World Café

Origin. Brown and Isaacs (1995).

Mechanism. Cross-pollinates small-group conversation by rotating participants between tables while leaving one host behind. Ideas propagate through the room by carrying participants rather than by broadcast, which preserves the depth of small-group talk at large-group scale.

Procedure. Tables of four to five, three rounds of twenty minutes. One host stays, the rest scatter to different tables. The host summarizes the prior conversation to the new arrivals. Final round returns to origin tables. Harvest collectively.

Applies to. Twenty to a thousand participants, where a plenary would produce four speakers and silence.

Limitations. Produces breadth and buy-in, not decisions. Nothing in the structure converges.