NAB: What does being a steward mean to you personally?
CM: First of all, being a Steward is a tremendous privilege and responsibility, because it’s of course a voluntary position where you are trying to look for the best of all worlds for this practice of dialogue. It’s like being an ambassador, to create the conditions for it to grow and expand and be embraced by many people in different parts of the world. It’s a thrill, actually. But this brings with it a strong sense of commitment to make sure the spirit of TWC is intact, that we are loyal and faithful to the intention of creating a web of conversations, that we prevent TWC from becoming a fad—a tool to be used for any purpose, and to avoid the temptation of using TWC just for sparking the same kind the results that created the problems we see in the world today. So being a Steward is a two-way function: first, to expand its potential; second, to be cautious and careful and to have very clear what TWC is not for. It’s important to be clear on its purpose, and what we don’t want to create because it’s so easy at this time to find another “flavor of the month”. TWC is a very popular tool partly because there is a tremendous sense of anxiety and dependence on tools, techniques and formulae to solve problems, and that is not necessarily what we want for the future.

Read on for Nicole's whole interview with this wonderful friend and exlemplary steward of the World Café ...

Howard Bloom says 'There is nothing, absolutely nothing individual about the universe ' and as he says so he evokes our social essence, the form in which we stretch from the individual to the collective. From the protons which in their desire for an electron formed a circle that produced something never imagined; the atom. We have 14 billion years of surprises, much has happened since the atom, living processes continued their journey, evolution continued to discover how to organize cooperative groups every time more complex. We can all recognize what it means to have the capacity for experience, sensing, environment stimulation, correspondence, attraction and repulsion which are essential qualities which contribute to the organization, to the cooperation in between simple unities (quarks and molecules) up to the most complex (human beings) that conform our universe. Its manifestation in society was our capacity to move from the clan to tribes to villages to nation-states and from there to the possibility of expansion in a global scale, or is it universal?