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Eco-Café
The Eco-Café method complements Round Tables, focusing brainstorming on specific challenges and strategic opportunities, enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration and strategic innovation for multi-faceted ecosystem challenges,
The Eco-Café comprises a six-step process:
- Teamstorms bring together diverse, cross-disciplinary teams to brainstorm, from different perspectives, eco-design challenges requiring strategic innovation, defining "next steps."
- Summary of Next Steps, identified through each Round Table, some of which may evolve into project proposals.
- Enlistment of Thought Leaders. Each proposal or white paper identifies required expertise and stakeholders for each aspect of the problem.
- Scenario-building. The Eco-Café guides problem-focused sessions toward strategic innovation, harnessing “what if?” scenario-building and web resources.
- Problem-mapping documents each problem-solving process, aligning it with community, cultural, and economic priorities.
- Iterative Cycles. Each technical refinement cycles back for testing with early adopter communities.
The informality of the Eco-Café grows stakeholder networks organically: bringing together engineers, planners and policy-makers, scientific researchers, educators and students, communicators and the general public. Besides the obvious need for cross-platform, cross-disciplinary innovation, the Eco-Café supports:
- First, pre-planning for each cross-disciplinary Round Table. A web-based framework enables those invited to participate to see each others' backgrounds and proposed "next steps." This framework can cluster related input, mapping user interest, and priorities.
- Second, post Round Table follow-up. A system is designed to map diffusion flowing from each Round Table, applicable to similar Round Tables.
- Third, an evolving system. Round Table pre-planning, documentation, and post-Round Table follow-up feed into an integrated, ongoing knowledge library, linked not only to output from other Round Tables, but also to related resources..
- Fourth, a “metaview.” By clustering and linking information in multiple ways, we can hyperlink resources not only by Round Table, but also by emergent themes identified for future Round Tables, key research topics, applications, etc. See the convergent planning method of MetaVu
Network.
In addition to building communication across engineering and planning sectors, across disciplines and organizational boundaries, the Eco-Café
- defines project-focused Round Tables to grow new ventures by positioning them in a larger collaborative ecosystem;
- supports stategic innovation from attendees at each Round Table;
- identifies thought leaders able to drive strategic innovation, and links synergetic projects and tracks those linkages.
Each Eco-Café Round Table
- produces a summary document identifying next steps proposed by each attendee,
- identifies drivers/ champions for particular innovation networks (possibly coincident with proposed next steps) related to the priority agenda;
- uses Round Tables to augment the capacity of teams (people and resources) to drive strategic innovation and to share progress with other teams.
The Eco-Café strategically innovates using
Partner-Focused Round Tables bring together product developers, stakeholders and users, tools developers and systems integrators.
Project-Focused Round Tables address different issues for regional planning, assembling stakeholders to clarify their needs and perspectives.
New Applications for Innovative Tools sessions on systems integration for
- Community Use, Tools and Mobile Apps;
- Open Source Tools grounded in Communities of Practice;
- Collaborative GIS and Visualization for Decision Support;
- Information Visualization and intuitive User Interfaces.
Eco-Café Round Tables bring leaders/ users together with integrators, user interface designers, and information visualization experts to develop specs for integrated systems design. Each Round Table produces a summary document on proposed next steps, or series of white papers, and an associated action agenda. Resources are collected into an emerging, ongoing collaboratory serving evolving teams of participants.
Downstream, the Eco-Café will include built-in capacity to represent the status of problem-solving as it evolves, to facilitate measuring and assessing improved speed and efficiency of decision-making, in order to refine the framework, and a GeoLibrary public knowledge space and resource-sharing environment, augmented by customized, private sign-in collaboratory workspaces with specific resources for problem-solving teams — used with stakeholders to develop a knowledge management system for strategic innovation toward sustainability. Capacity to structure incoming information and proposals in process as problem-solving evolves will enable embedded continual assessment and reporting on the status of strategic innovation as new resources relevant to different aspects of each ecosystem challenge are integrated.
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