The ConceptCafe is a form of gentle dialogue. Participants -- absolutely no fence-sitters allowed -- bring a citation, a poem, a drawing, picture or object and use it to talk about something they consider very important in (for eg) patterns.  Could be something inspiring them, a fear, something considered missing...

It is based on an idea of DanahZohar(RewiringTheCorporateBrain).

Businesspeople in particular are not used to sharing feelings (about change for example, about the way a system is working or should be working...) and reflections with their colleagues.

The past years I experimented with metaphors (see MetaphorsWeLiveBy and MetaphorAndOrganizations), storytelling, visualisation, BrainWriting and MindMap''''''ping to get for requirements engineering or simply for a better understanding of concepts withing the developers group or among management.

At Oopsla I want to experiment with a ConceptCafe on patterns during our workshop on SystemEnvisioning. Even if you are busy on sunday morning or do not want to participate in the more "technical" discussion on use of lateral thinking, systems thinking... in our OO-practice, we would like people interested in patterns, and creativity, to participate in the ConceptCafe.  We do not intend to come to any form of consensus on patterns -- just to experience and work on a technique to explore ideas within different paradigms,...  ''What happened? What were the results? Did the event take place?''
----

Interested?  Please contact me at mailto:mdevos@argo.be
----
More about this at:
* http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MartineDevos
----
SystemEnvisioning
* http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0321205766/pref05?portal=oreilly
* http://www.sigplan.org/oopsla/oopsla99/2_ap/workshops/ws10.html
* SystemEnvisioningReferences