Any room within the care facility should be adequate once it can comfortably seat the numbers attending.  Try to avoid the room being part of a through-way or beside a source of continuous noise e.g. a kitchen.

At the outset of the meeting it is useful to provide the attendees with tea/coffee and invite them to tell the group something that went right for them since the previous meeting. This can be as trivial or as fundamental in nature. This works as an ice breaker and sets a tone of positivity and social inclusion within the group.

Throughout the course of the dialogue, particularly if/when people start getting confrontational and lose track of what this is all about, you should stress to participants that this is meant to be a thoughtful and reflective philosophical sharing. For this to take place, each participant must need and want to cultivate his/her capacity to become a more careful listener. Indeed, the ability to listen with all one's being to what other participants are sharing is the most important quality a Socrates Café-goer can have.

In a Socrates Café, just about any question can be grist for a meaningful dialogue. Or at least, virtually any question can be fine-tuned so it can be looked at in a philosophical way.

Ask the participants for questions. Encourage them to propose any question that is on their minds. Their questions don't at all have to be traditional ones.  At the outset you could distribute the list of question outlined in this manual to help them in this regard.  Questions proposed about some current issue, something that has arisen in the public sphere since the previous meeting, are also very topical and likely to be familiar to the participants. The following is a suggested format for the selection of question but it might take some time for you to develop the capacity of your group to follow it in detail.

Read all the proposed questions aloud to the participants, and then have two votes. The first time around, ask them to vote on any of the questions listed, meaning they can vote more than once. But ask them to vote only for those questions that leave them feeling the least expert and the most curious and perplexed, those questions that leave them feeling that the ground is shaking a little bit under their feet are those that are most worth interrogating socratically (whereas, if they vote for a question in which they think that they already know "the answer," it will be a very empty exercise). Then, vote a second time, on those two or three questions that were the top vote-getters during the first round. This time, the participants can only vote once (the facilitator does not vote, if there's a tie, flip a coin to decide the winning question). Chose that question which gets the most votes.

At the outset, let a few of the participants respond to the question in any way they please. But just when they think it's safe to assume that this is going to be a free-for-all confab without any underlying method-start probing the question in a Socratic way i.e. examine it for 1) built-in assumptions, 2) embedded concepts, 3) differences of kind and degree, and logical consistencies and inconsistencies. Then try to seek out compelling objections and alternative viewpoints.

For example, when a participant asks an apparently deep question like "How can we overcome alienation?" you need to challenge the premise of the question at the outset. You may ask if alienation is something we always want to overcome? Shakespeare may have written his timeless works because he embraced a sense of alienation rather than attempting to escape it. 

Where are the concepts embedded in this question? To probe the question of overcoming alienation, you first need to ask and answer such questions as: What is alienation? What does it mean to overcome alienation? Why would we ever want to overcome alienation? By separating out the concepts and exploring them individually, everyone will get to see the question from a new perspective.

In response to the alienation question, you might ask are there some types of alienation that you want to overcome and other types that you do not at all want to overcome but rather want to incorporate into yourself? What are some of the many different types of alienation? How do they differ? But also, what are the aspects that link them? Is it possible to be completely alienated? How do I know there will be alternative views?

You may think you already can predict the responses.  But you and everyone else probably will be surprised by just how diverse and eye-opening they will be. In exploring the meaning of the terms they use, participants will reveal and articulate philosophies of basic concepts they might take for granted. This is what makes for a spontaneous and fulfilling discussion.

A Socrates Café is meant to provide a refreshing and exhilarating alternative to the way many groups engage with one another. It is meant to be the exact opposite of the mindless types of debates and diatribes and polemics and which he/she who speaks the loudest and interrupts the most and browbeats the best and engages in the most frequent non-redemptive one up man ship "wins," whatever that could mean. Socrates Café is meant to cultivate new habits of discourse in which the primary purpose is to inspire each person within the community of inquiry further to cultivate and discover his/her unique point of view.

In principle, every service user in your facility should be welcome to participate in the Cafe. It is very important to create an environment in which all participants feel comfortable to participate and listen. If one of the participants seems to dominate the discussion and often interrupts others, the facilitator needs to be assertive and make sure that others have their say as well. If necessary, you may want to talk in private with the person and point out gently that he or she needs to be more considerate of others who also want to have their say. You should explain that quiet or shy people may feel intimidated if they are interrupted by more aggressive personalities and that you want to create and maintain a safe, caring, and supportive environment for all the participants. Given human nature (what a great question), a participant may simply not abide by the parameters of discourse, and will persist in dominating and monopolising and hectoring, despite your best attempts to explain the ethos of Socrates Café. In such an instance, you regrettably may have to ask him/her to leave, lest he/she lead to the dissolution of the entire group because of inappropriate behaviour.

A good facilitator can create a healthy environment for exchange by setting an example for others. First and foremost, a good facilitator must be a very engaged listener. You need to be actively listening to what each participant is saying at the time. Do not project how you are going to respond or what you will ask next. Also, make sure that all the people who want to participate have a chance to do so; look for body language or hand signals from people who want to speak. They may make a gesture to indicate that they have something to say, and after a while they may stop doing it because some time has passed or what 

they intended to say does not seem relevant anymore. If this happens, you can still give them a chance to voice their ideas by asking them what they think about what was just discussed.

A fundamental principle of any Socrates Café is to create an environment in which people feel safe and respected. Participants must feel comfortable speaking about personal experiences in the knowledge that this will not be discussed outside the Café. Before the Café begins participants must be asked to respect confidentiality. The principle of confidentiality must also be explained to new members and existing members should be reminded of its importance from time to time. This does not mean that issues should not be discussed outside the Café and indeed it is good if the conversation continues in participants’ other circles. However, anything of a personal or sensitive nature that was spoken about by any participant should not be discussed outside the cafe. An exception would be if the information divulged was putting a person at risk and in that case the facilitator would have to judge their obligation to any follow-up action.

In the beginning, you may be the only facilitator, because you took the initiative to organise the group, and because others simply don't want to try their hand at it. However, over time, you should look for other participants, especially those who are particularly careful and thoughtful listeners and questioners (it doesn't matter in the least whether they have a background in philosophy or not), who would like to try their hand at facilitating and who clearly grasp the nature of this type of inquiry. A Socrates Café is meant to be a refreshing alternative, where an egalitarian spirit allows many voices. So the more facilitators, the merrier. Every facilitator will bring a different style, which will enrich the dialogues and help ensure the group's long-term viability.

Like everyone in the group, the facilitator of a Socrates Café is striving to become a better questioner. As a facilitator, you will see that it is very difficult to be neutral. The kinds of questions you ask in the course of dialogues are themselves a reflection of your personal curiosity. However, you should strive to some degree to be more neutral than the rest. You are not a teacher, and your purpose is not to lead the group to a certain answer or truth. If you monopolise the discussion, others might feel intimidated or turned off. Your role as facilitator is to help and inspire others articulate their unique perspectives.

Do be an active and engaged listener. Respecting the ideas of each participant is a key element of a successful Socrates Café. Be open to what people have to say even if you disagree. The facilitator needs to let the group know that putting down others is absolutely taboo at a Socrates Café.

Do encourage participants to offer specific examples that back up what they take to be a universally accepted view. The facilitator should try to get them to support their perspectives with cogent, well-constructed, reasoned views.

Do question the perspectives offered by others and try to examine any perceived logical inconsistencies. The collective goal is for all participants, not just the facilitator, to become a more expert questioner.

Don't allow the dialogue to become a one-on-one back-and-forth between facilitator and participant (or between one participant and another). Remember: this is a community of philosophical inquirers. So a good facilitator should involve everyone else at every turn. Do make sure everyone has a chance to speak. Invite but do not pressure quieter participants to contribute to the dialogue.

Do be receptive to unexpected and unfamiliar responses. Facilitators should avoid steering the dialogue in a preconceived direction, as if they know better than others what the answers, or questions, should be. Facilitators are there as fellow inquirers, nothing more or less, but you do have a special role, which is to inspire each person further to articulate and discover her perspective than she would normally have the time or take the time to do. This means you must reject the teacher and guru model, at least for this setting, and instead be an incredibly careful listener who is there to ask those questions that will further inspire participants to reveal their unique worldview.

Don't browbeat a participant or put him on the spot in a way that makes him uncomfortable. You should nudge participants into articulating their perspectives as clearly as possible, but if someone doesn't have a response to your further prodding, move on to other participants.

Don't strive for consensus. In the version of Socratic inquiry practised at Socrates Café, it doesn't matter if everyone begins and ends a dialogue with disparate perspectives. There's never any need to try to force any sort of agreement.

Do remember the Socrates Café is just one version of philosophical discourse, and it might not work for everybody.

Don't try to bring the discussion to any sort of artificial closure. Most Socrates Café dialogues last about two hours. (If held at a coffeehouse or any venue that sells food and drinks, it is of immense benefit to the owner if you take a ten-minute "pause for the cause" after an hour or so 

of discourse. A Socrates Café is considered a success when participants leave a discussion with many more questions than they had at the beginning.

Do NOT ever worry about "attendance figures", or judge a gathering's success, by how many people show up. The only measure of success should be whether there's a thoughtful exchange between participants.   What matters is commitment. If you keep showing up on a regular basis, at the same time and the same place, people will start to come, slowly but surely. Eventually, your gathering is likely to become a community mainstay.

If possible do not use readings or any other directive ploys to start a group discussion, although this might not be possible at the early stage of your Café. You might find it useful to distribute elements of this manual e.g. 110 questions and the philosophy of Socrates to the participants to give them a flavour of the subjects that can be the basis of proposed questions.  You could also distribute a copy of the library books which they may want to take a look at that relate to the topic discussed, so participants can get a more keen sense that they are part of a wonderful questioning tradition that includes great thinkers across the ages and disciplines,  A Socrates Café is meant to bring together as broad a cross-section of people as possible , emphatically including people who possibly can't read, but who have very rich experiences to share in the course of a dialogue. Be very wary of anything that can be seen as academic, snooty or highbrow.