Trying out a sustainability focussed lean coffee in Berlin

Through being involved in a democracy themed hackday last year, I ended up working at Factory Berlin, and using it as a coworking space. At a sustainability focussed event, I met another member Cherie Birkner of Sustainable Fashion Matterz, and we're testing out a a lean coffee next week. Read on to find out the when, where, what and how.

What's lean coffee?

Lean coffee is a format for an event when you have a set of people with a shared interest, and you want introduce some light structure to make it useful for everyone who comes.

I've pilfered borrowed the pictures from leancoffee.org

The general plan is:

First, rock up, and if you have an idea or question you'd like to discuss under the theme of sustainability, briefly introduce it

Next, vote on the ideas together

Marking the ideas with sticky dots, or a marker is fine.

The idea here is to get an idea from everyone present what's most relevant or interesting to everyone present.

Then divide the total time by the number of ideas it's reasonable to discuss

Depending on how long you have, you might restrict the topics so there's a chance to discuss them in sufficient depth.

Finally, spend the time discussing them

Because you've already got some idea of priority, the conversations are most useful to the most people.

Okay, that sounds like I might give it a go. When is it?

Next Wednesday June 6th, at 9am at Factory Berlin, at the Görlitzer campus, until around 10.

This is an experiment, so we're trying to keep it small, til we know how best to run it, which is why we're not trying to run it as an official Factory event (I think you need at least 15 people for one of them, and we're trying to keep it lightweight and easy to manage for now).

It's also totally okay if you're just curious and you don't have a thing you want to talk about yet - we don't have long, so we won't be able to discuss everything anyway.

If there's more interest than we have space for, we'll organise a follow up event depending.

We started this mainly as a thing to meet other Factory members with similar interests, but if it seems interesting to you, you don't need to be a member to come along - you can come as an invited guest.

Shoot me an email, or hit me up on twitter @mrchrisadams.

Come along!

See you there!