Resource: Collaboration Cafe - Open Source

A Facilitator's Workshop Guide for supporting people to work together.

Back in 2012 I got together with some friends from Enspiral to develop a monthly event to get people working together more.

I was having 10s of conversations with people in Wellington about their projects, and kept found myself connecting dots between their projects and other people and projects which could be valuable to speak with. It opened my eyes to how often we develop ideas in isolation.

Enter Collaboration Cafe.

So we created a simple process which could be run in 2 hours to support project owners to explore their challenge space with a roomful of locals. It looked and felt a bit like this:

A couple of years later when we'd run the process in Wellington, San Francisco, Auckland and around the country through our social lab, Lifehack, we decided to open source it so anyone in the world could use it.

In the open source resource is:

• A guide to putting on a Collaboration Cafe event, including how to find and engage with project holders, and how to find locals to attend.
• Facilitator Guide to running the Collaboration Cafe process on the night.
• Slides to help present the process.

We used to host this on Enspiral's website but it seems to have disappeared, so I'm making the files available here for posterity.

This was most certainly not me alone, this was an amazing collaboration by: Chelsea Robinson, Silvia Zuur, Seth Hickling, Britney Packer, Sophie Turner and Ants Cabraal.