About Coffee Time

Coffee Time is all about helping you host and participate in insightful conversations. Inspired by ideas such as Lean Coffee, Deep Democracy, and more, our mission is to connect people from diverse backgrounds and encourage learning from each other about topics that are important to them.

How does it work?

When you host a conversation, we make it visible to the world. So that folks can make a good decision about whether the conversation is for them, you can give it a theme and explanatory context. That context can be formatted using just the Basic Syntax of Markdown, without the inclusion of inline HTML tags.

You can add a link to a video chat (like Zoom), but we won't show it to people until 1 hour before the event at the earliest, for your privacy. We recommend you use a waiting room and only admit people who are on the participant list for the event.

A conversation is typically 45 minutes long, and is broken up into 5-minute segments called rounds. Each round is centered around a single topic, voted on by the participants using a dot voting approach.

A topic can continue between rounds, but generally only if the majority of the participants support it. We provide feedback about whether it is good to continue the topic based on similar rules as the Decider Protocol from the Core Protocols.

As a host

• See how everyone has voted on their favorite topics so you can fairly choose which one to advance
• Keep the conversation moving by advancing topics and pulse checks or extending the time of a round
• Promote participants to cohost to help with the event
• Remove participants
• Queue up emails that go out to all participants, up to once per day, before the event starts
• Send an invitation to someone to join your event

As a participant

• Add topics that you think should be talked about
• Delete a topic you created if you made a mistake
• Vote on which topic(s) you think are most important to advance
• Vote on whether the current topic should continue when the round ends
• Add insights and next steps to help you remember what you learned / committed to do during the conversation
• Send chat messages to everybody in the conversation
• Decide whether you'd like others in the conversation to be able to see those insights / next steps.
• Propose pulse checks to see how other people in the event are feeling about something.
• Send an email to your host before the event begins
• Send truly private messages to other participants in a conversation:
  • Messages are end-to-end encrypted
  • Messages cannot be recovered once the event has wrapped up
  • Replies to encrypted messages are also encrypted to the other person in the conversation

You will receive a wrapup report in email that captures what was talked about, next steps and insights, a chat transcript, and more. If your events are associated with a community, those reports can be viewed by people on your community that weren't at the conversation.

When the conversation is over, and the host has wrapped up the event, the system will send everybody an email that includes what topics got talked about (and didn't), what everybody learned, and what next steps everybody committed to.

Why build this now?

Our initial impulse was a feeling of disconnection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Consigned to spend our days at home throughout the year, we felt a loss of community feeling, and looked for ways to rekindle that in an intimate, well-hosted manner. Our hypothesis was that the fatigue that comes about from hanging out all day on video conferences included not having the normal signals we would normally get from folks that reassure us that we are going down the right track. The Lean Coffee method for participative co-facilitation looked like a good way to mitigate some of that.

We crave feedback! Our intention is to host Coffee Time conversations periodically to get a sense for what people need. However, that's not the only way. We hope you will send an email with your thoughts!