Knowledge Café: Choosing the Venue The venue need not be a meeting room

Often, you do not have a choice of venue, but if you do, the following should be considered.

If the Café is organizational, can you run it off-site away from one of the standard meeting rooms, or if on-site, maybe in the staff cafeteria?

Possible interesting venues are a boat, a café, a restaurant, a bar, or even a reception area.

I once ran a Knowledge Cafe at a University in Barcelona. When I entered the room I observed that the chairs and tables were in nice neat lecture style rows and bolted to the floor.

I thought I had a problem until someone pointed out that there were a large number of Cafés across the road from the University.

So we upped-camp and moved across the road. One of the proprietors was more than happy to let us have an upstairs room and we had the added bonus of a good coffee and a selection of other refreshments.

— David Gurteen