World Cafe

World Café is a different kind of meeting format designed to bring people together in an informal setting and have conversations about questions that matter. The underpinning assumption is that people feel more comfortable, and creative in a less formal environment and, as its name suggests, this engagement technique recreates a café environment and behaviours to stimulate conversations. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people’s capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims (http://www.theworldcafe.com/involved.htm).

Advantages

Requires little preparation except for ensuring you get the right stakeholder balance in the room.
Connects people with diverse styles and perspectives.
Encourages contributions from everyone because of the naturalistic setting.
Useful for generating debate and new ideas about 'messy' problems.

Disadvantages

Can be dismissed as anecdotal.
No good if decisions have already been made.

When to use

If new ideas are needed.
When you have diverse groups of people and you want to hear from all of them.

The format of a world café is as follows:

A theme for the café is decided beforehand and the key stakeholders are invited to the event.
The room is set out like a café: small tables with paper table cloths (or pieces of flip chart paper) so people can make notes or draw pictures to capture their conversations. It is important to make the space as welcoming and hospitable as possible.
People get their refreshments and then gather around tables to talk about the issue. Participants are encouraged to talk about what is important to them and listen to other people's views.
After a reasonable period (30 minutes perhaps) people move around with one person staying to make sure that people find out about the previous conversations, share common themes and develop ideas further.
The table cloths are collected and used to make an exhibition at the end of the event.
The method is based on the generative and self-organising capacity of the room.

For further advice and resources about this technique see http://www.theworldcafe.com/index.htm