criteria. We then asked Conversation Café hosts, Mentors and dialogue experts to pick their top ten. Over 75 people voted on the questions and the result was the following powerful list of ten questions from which Conversation Week hosts selected the one they would use. Attached[4] are the instructions we gave hosts via the website, followed by an expanded version of the ten questions below:

  1. What do you think is the most important question in the world now?
  2. What’s the highest leverage action you or anyone could take towards a just, peaceful, and sustainable world by 2025?
  3. How are we making life better for our children - and what else can we be doing?
  4. What do you think we can do now to make life better here?
  5. What do you believe freedom is for?
  6. What does it mean to you to be a human?
  7. How can we heal the wounds of violence and war?
  8. What is one of the most important things you have learned in your life so far?
  9. How much is enough? For you? For others?
  10. When do you feel most alive?

conversation week technicals

  • We used a Typepad Blog for the website
  • We used as our newsletter and sign up manager (their website says: phplist is an open-source newsletter manager. phplist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website. phplist is downloaded more than 10 000 times per month and is listed in the top open source projects for vitality score on Freshmeat. phplist is sponsored by tincan.)
  • We used Constant Contact for the Conversation Café bulletins and newsletters.
  • Dropping Knowledge set up a blog for each of the CW questions on their new website.
  • Weekly conference calls scheduled via and conducted using
  • New Road Map Foundation served as a fiscal agent.

conversation week Funders

We are grateful to Nancy Schaub and the Foundation for Global Community for providing us with our major funding for Conversation Week. Smaller donations came from: name, name, name.

conversation week RESULTS

Stats:

130 hosts signed up

84 hosts and guests filled out the survey

Conversation Cafes were as small as 4 and as large as many dozens.

Documented conversations happened from North Pole, Alaska to Sydney, Australia to Utrecht in the Netherlands to Tokyo, Japan as well as across the US and Canada.

For CW stories, see the follow up newsletter at the end of the bulletins at the end of this report.

conversation week Lessons learned

*. The choir comes, but beyond that is more difficult: Hosts were mostly recruited through the Conversation Café network or through some personal connection to one of the partnering organizations. Guests came largely because they knew the host, though most cited “being part of a global conversation and sharing what we learned” as their motivation. This suggests either that increasing the number of hosts and guests in the future rests on more strongly engaging those we already know or that more powerful PR and marketing tools, materials and strategies are needed to go beyond “the choir”. Also, while age and gender diversity were present, race, class and culture diversities were not as well represented. Assumptions about lack of these diversities include:

1. more structured, less spontaneous conversation appeals to middle to upper class educated people.

2. inquiry – seeking truth together – is inherently more liberal.

3. invitations through emails or listserves select for participants who tend to think like the host

4. personal invitation is the strongest draw to attendance and even when an effort is made to expand diversity, people just don’t know others not like themselves.

5. the Conversation Café initiative has not done sufficient effort to offer our tools beyond educated cultural creatives. If we had more diverse hosts, we’d have more diverse conversation cafes. Spreading Conversation Cafes via schools and youth organizations offers a real opportunity to train future generations of hosts.

6. there is such strong distrust along racial, cultural and political lines that even the best efforts to listen to ‘the other’ are often unsuccessful or short-lived. We are in an environment of polarization and painful history which will take personal commitment and collective will over many years to bridge.

*. Portability: This is a portable template which means other groups can use it:

1. The conversation Café Method
2. Host sign up and training (manual for CCs and video on CC website and/or a training can be done)

3. Question development (what makes a good question and survey to jury questions)
4. FreeOnlineSurvey.com to survey participants

5. Blogging for online discussion

This could be a program of CC/CW, encouraging national orgs, groups in conflict, communities, interest groups to host their own Conversation Week. CC/CW might provide online or face to face training and mentoring.

*. OrangeBand worked great in school, almost not at all in general population. In Todd Beamer High School kids loved OBs. Kids are tribal, schools are bounded communities with daily contact and strong norms and structures. Outside of campuses or closed groups, wearing OB drew little to no comment or identity. For the general public, using the OB would need to be linked with a strong national PR campaign.

*. Conversation Café Method was both limiting and liberating. CC method is safe enough that ordinary people are willing to risk hosting a community conversation – there is a sense of liberation when a sufficiently strong container is provided. However, we believe that the method.

*. Everybody wants to do what everybody’s doing. Being connected to something bigger, something that many people are doing at the same time around the world, is a strong pull to get people to try out something new and different. For both teens and adults, this was very important, and speaks for annual “Conversation Week” or branded (Girl Scouts, trade groups) Conversation Weeks

*. Teens need the identity and recognition CW provides. Jackie Jamison, a teacher atTodd Beamer High School in Federal Way, successfully organized the high school to do a Conversation Week. The teens liked that it was: real, not tied to a grade, ritualized so everyone gets a turn, given over to the teens to manage (one classroom trained as hosts, one for logistics, one for marketing and pr, one for oversight - Jackie launched and took responsibility for it but did not run it.

*. Non-local team meeting only by phone with no central office is problematic: Even with great good will, the project lacked the energy that comes from people working together on a daily basis to achieve a result. It did not become a campaign. As a comparison Bill McKibben at the same time was organizing a national day of action around global warming. They had a local Middlebury staff of several former students working together on the tech aspects, plus they had a nationally recognized spokesperson who happened to be touring in support of a new book. They achieved 10 times the number of actions as CW did. Another difference – and there’s no way to evaluate the impact of this – was that McKibben’s groups could design any action they wanted (a swim, a bike ride, a lecture, a conversation) while CW was more specific and constrained. People could find their events via the web; they could not find ours. Event hosts could toot their horn via the web; ours could not. Generally, the CW campaign was more static, and that might have lowered our appeal in the YOUTUBE MYSPACE era when people expect to be at the center of web based two way communications.

* A Google Map showing all registered conversation was a big missing! Our tech team did not figure out how to feed host’s conversation information into a Google Map, which has been part of the vision, not so much to help people find conversations but to give a visual representation of the world lighting up with conversations which would have been very compelling and energizing. A MUST for the next time.

* Blogging before, during and after. Our younger team member’s instinct was to be transparent while building the project capacity while older members believed we should not place our personalities or our failings front and center. The older but not necessarily wiser ones prevailed, but next time more transparency might increase ownership and partnership.

* Partnering was a mixed bag. Despite our best efforts, some aspects of the partnerships broke down. Dropping knowledge ended up in a redesign of their website during CW ramp up and was unable to provide the functionalities we agreed upon (question jurying and blogging). Our coordinator was offered a plum job and turned his attention there mid-stream. When organizations that don’t share cultures or history attempt to parcel out tasks according to each one’s capacities plus work at a distance, misunderstandings and distractions can happen. The shared project can drop in priority and tasks not get done.

* Time frame was too short. From our December organizing meeting until Conversation Week began was just over 3 months. It could now be done by a committed group in a 3 month time frame since all the parts of a Conversation Week are developed and all the major documents written. However, for this pilot, developing the idea from scratch, we ideally should have had an additional two months – or more – to do the job well, especially if we had activated a larger PR campaign. CW is such a powerful idea; it can potentially impact tens of thousands of people around the world and it deserves a chance to succeed.

recommendations for future conversation weeks