There is a new style of meeting that is gaining tracition amongst large organizations called Lean Coffee. Lean Coffee is a way to approach meetings that have no strongly defined agenda.

The process of Lean Coffee follows these basic steps:

• Everyone submits topics (2-3 mintues)
• Similar topics are merged (1-2 minutes)
• Everyone votes on the topics (1-3 minutes)
• Each person has 3 votes they can use any way they like
• Main body of the meeting
• Take the topic with the most votes
• Talk about the topic (3 minutes)
• At the end of three minutes everyone votes on whether or not to continue talking about the topic
• If they vote yes, keep talking (time is reduced by half for each successful continue)
• If they vote no, remove the topic and repeat the main body steps again
• Main body is repeated for each topic, in vote order, until the meeting is over

Lean Coffee has a couple of great benefits from a meeting perspective.

• Simplicity - The rules are very simple to explain and understand
• Efficiency - The topics with the most interest are talked about first, and for the longest
• Focused - Each topic is talked about only while there is overwhelming interest, reducing swirl
• Dynamic - Lean Coffee allows you to have productive meetings even when it is implausible or impossible to create detailed agendas ahead of time.

• Go to the Site - navigate to http://www.kanbonsai.com
• Join a Meeting - either choose an existing meeting from the left-hand side, or create a new meeting.
• Invite your Friends - simply copy the meeting URL (e.g. http://kanbonsai.com/meeting/myMeeting) and share it with the other participants.
• Enjoy the Meeting!

If you are interested in setting up your own Lean Coffee server, its quick and easy!

• Download Node - Lean coffee is a node based application, you'll need NodeJs and NPM (npm is packaged with Node)
• http://nodejs.org
• Checkout the Code - Lean coffee is publicly available on Github. You just need to clone the repository
• Download Git - http://git-scm.com
• Clone the Repository - git clone https://github.com/Ellisande/kanbonsai
• Install the Dependencies - Npm makes this quick and easy. Simply run the following command:
• npm install
• Run the Server - Gulp JS is configured to run the application just run gulp (assuming you have already installed it globally)

Your server should be all setup and running, now to try a meeting!

• Go to the Site - navigate to http://localhost:5000
• Join a Meeting - either choose an existing meeting from the left-hand side, or create a new meeting.
• Invite your Friends - simply copy the meeting URL and share it with the other participants.
• Enjoy the Meeting!