Creating the cafe

The first thing I did was to mail all my list of contacts asking if any of them would like to read and comment on the chapters of a book as I wrote them. About forty agreed to take part. I then added to these a number of people from various e-mail discussion forums that I belonged to: those whom I knew were actively involved in one way or another in the e-business world. I then had a full cafe of readers and randomly divided them up into six tables with about eight to each table.

The people in the cafe were an ideal cross section of the type of readers the book would be aimed at, they were about as mixed as it is possible to get. Not only were they typical of the readership, they also each had unique knowledge that could contribute valuable input to the book. They included application developers, programmers, entrepreneurs, Web site designers, database specialists, hardware specialists, marketers, business executives, technical writers, teachers, students.. They were a random selection of people who weren't all e-business experts but in one way or another worked or studied in the e-business environment. The only thing they had in common was experience in using e-mail discussion forums.

In effect, the cafe consisted of six small-world clusters where the members of each cluster had extensive links to a large number of areas in the world of e-business.