Virtual World Café using Zoom, Miro, Padlet

In my role of online meeting design and Zoom tech hosting, I’m having a ton of fun working with a group hosting a series of online World Café’s (a one-page overview of the World Café process is here). Here are some highlights of how my role is helping to bring the World Café process to life virtually through the lens of the seven World Café design principles.

1 Clarify the Context

A co-design team that included a diverse range of participants met several times to hone the purpose, people, and more, guided by my chaordic stepping stones/meeting planner tool, which helps me draw from a range of methods and online tools and adapt to what will be accessible to those we will be hosting.

From this work, the co-design team moved into the process of invitation, with personalized invitation emails, phone calls, materials, and follow-up with potential participants. We used Zoom’s meeting registration feature to help track registrations, as the Zoom confirmation email provides an easy way to add the event + participants unique Zoom link into their calendar. The purpose and intentions of the Café were reiterated through all the invitation + welcome materials, as well as at the beginning of the Café.

Tip: Make the purpose visible before, during, and after the Café - in planning meetings, invitation materials, registration page, welcome materials, Café opening, and more.

2 Create a Hospitable Space

This began before the Café with an online collaboration tool, Padlet, where people could get to know each other through some informal introductions + photos; as though we were gathering over a meal to meet each other before our first gathering. During the Café we would be using another online collaboration tool that offered more sophisticated harvest design, Miro, so I also created a short Miro orientation video and a practice Miro board to introduce the main online collaboration and documentation tool we would be using during the Café, all to help create a warm and welcoming vibe of the virtual room we’d be in together.

On the day of the Café, a custom welcome image greeted folks when they clicked the Zoom link so they knew they had arrived in the right ‘room’. We opened the Zoom room 15 minutes early and invited people for an optional “coffee and connect”; it was a great chance for people to settle in and connect with others before we began.

During the Café, one of the most commented-on aspects of the hospitable space was with the use of music. I had created a custom playlist filled with a multicultural range of artists and instrumental music and this music welcomed people at the beginning, transitioned people back from Zoom breakout rooms, enjoyed on breaks, and more.

Tip: In a physical space, we take the time to tend to the room. Online, it is even more important to tend to the ambience of the virtual room and create a welcoming space.

3 Explore Questions that Matter

A big focus of the co-design group’s work was honing the questions for each round of the Café, ensuring that participants with varied level of experience with the content would be able to contribute to the conversation. These questions were shared in advance in the welcome materials so people could begin to think about them.

During the Café, the questions were displayed in multiple ways to keep them visible during each round: on slides that were screenshared to everyone while the questions were explained, posted in the Zoom chat for visibility inside all the Zoom breakout rooms, as well as on the Café Miro board.

Tip: After you’ve created compelling questions, help the small groups focus on them by making them accessible and viewable in multiple ways.

4 Encourage Everyone’s Contribution

In the World Café tradition, Table Hosts are not ‘outside the process’ facilitators, but full participants with an additional leadership role of supporting the conversation. I created a Table Host Guide to orient them to their role and the Café process, and we hosted a Table Host Preparation meeting before the Café to go through it all, including practicing in Miro. As an informal guide-on-the-inside of the breakout rooms, the Table Hosts would host brief introductions, help focus the conversation on the question for each round, invite in quieter voices, and encourage note-taking.

Everyone was invited to help harvest (document) the conversations; there was no one person designated as note-taker to give everyone an opportunity to add notes in their own words and perspectives on the Miro board (and notes were welcomed in any format during and after the Café e.g. Zoom chat, Word, back in the Miro board, etc.). I had particular fun creating some café imagery on the Miro board, including a flying friend who often appeared during our planning meetings.

Tip: Bring in beauty to create harvest spaces that invite and encourage everyone’s contributions, and make multiple harvest avenues available for confidentiality and accessibility.

*Corner snippet of the Miro board (round 1 breakout room harvest space)*

*Another corner snippet of the Miro board (round 2 breakout room harvest space)*

5 Connect Diverse Perspectives

For these Cafés, it was particularly important to mix up the 80ish participants across their roles, to benefit from the range of their perspectives. To do this we created a participants list with category symbols, and while people joined the Zoom meeting we let them know that we would be adding a symbol to their name. I used those symbols to manually create the breakout room groupings of 4 to 5 people, and then between rounds wrote out new groupings with their symbols to ensure everyone was both mixed up in new groups as well as continue to be mixed up across roles. Both pencil and paper as well as Zoom’s newer feature of “Plan Next Session” were useful. I learned that the “&” symbol isn’t friendly to handwrite in a hurry!

Tip: Before the Café map out the variety of categories of participants that will be present, and where mixing up will be particularly important to connect diverse perspectives.

6 Listen Together for Patterns and Insights

An important part of a Café is inviting everyone’s contribution, with enough time and space to listen together. And it’s easier to contribute and listen once we’ve met the folks we’re in conversation with. We started the Café with a Zoom poll to illuminate the group’s range of experience with the topic, emphasizing that those with newer familiarity were just as important in the conversation as those with many years experience. We also hosted a short small groups check-in round in breakout rooms to be in some relational practice and meet each other, learning how everyone was connected to the topic; recognizing that relationships are so important in how they do their work, and the hope of ‘leaving with more community’ than they started with.

The check-in small groups stayed together for the first round of the Café so they didn’t have to immediately meet more new people. For the second and third rounds of the Café, as the groups were mixed up, we gave some additional time for people to introduce themselves briefly bfore shifting to the question for that round. This meant that the time for each round was slightly different to accommodate these needs: check-in was 10 minutes, round 1 was 20 minutes, and rounds 2 and 3 were closer to 25 minutes. We also had several breaks so people’s brains and bodies could have a little rest.

Tip: Everything needs more time in online sessions - build in spaciousness in your agenda so folks have time to listen, think, and reflect.

7 Share Collective Discoveries

When the breakout rooms were closed after each round and everyone arrived back in the main Zoom room, we hosted a couple of minutes of quiet, with some gentle instrumental music, for people to reflect on the conversation, add to the Miro harvest, and/or share in the Zoom chat. This was followed by some ‘popcorn harvesting’: hearing a few insights from the group (not a group-by-group report out) to get a sense of some of what was bubbling in the small groups.

The use of Miro is continuing after the Cafés, as a small group is working on sense-making and analysis, helped along with Miro’s tagging, clustering, and exporting to Excel features.

The ongoing sharing of collective discoveries is also happening via a Padlet that has links to the welcome packages, introductions Padlet, community resources that everyone can add to, Café slides, feedback summaries, harvest summaries, and more. This Padlet offers a "one stop shop" for all things connected to the World Cafés for participants, and we’ll continue to add to it as the Cafés progress. I can’t wait for the next one!

Tip: Connect the small group conversations to the whole Café in a variety of ways: Zoom chat, verbal sharing, small group sense-making, and sharing the harvest summary with all participants.