Final Report - pt3 Organising

easa010 Final Report

Section Two: Organising

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Introduction

Writing a Final Report is a tricky thing in so much as you want to achieve two

goals, one is to document an event you feel personally very close to and the

other is to provide a piece of work that is both insightful and helpful to future

organisers.

In order to be helpful the report must be relevant to the problems of future

organisers. If we were to simply review easa010 the text would age quickly

– future organisers would fi nd themselves in different countries, with an

inherently different economic climate, social issues and local government set

up, as well as different laws and restrictions. It is worth noting that one of the

key features affecting easa010 was the grip of the worst recession in living

memory with the looming inevitability of a new UK government introducing

stringent cuts to publicly funded events as well as new measures affecting

private industry.

The chapters that make up this section cover the specifi cs of the work the

easaUK2010 team did to make easa010 happen. It outlines our plans, our

discussions and our thought process. It covers what we did, what we didn’t

have time to do and what we should have done. It covers the mistakes, the

successes and the dumb luck.

This section covers what it was to organise an EASA in a specifi c place

(Manchester, England) at a specifi c time (2008 - 2010), and it offers an insight

into the attitude of the team written in their own words.

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Chapter 1 - Experience and advice

As early as possible the team should meet to defi ne what your EASA is for.

It might sound odd, but EASA that meets just to meet lacks depth and can’t

reach its potential. The organisers of EASA have a commitment to the network

to not just organise a two week event, but to leave the network stronger than

they found it. The original EASA - meant only as a one off - was organised to

look at the problem of the closing dock lands in Liverpool, in 2011 the reason

for the assembly is to challenge the views of students of architecture about

development. The reason we hosted EASA was to challenge views on EASA

itself, in many ways the theme identity came from the idea of looking at the

identity of the assembly.

Of course many people have an opinion of what a summer assembly should be

and it is important to state outright that we were not attempting to organise the

exemplar EASA, to impose our vision of perfection, rather we felt that words

can only do so much, we’d prefer to make some bold decisions, decisions we

knew would cause a certain amount of controversy for us but decisions we felt

would make people see the varied potential in EASA’s forms. We didn’t dare

to do any one large out right change to the summer assembly format - we

were not looking to change for the sake of it - so we decided that for every

element of the assembly, we would reevaluate it and see if we could make it

work better for the easa010 whole.

In order to be able to do this we made sure to safe guard the under laying

features of the event, this gave us a framework which could inform all our

other choices, as explained in the Bid Section these were the four pillars -

Density, Urbanity, Integration and Legacy - along with the theme - Identity.

As the saying goes - ‘one must be supple as a reed, not rigid like an oak’.

Your team is made up of students giving their time for free, the results will

refl ect this. Obviously if things go wrong it can cause problems for you, but

Responsibility <<<<<<

Reality <<<<<<

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we tried to stick to this simple line of thought - we don’t mind mistakes, we

do mind lack of effort. Simply put, you will get more problems from people

not doing things then you will from errors made.

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Chapter 2 - Time line

Organising an EASA is a linear process - you do it once and it is over - and it

is stretched over a relatively long period of time in your life. More over, as will

be illustrated with examples in the coming chapters, what can be organised

varies depending on the length of time until the Assembly, meaning forward

planning months, and in certain areas, years, in advance is essential to avoid

signifi cant problems.

For us there was the added complexity of established members of the UK team

dispersed around Europe and a young team in Manchester and we realised we

needed to fi rst identify the key points in the coming months and years, things

to be achieved along the way and plot a course

from INCM 2007 to INCM 2010.

To help with these issues we identifi ed 6 key phases of the organisation

process which we used to outline the task ahead. These were fi rst drafted as

part of our organisers pack, document number 050.

Phases

To aid understanding the long process of organisation that has gone,

and will go, into easa010 can be broken down into phases. These

phases, though obviously notional, are periods in the process that are

dominated by similar characteristics of attention and usually are divided

by major moments in the organisation. Ignoring minor iterations, these

phases can be seen as:

Phase one: Visibility and Believability

At INCM007 the decision to bid for easa010 was taken by two members

of easaUK. In order to successfully bid for and organise a summer

assembly a large, visibly strong team was needed. Between incm007

and easa008 the majority of the work was aimed at building a strong

team though communication leading to an EASA with a great UK

participation at all levels. Away from the network it was vital to the

success of the bid and the hosting of the event itself that the relevant

For more on the issue of integrating new members to the team and bringing in experienced EASA members see Chapter 3.

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institutions in Manchester were supporting the assembly. These two

strands lead to the INCM008 where a respected UK team presented a

strong bid to the EASA network.

Phase two: foundations

Following the success of the bid in Cyprus the team needed to change

dramatically. The team needed to grow, gain legal status, secure an

offi ce and put in place the systems and processes that would allow for

a smooth organisation. This phase also saw the fi rst of the easa010

events, with links being forged with artists and educational groups.

Phase three: all hands on deck

The 20th September 2009 marks the day that those UK based members

of the team not from Manchester, will move to Manchester permanently.

This will see full occupation of easaHQ and a more rapid progress in the

organisation process.

Phase four: the assembly

The two week assembly stands alone in the organisation process for

obvious reasons. It could be said that phase four begins a week before

the participants arrive and ends a week after, thus encapsulating the

main periods of on site preparation and cleaning.

Phase fi ve: documentation

The end of the assembly does not signal the end of the work, but the

start of the fi nal phase. As organisers it is a responsibility to produce

a fi nal document for the network, charting the organisation of the

assembly. Beyond this, phase fi ve will also cover the production and

curating of exhibitions within the city, and also the publication of books

and journal texts covering the event.

Phase six: exit strategy

Following the assembly EASA as a network will go on, as will the

involvement of easaUK. This involvement will include participation at

future assemblies and INCMs, though with the added responsibility of

being a former organiser. Balanced with this is the ultimate legacy of

hosting a summer event, the increased interest from students in the

UK. easa010 is a huge opportunity to present EASA to the UK student

population, and following the assembly it is vital that this interest is

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maintained and fostered.

These six phases served as a basis for our early preparation and a framework

for our planning, but in reality the phases from INCM 2007 to INCM 2010

could easily be broken into ever smaller iterations.

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Organisers document: 050

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Chapter 3 - Pillars of the Bid

Leading up to the bid we discussed what features had defi ned previous EASAs

and, in turn, what we wanted easa010 to be. Out of this long discussion and

thought process we were able to defi ne 4 key points which we called ‘Pillars

of the Bid’. The Pillars were a distillation of a lot of ideas - EASA is a many

faceted beast - and became one of our successes. Once written down, the

Pillars provided a reference point for the team in times of disagreement, doubt

or confusion while they also worked as a simple set of concepts to use when

explaining either EASA or easa010 to the uninitiated.

The easaUK2010 bid was based on four Pillars, which we believe refl ect

the ideals of the network as well as establishing fi rm foundations upon

which to build our assembly.

Urbanity:

To allow the assembly’s participants to experience the excitement

and diversity of life in Manchester, as well as to provide an appropriate

setting, it is essential that the sites for accommodation, workshops etc

are as close to the city centre as possible.

Density:

As a rule, participants commute on foot. For practical reasons, as well as

to create a good group atmosphere, all sites should be as close together

as possible.

Integration:

To make the most of this opportunity of bringing such a an event to the

city of Manchester, easaUK2010 is committed to integrating the event

with city in an engaging, creative way.

Legacy:

EASA presents an opportunity to create a lasting impression on

Manchester; there are many ways this could manifest.

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Chapter 4 - Theme

Each assembly runs under the umbrella of a theme, it is from this theme that

potential tutors draw up proposals for workshops to run. The theme will draw

on contemporary issues facing the profession of architecture.

The choice of theme goes hand in hand with the choice of location for the

assembly. The location will have a strong and specifi c connection with the

theme, thus allowing for relevant output from workshops.

The theme for easaUK2010 was Identity. This theme drew on the issues

facing architecture in the modern world, where information technology and

transportation systems have reduced the time

distances between global locations, forcing

locations to compete on a deeper level then

geographical birthright.

Manchester is a city with a broad history for innovation in many fi elds; since

its explosion in growth during the industrial revolution it has been the home

of, and renowned for, many subsequent advancements in science, culture and

technology. None of which, however, have singularly defi ned the city in the

consciousness. It is a city that so far has refused the allure of branding.

The theme for easaUK2010 is Identity. Identity was chosen for the

theme as it relates to urban branding, and it’s increased role in urban

planning, a shift that directly impacts architecture, it is especially

relevant to Manchester due to the city’s history of apparent reinvention

and the council’s reluctance to use urban branding as policy of urban

planning.

It was felt the theme should simultaneously be relevant to the wide

world of architecture and its practice today and specifi cally relevant to

the chosen location. This theme draws on the issues facing architecture

in the modern world, where information technology and transportation

There are a number of articles expanding on the theme collated in Section Five.

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systems have reduced the time distances between global locations,

forcing locations to compete on a deeper level then geographical

birthright.

Manchester is a city with a broad history for innovation in many fi elds;

since its explosion in growth during the industrial revolution it has

been the home of, and renowned for, many subsequent advancements

in science, culture and technology. None of which, however, have

singularly defi ned the city in the consciousness. It is a city that so far

has refused the allure of branding, most recently with Peter Saville

refusing to re-brand the city

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Chapter 5 - Team

EASA is a network. A simple sentence, possibly said more often than any

other through out the history of EASA. On the surface it seems self evident.

Obvious. Hardly worth mentioning at all, but these four words are thee key to

understanding both EASA as an event and how it comes to happen each and

every year, they also have implications to organising that are not obvious at

fi rst. I would go as far as to say, once you truly appreciate this sentence then

everything becomes easy - to reason, plan and justify, if not in fact to execute.

Perhaps by way of explanation one can embellish the sentence:

EASA is merely a network

EASA is solely a network

EASA is just a network

even

EASA is exclusively a network

The problem with adding such emphasis amplifi ers is they all bring their own

cultural bias, so I will stick with the more matter of fact: EASA is a network.

Their are many things EASA is not - a company, institution or recognised body

of any kind. This makes it generally ineffi cient and creates initial diffi culties

for organising teams, but I will put this avenue of analysis to one side as I fear

to do the subject justice would require a complete section of the Report.

So, EASA happens because individuals put in far more than they could ever

expect to get back, this is true of NCs, tutors, participants and it is true of

organisers. Put simply - the team is hands down the most important aspect

of organising EASA.

With this key fact in mind, the fi rst job following the successful bid was to

rapidly expand the team. The reason why this was necessary has roots in the

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Although Doc 050 remained partially unfi nished it was tremendously useful to have these things laid out and can be found in section 5

nature of the UK’s architectural education. The UK has around 40 accredited

schools of architecture and during my brief tenure as NC I felt it was vital we

advertised EASA in as broad a range of these as possible in order to strengthen

the network in the four countries. The downside of this was despite the strong

showing of the UK in Greece 2007 there were only two persons ready to bid,

and in turn the bid was delivered with a skeleton team.

Expanding the team was always going to be fraught with diffi culties, most

of which were overcome. The process began straight after INCM 2008 with

posters put around the school of architecture in Manchester to raise awareness

of the EASA name. I then drafted the organisers pack which was designed to

explain what EASA is and what was planned for the summer of 2010 - it is

essential that all new team members are engendered with an understanding

of the gravity of the task, to do this without scaring them off completely can

be a delicate balancing act. We then

produced promotional posters and I

gave a short talk about EASA and the

upcoming event in Italy as well as the chance to be involved in easa010.

It is worth noting here that at no point did we have a team structure in mind

in terms of fi nding people to fi ll specifi c roles, rather we knew some key

important roles for organising - accommodation, workshops, spaces etc. -

and for the assembly - food, built workshops, IT etc. - but largely, and to use

the old English saying, we cut our coat depending on our cloth, meaning from

the outset the team was in constant fl ux, mutating as people came in and out

and as people moved between roles as certain aspects became more or less

pressing.

Paul and I took the decision at the very out set that we would run the organisation

of easa010 with the same ideals we saw in the EASA network and at INCM. The

organisation would be non-hierarchical meaning no one was in charge of any

one else. This was massively important as with everyone volunteering their

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time it was important that no one feel bossed around as they would likely quit

the set up or just not do the work. I see a huge value in this approach, as one

of the most compelling things about EASA is its unusual nature compared to

any other organisation you may have been involved in, it most certainly isn’t

English, but then again it can’t be said to be typical anywhere else either.

Any one who has attempted to be part of a non-hierarchical setup will tell

you that it is impossible in its purist form, the closest we could achieve was

a meritocracy - meaning the more work put in the more responsibility you

gained, if you were capable and available and willing to take on a role then the

responsibility would come with certain licence to decision making. None of

the core decisions were ever, intentional, made by an individual though.

The problems our egalitarian approach to team building produced were, in

my opinion as predictable as they were acceptable within the bigger picture.

One issue that will plague all EASA organisers is that EASA is a very interesting

prospect to non-EASA people, that is people who are happy to be associated

with the Assembly in order to promote themselves and their work, but will

exploit the setup to gain more than they put in, this is true of associates and

potential partners as much as it is true of team members. Potentially worse

though is in some cases people seek to affi x their own position with some

element of permanence or power, sometimes quite simply because they do

not understand - or perhaps appreciate - the nature of EASA and the small

place of the organising team within the larger whole.

A secondary issue with a meritocratic approach is people’s reliance on labels

or, in the terms of a team, titles. You see, when someone is putting in a lot

of effort and time it makes sense they should be getting the responsibility

and decision making freedom spoken of, and this often comes with a ‘title’

such as communications coordinator. The decision for someone to take on

a role would be suggested by someone associated with the task at present,

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discussed and the person could decide whether they could commit the time.

The issue came if the person was then unable, or unwilling to commit the same

amount of time to the organisation process. Could someone be ‘demoted’

from organiser to volunteer status? In a team of friends where no one is any

one’s boss you don’t do that. We started out on the footing that anyone who

wanted to be involved would be welcome for as much or as little time as they

could commit, and that spirit held true in operation. Being honest, it resulted

in complaints and moaning about people not pulling their weight, and some

members of the team did less and less until they just didn’t turn up any more,

but the alternative of inexperienced people managing their peers was potted

with far more pitfalls and dangers. The way we did it left people to defi ne

for themselves what to do, and to take responsibility (or not) in an adult way,

organising is a learning experience and it will teach you about yourself and

you friends as much as about event management.

The other major issue we had came from the spread of the team for such a

long period of time. From August 2008 - August 2009 there were only 2

people who had been to EASA living in Manchester and therefore working

on EASA full time. Until November 2009 there were only 2 team members in

Manchester who hadn’t debuted that summer.

For me personally this lead to the only real problem I had. On one hand there

is a reason to hold back on major decision making so that the non-Manchester

team members could bring their experience to bear, on the other hand being

seen to act as gatekeeper to these other, never seen, team members can instill

a false feeling of control and therefore hierarchy. Another factor being that

the process of planning for EASA had started in late 2007, so at the time of

the bid 1 full year of work had been put in already and therefore some of the

larger decisions had been boxed off.

I stated already that the problems were predictable, but acceptable - and

therefore unavoidable, despite the personal pressure - and it is something

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that I had factored in and put in ground work to avoid. As part of the bid

preparation I approached architecture practices to back our efforts and solicited

them for sponsorship in kind. Knowing that, in 2008, times were becoming

hard for practices in the UK I suggested that instead of cash sponsorship that

one of the countries largest fi rms - BDP - could instead recruit members of

the team for the students places that annually become available, to our delight

they agreed, and even agreed to a work exchange with their Rotterdam offi ce

meaning Marten Dashorst, Dutch EASA veteran, would be able to move to the

city. Unfortunately the recession deepened and BDP didn’t recruit the same

numbers that year as previously.

If those are problems we faced then there was one overwhelmingly good

decision, the inclusion in the team of a dedicated Human Resources

coordinator role. Emma Uncles, a second year who joined the team as part of

our expansion at the start of 2009, was the epitome of the team’s meritocracy

set up. Having not been to EASA previously Emma threw herself into the

organising of build up events and was involved in all aspects of the assembly

straight away. Emma took to the role of HR co-ord and it is safe to say that

without someone as committed and diligent in that role the whole exacting

process would not have been a success.

A testament to the success of the HR role is the strength of the team under

pressure as demonstrated a very particular times through out the last two

years, which we will pick up on as we go through.

It is worth remembering at all times, especially when things look like they

might go wrong, that the team is made up 100% of students, and in our

case for the majority of time by a majority of students in just their second

year of university having only attended EASA 12 months prior to hosting one.

Throughout the two and a bit years there were times when the team didn’t

perform, but there were also times when it was a beautiful thing to watch in

motion.

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For one year only your team holds the concept of EASA, with a history spanning

30 years and a network of thousands who have come under its spell. It is now

your responsibility to make it happen…

EASA is an entirely voluntary organisation. It is important to remember that

your team will be working their fi ngers to the bone to produce an assembly;

for free, out of their own time. Therefore, it is important to inject some fun

into the offi ce environment. Throughout the course of organising an EASA you

will learn a plethora of new, endlessly useful skills, many will have their fi rst

opportunities to work in a team and an offi ce environment, and you will make

friendships that will continue to blossom long after easa has gone.

For most this is the fi rst real project that holds with it expectations and

responsibilities. Many embrace this aspect and throw themselves right into the

team. Differing personalities are a fact of life, and you will fi nd there are those

who prefer to be involved from the sidelines. This is fi ne; however do ensure

that specifi c responsibilities (that are vital to the assembly’s progression)

are given to those fully immersed within the team. You may fi nd putting all

your eggs in one basket/person (and it not paying off) can cause some major

issues, as it did with us.

Starting Up:

Be completely aware of what you are getting yourself into. Organising EASA is

not purely about Architecture, it’s Business Management, Team Management,

HR, Communications… skills that you will have to learn, quickly, and then

apply in a “real-life” environment. Be inspiring, but above all, continue to be

realistic.

Team Structure & Organisation:

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A voluntary workforce lends itself to a horizontal hierarchy. That said, you will

fi nd that certain individuals will become more involved than others, and will

therefore be trusted with more responsibilities. Quite simply, the harder you

work, the more you will ultimately get out of it.

Defi nitions of each “Role” were created early in the process of organising, to

ensure individuals knew what was expected of them. We initially split it into

three categories:

Coordinators: Responsible for a particular area, you must be aware of

the developments and future plans within your area of expertise. You

must communicate developments & delegate tasks to relevant organisers.

Understanding the dynamic of a volunteer workforce is fundamental to your

role.

You will fi nd that many organisers’ will show particular commitment, and

therefore can take on the role of Coordinator for a specifi c project/task that

they have shown substantial interest in. Additionally, do expect individuals to

drop out of the team. This is not a problem, as long as you cater for this (an

estimate of a third).

Coordinators must think on their feet, use initiative, and be fl exible. Be patient

and promote communication within your team to ensure you ease tensions.

Organisers: Members of the team who actively take on tasks laid out by the

Coordinators. They attend meetings and have an active input into decision-

making. These are generally members of the team who are unable to commit

as coordinators, but want to have input into the organisation.

Volunteers: Help at specifi c events (like the assembly) and are not involved in

meetings or discussions. They have no input into decision-making, however

are vital in ensuring large events run smoothly.

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Communications:

Communication was vital, particularly with a large team in various locations

across the country. There was not one occasion where our entire team were all

in the same room together at any point of the organisation or fi nal assembly.

e-mailing is key. Ensure that Coordinators send updates regularly (weekly

basis) to the team. Take meetings seriously, and keep them on a regular date

and time. Ensure you have a chair and minutes taken. A HR Coordinator is very

useful hassling tool….

Management:

By pre-determining tasks & roles in advance, team members knew their area

of expertise inside-out by the time of the assembly. It also made the rota a

hell of a lot easier; you were not allocating jobs to people who did not know

what they were doing. Know the specifi cs of your volunteers, Who? What?

Where? When? (pop this all into a rota). Do provide fl exibility to cope with

unpredictable circumstances.

During the assembly it is important to have regular meetings to answer any

queries and provide updates. As volunteers become more knowledgeable,

team member are provided with more fl exibility (and more time to sleep!).

Do:

- Have socials

- Communicate

- Be willing to take on the less glamorous tasks

- Emphasise team work

- Delegate

- Be realistic about people’s capabilities

Don’t:

- Take on too many tasks at a time

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- Rely upon those less committed for fundamental tasks

- Be afraid to ask questions

[eun]

Organisation of easa is a team game. Involvement of individuals

will be determined by outside factors, such as work and university

commitments. Some organisers will make it there full time job, while

others will be limited to a supporting role.

The level of involvement committed will greatly affect what an organiser

will get out of the process. The team works on an experience basis, so

those more committed will gain more autonomy and therefore more real

world experience. The measure of experience and understanding within

the team falls into three areas, known as branches:

EASA, Manchester, and the organisation processes.

For an organiser to be effective and gain more autonomy it is necessary

for them to have an excellent working understanding of all three. Any

level of understanding is enough to become involved in the organising

team as there are always opportunities to improve understanding

throughout the course of the organisation process.

When roles, such as coordinator, are identifi ed as needing a dedicated

member of the team to fi ll them, the main three considerations for

the role should be availability, commitment and experience. The

organiser should be available for the required workload for the period

of time required; this also means that organisers should avoid fi lling

more positions than they can offer their full attention and abilities to.

They must also be committed to the role and have shown willing and

aptitude in the organisation to date. While it is true that no one has

organised a summer assembly before there will be examples when an

individual has experience relevant to the role.

Meetings

Meetings will be held once a month up until easa009 at which time they

will become weekly events held at 7pm on a weeknight in easaHQ.

Each meeting will run to an agenda, to be circulated prior to the

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meeting.

Meetings provide an opportunity for coordinators to update the team

on progress of each area of the organisation. As such, priority at weekly

meetings will be given to coordinators to explain progress in their area

and future progress. There will be a designated Chair for the meeting,

the Chair will be nominated at the previous meeting and is responsible

for composing the agenda and the smooth running of the meeting. Each

meeting will have a minute taker. The minutes are a legal document

and are vital to the running of the organisation. They will be issued

to all members of the team following the meeting. At each meeting

all members are encouraged to participate in issues being discussed.

All members are welcome to present an issue or propose an event or

sponsor.


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Chapter 6 - Offi ce

Having identifi ed the importance of the team, a fact that is borne out again

and again in the story of easa010, it follows that the team needs somewhere

to be, a space, an offi ce, and as architects we should be more keenly aware of

this than most.

By its very nature and its reason for being any Final Report will be littered

tales of caution, of things that went wrong or problems faced, there will of

course be examples of things that went off just right, things we did really well

(though the unfortunate truth is you don’t notice the good decisions as much

as the bad ones), but the story of how we gained our offi ce has to go in the

column marked ‘unexpected windfalls’.

From the outset we knew we needed a space to call home, somewhere the

work could be done as an organisers front room just wouldn’t be up to the

task, but we didn’t ever have to look for one specifi cally.

Early in the organising process I approached ever major, and some minor,

developers in Manchester, ostensibly to enquire about accommodation

possibilities but also to become better known and gain letters of support for

the bid.

One of company, ASK developments, and more specifi cally Development

Executive Julian Stott, showed an immediate interest meeting with us on

numerous occasions in the early days. It was made clear to us that ASK would

be unable to sponsor us with a cash donation, but they did want to support

us, so in addition to a letter of support, at the bid stage they offered the free

lease of what an only be described as a cult Manchester icon - a two storey,

800sqft offi ce building. The offi ce was / is situated in an mostly brown fi eld

site and is within the footprint of a major development - First Street -, we

would be taking it on and offering it one fi nal lease of life before demolition.

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The contract would be ‘tenancy at will’ meaning we wouldn’t pay rent but

we wouldn’t have the right to a contract extension when this one ran out in

2010. We would pay for insurance and electricity however. Unfortunately to

sign we would need to be a recognised company which was dependant on us

winning the bid to host EASA, meaning we couldn’t make use of the space

while working on the bid.

From the beginning Julian and his colleague Anne-Marie showed great

enthusiasm and were the fi rst people fully on board with our vision for the

assembly. First Street was due for completion in 2010/11 but in 2008 it was

clear the recession was taking hold, there was a possibility that it would be

delayed or even stall meaning the surrounding car parks would be available to

us as accommodation / campus space. (See chapter on spaces).

As mentioned, having an offi ce as a base is essential. It needs to be a room

with a locking door, a postal address, large enough for the core of your team

to gather together, a place to have meetings and importantly in this day and

age it needs internet connection and a phone line.

An offi ce give you a place to store your things, it provides a setting to let

the team know that when they are there work and it allows the team to be

together making a lot of tasks so much easier.

A vital part of a successful organisation is having an offi ce to work out

of. A building allows the organisers to work together and will allow

the creation of a good atmosphere that is possible when friends work

together.

The building will also demonstrate a level of intent that the organisation

has, it will act as symbol to people wanting to become involved with

easa010.


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Any offi ce will act as a signal of intent to prospective sponsors and partners,

simply having a unique postal address, or somewhere to have meetings

shows a commitment that will help separate you from the stigma that may

be associated with other student organisations. For us even the prospect of

moving in to 43 Hulme Street - soon to be easaHQ - represented a leveling up

of the organisation process, and provided us with momentum that we could

use in meeting other potential sponsors.

page 55


page 56


Chapter 7 - GalleryIn our fi rst visit to the building it was immediately obvious it was both perfect

for our needs in terms of location and facilities - kitchen, shower, multiple WCs

- and much larger than we needed, this presented us with an opportunity. We

decided that the building could be split up around its central circulation core

to become offi ce / storage on one side and gallery on the other. Fortunately

the lay out of the building was perfect for this, but the condition we found

the building wasn’t quite ideal. Having been empty for the previous two years

an extremely small leak had been given plenty of time to saturate the ground

fl oor concrete fl oor plate meaning we had some immediate work to do when

we moved in. Along with drying out the carpets there was mold in many of the

downstairs rooms which had to be bleached clean and in some cases painted

over.

All in all the building was in pretty good shape

and most of the work was superfi cial. Once we’d cleaned up our attention

turned to beautifying the building inside and out. Inside we’d been left with a

questionable paint job from the previous occupants, their company signature

colour being purple at some point someone had felt it benefi cial to have it on

every door, wall and chair in the building, leaving a somewhat overwhelming

impression. Outside we decided to take advantage of the prominent position

of the building on a major route into the city centre to promote EASA and

show off our new location as much as possible.

A vital part of a successful organisation is having an offi ce to work

out of. A building allows the organisers to work together and will allow

the creation of a good atmosphere that is possible when friends work

together. The building will also demonstrate a level of intent that the

organisation has, it will act as symbol to people wanting to become

involved with easa010.

easaHQ, 43 Hulme street, is the home of the organisation team of

easa010. It is a former industrial building that received a renovating

A full list of exhibitions and events that we organised or hosted can be found in the appendix.

page 57


face lift from Stephenson Bell Architects. It is somewhat of an icon to

residents of Manchester, with many people aware of the building simply

by the signage of its most recent residents, ‘Moonfi sh’.

The building will have three functions in the build up to easa010:

Offi ce:

The fi rst fl oor main space will be devoted to offi ce space for the

organisers of easa010. This will be the place where most of the

organisation of the assembly and fund-raising will happen.

Gallery:

Central to the strategy for easaUK2010 to meet its remit of engaging

residents and giving a platform for local artists and community groups.

The fi rst fl oor bays will be used as a day gallery, where work will be

displayed for the public during offi ce hours.

Event Space:

On the ground fl oor, the former reception and board room will be

converted into event spaces. These will be used for exhibition launches,

strictly out of offi ce hours.

The history of the building as we have been able to pick up over the time of

our occupation runs thus - The building had started life as part of a complex

of industrial buildings manufacturing clothes. In time it was taken over by

Architects practice Stephenson Mills who were responsible for painting it white

and adding the distinctive louvres as well as adding some fantastic swinging

doors. About the time that Stephenson Mills became Stephenson Bell they

moved their practice to Ancotes, it is believed that at this time they expected

the building to be coming down just as its neighbors had. Instead though

Web design company Moonfi sh moved in and added their illuminated sign that

to many christened the building. Moonfi sh themselves merged with another

company and left the building empty once more. Two years later the building

was offered to us and we were able to breathe life into it once more, but more

than that it gave us a fantastic base from which to raise the profi le of EASA

and also to begin the process of integration as well as, though giving young


page 58


artists their fi rst taste of exhibiting, creating a lasting impact and legacy of

EASA in its host city.

[cma]

When we bid to host the 2010 EASA in Manchester, we were clear that

integration and legacy were very important to our idea of EASA. We had been

to many EASA debates where the same issue kept coming up – the idea that

EASA is a self-contained event, too inward focused to be much of a force for

change. Participants, some suggested, came from all over Europe and only

socialised amongst themselves, barely interacting with the host community.

But the original idea of EASA was to change a single place, to address the

unique problems of the Liverpool docks. How could we unite event and city,

using each to drive the other to look at itself anew?

The ideas of integration and legacy were central to the plans for the two-

week assembly itself, but they could also help us in the long run up to August

2010. We had chosen Manchester as a host city partly because of its positive

attitude to artistic and cultural events and its strong cultural scene. This meant,

however, that EASA would be one festival amongst many, all clamoring for

attention, help and funding. We had to raise awareness of EASA to prove that

we had an audience so that sponsors and advertisers would be interested. We

had to show that we could organise events so that the council would support

us. Organising events in the run up to the assembly itself had other advantages

too: rather than being separate from and competing with the other creative

people in the city, we could make useful friends and contacts, and we could

also practice working together as a team on some smaller projects.

The gallery at easaHQ was a natural part of this. It was a privilege to have a

space of the size and quality of HQ so close to the city centre, and we wanted

to make the best use of it. We would use it as a venue for some of our own

events, but we would also make it available to local talent to use for their

page 59


exhibitions or events.

We felt that it was important that events informed people about EASA not

simply by telling them but by demonstrating the EASA spirit in the way they

were organised. Events were to be free where possible, to make imaginative

use of available resources, and to get interested people involved as volunteers.

We wanted to open up to as broad a range of people as possible; not just

architects or students, but fi ne artists, musicians, the general public and

community groups like the Scouts.

The gallery would be the focus of the most of the events, but we didn’t want

to ignore what was going on in the rest of the city and sought out other

events to be involved with. One of these was the Cutting Room Experiment, a

one-day festival intended to celebrate the opening of a new city square. The

festival would consist of many smaller activities proposed by, and voted for,

members of the public logging on to a web site. In easa010’s suggestion,

faceless identity, participants would arrive and build an ideal city by creating

model buildings using old cardboard boxes. They would disguise their faces,

and therefore their identities, by wearing a mask while they created their

buildings. The idea was that they would therefore construct their identities

by making the model buildings. The proposal was directly related to our

easa theme, and it also encouraged people to think more broadly about the

meaning of architecture and built environment in their lives. Each event at the

Cutting Room experiment was chosen by public voting, and we were able to

use the power of the easa network to obtain more than double the votes of the

next highly rated idea. We were later able to point to this success to show the

number of people that were supporting us across Europe.

easaHQ occupies a prominent position on the city’s inner ring road, next to an

elevated motorway. Offi cial statistics indicate that over 13,000 people see the

walls of the building every day. To announce our presence in the city and the

building, we proposed repainting the building. We launched a competition,

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open to anyone in the world; by carefully wording its name and description

we succeeded in having it listed on Bustler, a popular architecture competition

aggregator. The shortlist of entries was judged by a representative from ASK,

the building owners, Visit Manchester (part of the council who we hoped to

have help and fi nancial support from) and a lecturer from Manchester School

of Architecture. The winning design was announced at our fi rst exhibition at

the gallery. The competition had created some publicity for us, launched the

gallery, produced a lot of statistics that we could tell potential sponsors, and

it had rewarded those that supported us so far by demonstrating that we had

big ideas.

Carrying out our promise and painting the winning design was a building

project in itself which served as practice for the more complex conversion

of Downtex later. Many of the lessons that we learnt such as dealing with

volunteer labour and the planning department, are discussed in that chapter.

It was not as simple as we had imagined initially. We learned that any lettering

required advertising consent from the planning department, and our initial

application was dismissed because the design was considered too intrusive.

Consent was gained, and we did paint the name easaHQ in letters nearly a

metre high on a wall facing the motorway. We did not complete the total

design, and to substantially fi nish two walls took from August to November

2009. Perhaps in thinking we could repaint the entire building we were too

ambitious. The competition phase was very successful, but the effort to carry

out the work absorbed a lot of our time that might have been better spent on

other things.

Before we invited artists to exhibit in the gallery, we established certain

principles about how it would be run and why we were doing it.

1. The space would be available for free to exhibitors, providing they were

not intending to make money from the exhibition. We had received the space

as a gift, and we wanted to pass that on. We were also inexperienced as

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gallery curators, and providing the space for free meant that there was less of

an obligation to provide a professional service.

2. Exhibitions would ideally be related to architecture or the built

environment in some way.

3. Artists and exhibitors were to be solely responsible for installation,

curation, invigilation and removal of their exhibitions.

We were given the building rent-free, but we still had to pay utility bills and

taxes. Originally we imagined that we could obtain sponsors or funding for

each of the exhibitions that we put on ourselves, which would cover the cost

of the exhibition and the utilities. We would also ask other exhibitors to do

the same. This is not quite how it worked out in practice, as sponsors and

funders were very diffi cult to fi nd, and we had to meet the running costs of the

building by loaning the company money from our personal funds, by taking

out a company credit card, and by selling tea and cake at the exhibitions.

In litigious societies like the UK it is important to have the proper insurance.

The fabric of the building was insured by the building owner, but we needed

public liability and building contents insurance as a condition of our tenancy.

We got a good deal on this through a professional contact. It is worth

mentioning that insurance companies get very nervous about insuring works

of art, as the value is so hard to determine and can often be high. This was a

problem when easaHQ became the site of an installation of Angela Brooker’s

illuminated sign, Apollo Theatres. The sign was mounted on the outside of

the building where it was vulnerable to damage and the artist demanded to

see our insurance. We successfully argued that it was insured, but only for its

value as an illuminated sign rather than a work of art. For all other exhibitions

it was made clear that the responsibility for insuring artworks lay with the

exhibitors rather than ourselves.

page 62


Establishing the gallery

The fi rst exhibition in the gallery was the entries to the facade repainting

competition. We formally invited all of our contacts at the school of architecture,

the council, the universities and developers – not in the expectation that

many would come in person, but again to show that we were already doing

things in the city. For the following week, through our contacts at the school

of architecture and the Manchester Society of Architects, we had secured

the gallery as the venue for the closing party of the inaugural Manchester

Architecture and Design Festival, to coincide with an exhibition of work by

architecture students. This event was well attended by staff from the School

and some members of the Society, useful contacts for organising EASA.

These two events were instrumental in establishing the gallery amongst

architects, staff and students. A broader awareness came with An Urban

Ecology of Chance, a solo show by a fi ne artist who had already exhibited

in other more established venues in the city. This exhibition resulted from

a personal contact between the head of the school of architecture and a

professor of arts, who recommended the space to Daniel Staincliffe, the artist.

This exhibition brought in artists and students from across the city, and word

spread rapidly across all the artists in the city. The gallery was an established

part of the cultural landscape.

In talking to people in the city about EASA, we found that it was diffi cult to

communicate just what EASA was, and it was very easy to put people off the

idea, especially if they began to think it was ‘just a big piss-up’. The best

way to explain the event to our existing supporters and potential sponsors

was an exhibition in the gallery that we had created. EASA: An Exhibition

would bring together archive fi lms, photographs and whatever artefacts and

descriptions we could gather to try to present as full an experience of the

event as possible. It was timed to coincide with the Manchester SESAM so that,

on the preview night, there would be genuine European architecture students

page 63


A report written after the exhibition is available in the appendix.

there for visitors to talk to, and the goal of the SESAM participants was to

create an installation on their fi rst impression of the city.

The experience of putting together the exhibition would once again be an

instruction in the management of volunteers, and the diffi culty in gathering

materials from the network meant that large amounts of it had to be organised

at the last minute during the week when the SESAM participants were staying

at HQ. We succeeded in obtaining free printing from the school of architecture

and the exhibition was the largest and most impressive at the gallery to that

date. On entering the gallery, the visitor saw fi rst a wall-size map of Europe. On

this the locations of all historical EASA events were marked, and four hundred

threads from all the countries in Europe converged on Manchester. Below this

was a pile of looped TVs showing all of the fi lms that we had acquired. In

the alcove to the left the beginning of a time line that ran throughout the

gallery, from the fi rst event in 1981

and leading the visitor through time

up the stairs to the room dedicated to Manchester 2010. Along the way there

were rooms dedicated to workshops, sleeping (with a full-scale mock-up bunk

made of scaffolding and covered with sleeping bags), lectures, and a cinema

showing the three most professional fi lms on a loop.

Unfortunately, we had not anticipated the diffi culty of getting busy

businesspeople to an exhibition at a gallery they hadn’t heard of. The preview

was well attended by all our friends at the School of Architecture, the Society

of Architects, other artistic organisations, and a good few members of

the public. It was a great evening that our corporate sponsors, actual and

potential, missed. It was always going to be diffi cult, but we had sent out

professional invitations well in advance by e-mail and over the telephone. We

even had a plan for separate sponsor evenings, networking events to which

individual companies would be specially invited. Over the following weeks the

exhibition was visited by architecture students and artists. Despite the lack

of professional attendance, there were positive outcomes of the exhibition,

page 64


chiefl y once again reminding important people of our presence and ambition.

In running the gallery, artists would often approach us with the intention

of having a month-long exhibition. We quickly learned to avoid such long

shows. The public preview evenings were usually very well attended, and then

on subsequent days visitor numbers were low. In order to maintain a regular

turnover of events we established a compact timetable where exhibitions

previewed on a Thursday or Friday night, were open over the weekend, and

were taken down on Monday ready for the following exhibition to set up on

Tuesday and Wednesday.

Our insistence that artists invigilate their own shows should have saved us

time, but initially we still had to open up the

building to let them in, and lock up at the end.

This was an onerous task for the two-person

team on the ground in Manchester, especially with the long and unsociable

hours that many of the artists worked to. The solution was to sign a set of

keys to the artists and trust them – not an ideal solution, as there was no way

of securely sealing the offi ce from the gallery and there was one incidence of

theft. It was also very diffi cult to keep exhibitors out of our storage areas; we

would often fi nd that our furniture or painting materials had been used and

modifi ed without our permission.

In retrospect it would have been better if we had asked for a fee to exhibit at

the gallery, and also asked for a refundable deposit. A fee to cover expenses

would have prevented the fi nancial drain of the fi rst months of the organising

period and we would perhaps have had greater resources for publicity and

fund-raising. This, together with a deposit, might have made the exhibitors

have a more professional attitude and treat us and the gallery with greater

respect.

The initial ideas had been for the gallery to be self-funding, to raise our profi le

Issues of in team communication are discussed more fully in the communication chapter

page 65


in the city to make it easier to attract sponsorship, to generate goodwill, and

to broaden the impact of EASA on the city. We underestimated both the time

and cost that such a commitment would take. Having a gallery did not help us

with sponsorship; it is diffi cult enough to make possible sponsors understand

what EASA is as an event. Mentioning the gallery and events too seemed to

confuse the message further, while the visitor numbers were too small to be

attractive. However, the gallery was a success in other areas. It generated

a great deal of goodwill with the university and the council, and with those

organising other festivals and events in the city. The weekly previews were

exciting occasions which helped to bind the organising team together and

lifted the spirits when the work was hard. The gallery and the events, to our

knowledge unique in the history of EASA, did succeed in using the resources

of the assembly to have a sustained and positive impact on the host city.

easaUK2010 will vacate easaHQ in November 2010, 19 months after we

moved in. The demolition date for the building, originally early 2011, has

been put back by the collapse in the property market and so the building has

at least another year to stand. Blank Media Collective, an arts organisation

that curated one of the exhibitions in the gallery, had approached us earlier

in the year about the future of the space, so when we found out that it was no

longer due for demolition we let them know. They want to take on and run the

building in a very similar way to us, as a cheap exciting exhibition space. The

building owners have yet to agree, but we will do our best to convince them.

This might just be a lasting legacy for Manchester.

[tbe]

page 66


I’ve said before that the structure of EASA is not the most effi cient model to

have, whether this is a big issue or not is, in my opinion, a mute point - this

is what we have to work with. One of the points where it is not very effi cient

is communicating. Communicating can be conversations, it can be meetings

or a number of other things, but for an organising team it also includes being

able to fi nd documents when needed, rather than having to fi nd the person

who made it, and asking for it to be transferred to your machine. With this in

mind we set up a fi ling system based directly on the Irish model from 2008.

With so many people working on easa010, a coherent fi ling system and

professional adherence to it are vital. The fi ling system will be in two

parts, with editable documents on a web based, virtual, fi ling system

to allow access at all times, whilst avoiding duplication and errors in

saving. There will also be an offi ce based desk top tower for saving of

photos and video.

Numbers/names

Each team member has a shorthand user name. All fi les will be saved

with the date fi rst, title and name of user last; of the type:

yy-mm-dd_title_user

For example:

09-06-17_doc050_ckm

Note:

Hyphens are used within elements (as for the date). Underscores are

used to separate elements.

Documents

All documents to be issued, be it internal, network or external, will be

given a document number. This document number will relate to where

to fi nd it in the document fi ling system.

See Appendix A for the fi le tree.

Chapter 8 - Filing

page 67


Documentation of every aspect of the event is paramount. Photographs

from every event will be used: on the web site, on posters, in info

docs and publications after the event. With this in mind, folders for

documentation have been created for each event.

In practice though, the fi ling system, though vital to getting anything done,

wasn’t adhered to in full by the team and in the end the only sections of the

fi ling system based on an external hard drive in the offi ce that worked anywhere

near properly were the sections with photos from previous assemblies and

the section with documents produced for easa010. The result of this was a

tremendous amount of small pieces of wasted time over a long period that

affected productivity of time spent in the offi ce, but more majorly, it always

cause major slowdowns at times of big production - sponsor document,

welcome guide, fi nal report.

It is advisable to investigate means of remote fi ling too. It is hard to ignore

that the internet has made many aspects of organising EASA easier, and for

2010 we made use of some of the more simple things out there to help the

process.

One of our sponsors - AODL - set up an e-mail service with google, and with

it came the ability to use google docs. Google docs allowed us to produce

documents online that we could all access for information and update. These

were always useful for things like contact lists, but towards the end they were

also a real time saver for budgeting and shopping. Having documents stored

centrally meant that everyone was working from the current iteration at all

times.

[cma]

page 68


Chapter 9 - IncorporationThe formation of a company to organise easa010 was always our intent, and

though we managed to get sponsorship paid to us for the bid, the two month

delay caused by not being a legally recognised organisation was all the added

incentive we needed.

Yet from beginning to research the process to becoming incorporated took

over six months. Why? Incorporating a company is a serious business, it

brings responsibilities for those named as directors and this can have serious

repercussions - we’ll talk about the impact of this in the post EASA chapter in

Section Three.

This sudden legal step will jolt the organising team out of the typical EASA

state of team interaction, and if it is not treated carefully, can add an unwanted

level of hierarchy. It is important that directors don’t take on a controlling

attitude, but it is also vital that non-directors treat the organisation and

company seriously as the repercussions for the directors can include stiff

fi nancial penalties or even jail.

At the time we were becoming incorporated as well as seemingly endless

trawling through legal documents and online advice from companies house,

Tom was working towards his fi nal year hand in and I was swamped with

team expansion and meeting after meeting to do with the other aspects of

organising. It’s worth noting we were looking into charitable status at this

time too - but that, as they say, is another story.

After gaining a good understanding of what to do, we had laid out our charter

ensuring that the company would be not-for-profi t, and realised incorporation

as a company limited by guarantee was for us. It was the actual incorporation

that was holding us up, the simple fact was we had no experience and didn’t

know what to do.

page 69


A chance meeting turned out to hold the key to this for us. At a friends

party I had met his neighbor, a landlady who also worked as an adviser who

connected small business to training funding, Hadil Ali.

Hadil was really interested in EASA and became involved as an organiser. She

arranged a meeting with Business Support Solutions who ran through the

forms for free with us, she then contacted HJM solicitors who agreed to sign

off the forms in return for sponsor status.

We were incorporated as easaUK2010 Ltd on 29th April 2009 with Chris

Maloney as Chairman and Tom Bennell as Secretary - the only two people

available to sign at the time we fell into the positions. Alex Maxwell and Paul

Farrell were added as directors in February 2010.

[cma]

page 70


Chapter 10 - Finances

Regulatory and fi nancial context

As a company, easaUK2010 ltd was legally required to keep proper accounts,

to be submitted to Companies House once annually. We were also required to

designate a treasurer who would be responsible for keeping track of money in

a transparent and accountable manner.

Charity

From the outset it was our intention to be a registered charity. We felt that our

objectives were charitable; other EASAs in the past, particularly Ireland (where

the regulatory framework is similar to that in the UK) had been registered

charities. The status offered a number of advantages:

1. It is a requirement for access to most artistic and educational trusts,

depending on a successful funding application, and often also for access to

the funds of public bodies and quasi-non-governmental organisations.

2. Tax reductions and exemptions are available to charities when they are

not available to non-profi t companies.

3. Being a charity is powerful shorthand for ‘a good thing’ in the popular

imagination and would make people and companies far more likely to donate

money to us.

With this in mind, we established the company with legally defi ned objectives

that were, in our view, charitable.

Bank accounts

With the company established, we opened bank accounts in the company’s

name. The details of our paying in account, used for participation fees and the

great majority of other income, would be made very public and the risk of fraud

therefore increased. Our solution was to follow the Irish example, and make

this an account that would not have nor be ever able to have a cheque book,

direct debits or credit/debit cards. This turned out to be a savings account.

We also opened two current accounts, with the intention that one would be

used to store the bulk of our money (deep pool), and the other (operational)

page 71


for day-to-day transactions.

Diagram x: easauk2010 bank accounts and operation.

In the event, the setup of our bank accounts worked reasonably as planned.

Having our gateway account as a savings account had the additional advantage

that it earned some money in interest for us. The deep pool account served as

an ideal safe box for money which we knew we had to spend, such as the rent

for the accommodation, but had not spent yet. With such an unpredictable and

rapidly changing budgetary situation it gave great peace of mind to know that

we had enough money stored away to cover our essential out goings. Having

this account only accessible by the treasurer reduced the chances of mistakes.

Preliminary budgets and a business plan

After winning the bid and beginning to organise the assembly, it was important

to have an idea how much the assembly we planned to host would cost. This

was primarily so that we had an idea how much money we would have to raise,

but also because funding applications usually require detailed supporting

documents including a budget and a business plan.

The initial budget was based on the costs of previous assemblies, modifi ed

by our knowledge of local conditions and our specifi c aims. This fi rst budget

can be found in the appendixes. It informed our fund-raising work and, as

the project developed, allowed us to identify which parts of the assembly plan

were best value for money, and which were most expensive – what we could

afford to do and what we would have to change. This budget was not formally

updated until several months before the assembly itself, when we had a much

better idea of how much we had to spend and what our activities would be.

Accounts: day to day operation during the organising period

For much of the organising period, the team working in the offi ce was small

and any events that we were involved with were inexpensive. It was suffi cient

to use the operational account for most transactions, with Chris and Tom each

having a debit card to make payments where necessary.

page 72


The SESAM in February 2010 provided a dry-run of the bank account system.

Participants transferred money from European banks to the savings account,

this money was transferred to the petty cash account, and then spent. We did

not need to use the deep pool because the sums and risk were much smaller

than in the assembly itself.

Cash fl ow chart: discussion November 2008-May 2010.

1. In its early stages, easa010 was heavily dependent on small loans from

the directors and donations from their families and friends. This money was

only paid back when the participation fees began to come in.

2. SESAM was nearly cash neutral

3. Small events like get sectioned were vital in the early days

4. We only passed the £5000 barrier, a prerequisite for charitable status,

after the participation fees began to come in. By then it was too late to become

a charity (see separate discussion).

Charity

easauk2010 was never registered as a charity. In the UK as in most countries,

company and charity law is set up with the assumption of continuity. EASA

simply moves too fast. To register an organisation as a charity takes a minimum

of three working weeks, but it also requires proof of an annual turnover of at

least £5000. easaUK2010 passed this threshold when the participation fees

began to come in, by which time it was already too late: fi rstly because the

deadline for the grant applications for which charitable status was necessary

had passed, and secondly because the participation payment structure fell

foul of the charity commission’s guidelines for charging. Extracts from our

correspondence with the charity commission are reproduced in the appendix.

[tbe]

page 73


page 74


Chapter 11 - Fund raising

The budget for easa010 was one of the smallest ever for an EASA, and relative

to the cost of the location and changes in the market may possibly rank as

the most frugal of all time. In comparison to the reputed $1m of the train,

the $1.2m of Denmark or even the more recent €300,000 + of Ireland, the

£106,000 (about €120,000 at the time) turn over of easa010 really stands out,

but how did it come to this, and how did we cope?

The answer to the fi rst part of the question also come is two parts, put simply

the recession that started to cast a shadow over EASA 2008’s and had a

negative effect on EASA 2007’s fund-raising ability was a sustained reality

even before we got started. Along with this we had a number of false starts

within the team in structuring a functioning fund-raising effort.

Fund rasing takes time, lots of time. In the very early days, when the team

was just a small number of people, fund-raising was done with on the back

of identifying key partners. When the team started to expand the tasks were

reviewed in order to be better distributed, it was agreed that tasks and roles

relating to writing documents, accounts, running the offi ce, the team and

communicating with the network along with existing partners and backers

where a trusted relationship was already in place required full time attention

and therefore full time team members. Fund-raising, and a number of other

tasks was agreed to have a coordinator and was a task that anyone could

take part in as their schedule permitted. This way everyone was in theory

involved in fund-raising, and as such it was the most staffed element of the

organisation process. In theory.

Unfortunately the numbers of people working on fund-raising was not

matched with the required focus. Somewhere along the line the urgency

shown in other areas of the team wasn’t matched in the fund-raising fi eld for

a signifi cant amount of time ; fi rst calls were made to companies, but were

What went wrong? <<<<<<

page 75


never phoned back - there are numerous spreadsheets bearing witness to

fi rst contacts and no further information; for a long time things as simple as a

staple sponsor document were not produced, but time was put into redefi ning

the levels of sponsorship available - the next chapter will talk more about

the importance of brand stability. At weekly meetings very little feedback

from the fund-raising team was being put to the group and as a whole the

team became more frustrated and tensions began to show. It is at times like

these that people will begin to question the structure of a team which affords

all members an equal involvement, it is important to, as a team, remember

why you are doing it, what EASA is about. From a purely pragmatic point of

view any attempt to assert control over the each others roles or implement

punitive measures - whatever they might be; how can you sack someone from

a voluntary, everyone welcome, organisation? - would create more fi ssures it

the team and more ineffi ciency. Unfortunately, over time, the fund-raising

team shed members, with people just not turning up. Having been concerned

at the turn of the year (2009 - 2010) about the lack of money coming in the

team had overhauled the fund-raising effort in the hands of a coordinator, by

the end of February it was in tatters, with only full timers making any head

way. It was at this point I created a defi nitive sponsor document and took up

direct contact with team members around the UK.

The issue of recession is one that was put to us during the bid in 2008, and

I remember saying that of course the recession would make it harder to gain

funding, but as we had never had to gain funding before we didn’t know any

better and therefore wouldn’t notice the difference. The effect was easy for

us to notice though, with the long, long, long, long line of people we spoke to

who told us that “We’re really interested, and 12 months ago we could have

done something, but right now we’re having to sack people, so it wouldn’t be

right.”

The best example for both these problems comes from summing up our public

funding = £0. EU money was not investigated by the fund-raising team,

page 76


despite a lot of ground work going into the research between the bid Nov.

2007 and Aug. 2008, the work simply wasn’t picked up and the deadlines

passed us by. Local public funding was investigated though. At the time

there was a body called the North West Development Agency, this agency was

responsible for distributing EU funding allocated to the region - the funding

coordinator mistakenly assumed this meant all EU money possible, but in fact

it didn’t include monies applied for directly. The NWDA loved the idea, we were

advised to go for matched funding meaning that for every £1 we secured they

would double it - great! Unfortunately this advice - from a senior member of

the NWDA proved to be a little simplistic, as in fact we needed to approach a

myriad of subcommittees to gain the funding. All this was a mute point in the

end anyway, the eagle eyed reader will have spotted I have been referring to

the NWDA in the past tense. The fi nal complication to our fund-raising was

the specter of a general election in June 2010. It was clear for a long time in

the UK that the right of centre Conservative Party would win the election and

in turn it was their policy to cut public spending. This did two things, one it

made private companies nervous of the coming fi nancial climate and reluctant

to give away capital and two it meant that publicly funded bodies that may

have been a source of funding were concerned over their existence so were

similarly unwilling to entertain cash sponsorship. Before the assembly took

place the NWDA was disbanded, meaning all funding was cut, if we had been

involved with this funding stream it would have been a disaster to the budget.

Having covered ‘how did it come to this?’ I must we can move on to the more

uplifting ‘how did we cope?’ I’ve spoken to problems within the team to

create a dedicated fund-raising arm but as with all aspects of organising,

when things were not perfect there were people willing to pick up the slack

and put the extra work in - but before we get to that part, the story starts, as

ever, with the decisions made before the bid.

As this will be the fi rst time the team are organising an event of this

nature the only thing we have to take to sponsors is our words and our

What went right? <<<<<<

page 77


professionalism. Beyond this we have to be careful to neither undersell

ourselves nor attempt to go to the same well too often.

Sponsorship is not complicated, but it is vital to have a clear outline

of what is happening, no one should approach sponsors at any level

without it being discussed at the team meetings fi rst.

For clarity the level attributed to a contributor has been banded, relating

to the level of fi nancial backing provided by an institution:

Partners: Partner status is reserved for major contributors to easa010.

This contribution includes: a very large cash sum, a principle space for

the event, key advice and highly technical specialist help; or a mix of

the above.

Backers: Backer status requires: a substantial cash sum, a collection of

secondary spaces, material sponsorship, or key professional support.

Event sponsors: Event sponsorship costs £500. The sponsor can choose

an event in the build up to the assembly to be associated with.

Building sponsors: Building sponsorship costs £1000. The sponsor

will have their details displayed at easaHQ for the duration of the

organisation process.

Friends of easa: Friend status is available to individuals only and

costs £50. Friends of easa010 will be acknowledged in all easa010

publications.

EASA is a complex thing to explain in its entirety to someone unfamiliar with

it, so it is important to learn to simplify what you are saying dependant on who

you are talking to and why you are talking to them, this is especially true when

approaching companies for sponsorship. Essentially you are asking them to put

their companies, their bosses, money in to your idea. Obviously presentation,

documents, logos, being well dressed all help, but to get anywhere at all you

have to be clear on some key points: 1. Who you are 2. What are you asking

for 3. What do they get. It is best to treat the pursuit of sponsorship as a long


page 78


conversation, at each stage you are keeping the conversation interesting in

order to have more time to explain a little more, you wont get the promise

of money on your fi rst phone call, so don’t ask, you can say you are looking

for sponsorship and would they like to see some more information about the

event? You fi rst goal when contacting a company is to meet them face to face

to give them a presentation, that’s all - it’s less scary to think of it like this

than to think about the pressure of getting a set fi gure of money.

As mentioned already, when we entered into the organising of easa010 in the

midst of the recession, and as such we realised that the recent funding model

for EASA wouldn’t be enough. We had seen the problems faced by EASA

Italy in raising funds for 2009, how they had worked intensely hard on the

event but money remained tight. We knew we needed to be inventive. From

the outset we asked all NCs to help with sponsorship for the assembly and

when approached by people outside of the UK willing to help we sent them

sponsor packs and suggestions of types of people to approach and what to

say. At fi rst this yielded small success with Denmark and Ireland the only

countries to come forward with successful fund-raising. Closer to the event

we approached the network once more with the same request and this time it

was met with a fantastic response and we brought in something like £3,000

in the last couple of weeks this way - it is my fi rm opinion that the immediate

future of fund-raising for EASA will rely on the whole network.

I think by now I’ve made the point that fi nding cold hard cash in a recession

is tough, but that doesn’t mean don’t ask for cash, you might get something

else you need, which is why at the very outset we wrote the possibility of in

kind sponsorship into the defi nitions of the sponsorship levels.

Despite being a priority from the outset tools and material sponsorship was

left really late, with tools sourced at the eleventh hour and only materials

for the competition found at all. Tools are an obvious thing to try and get

for free, they are relevant to the profession and EASA has a good history of

Tools <<<<<<

page 79


gaining a major tool sponsor. First port of call was Dealt, but following their

initial interest and a little investigation from their UK branch, their response

was that in their opinion they had sponsored the whole of EASA in 2007 by

gifting tools permanently - so we should have them to use. Hilti were also

initially interested but this interest cooled. We eventually had success when

Christoph and Sam approached Makita’s advertising company with one of our

sponsor documents. They followed up their interest while the boys were out

of town and I supplied them with the information they needed about EASA day

and our commitment to other partners. With our support they sold the idea to

Makita, who agreed to supply our electrical tools and - to our delight - stated

that as part of the deal they wanted to do a complete safety demonstration,

fulfi lling part of our insurance obligation. Tools was a great example of

something falling through the cracks, but with concerted team work being

brought together in the end.

Cash brought in, as can be seen in the budget, was at a premium - literally

every little helped. Fund-raising is a many wondrous thing, it’s best to hear

how it was done direct from the people who did it, so here I pass the batten

here to Joe Frame to elucidate his experience, I will be back to talk through

some examples of money that I got hold of.

[cma]

CASH SPONSORSHIP

During the boom of the last 10 years it seems that architectural offi ces were

quite free with their money, but for easa010 offi ces were not a particularly

lucrative group to approach due to the economic conditions under which we

were working. I personally contacted over 60 offi ces and received nothing

from any of them, and as a team we contacted pretty much every offi ce in

Manchester and over 100 in London with similar results

>>>>>> Architecture Offi ces

page 80


The system we used was to fi rst make a telephone call and ask for someone in

public relations or human resources, then explain to this person briefl y what

EASA is and then ask if they would be interested in a sponsorship brochure or

pdf for them to have a further look at. This sponsorship document explained

EASA more fully along with the sponsorship possibilities we were offering

such adverts in our literature, lecture opportunities, promotional materials in

the welcome pack and many other things.

Invariably people will say they are interested at this stage as they don’t want

to be dismissive, but once you have sent it the laborious task of reaching them

again and getting a defi nitive answer from them begins. Having a spreadsheet

to keep track of the status of each line of enquiry is essential; otherwise you

will be lost and make mistakes.

It can be a very boring and depressing task, being

on the phone all day, repeating yourself and repeatedly being told no, which

is why it is better to have team of people doing it.

As a team we stopped contacting architecture fi rms about 2 months before

the assembly as we decided it was not worth our time considering the lack of

successes. In a fi nal salvo I e-mailed all the contacts that I had made at offi ces

containing a thank you and the link to our fund-raising button on the web site

asking for it to be forwarded around the offi ce so people could make personal

donations if they wished. I myself have little idea this elicited any donations,

but it was a positive way of closing communications.

There a lot of charities that share aims with EASA with regards to developing

communities, promoting Europe and so on. By the time I became involved in

fund-raising it was too late for me to apply for specifi c grants from them due

to passed deadline, so I was making contact for small scale cash sponsorship

for people to come and lecture or hand out information to participants using

the same technique as with the architects; making direct contact, sending the

Charities <<<<<<

page 81


sponsorship pack and then following up with another phone call.

I did not meet with much success as they are charities and are not used to

people asking them to pay to talk to an audience. Obviously each country has

different charities, but ones whose aims are developing communities are the

obvious ones to research and approach, in our case The Prince’s Foundation

for the Built Environment is an example.

Building Suppliers / Vested Interest Groups for Building Materials

We as a team found far more success in approaching building suppliers and

vested interest groups to lecture at EASA in exchange for sponsorship, whilst

I personally concentrated on the vested interested groups. Many building

material companies fund groups whose job is to promote that material; ie:

concrete, glass, plastics, photo voltaic etc. Researching once again is a vital

part of fi nding these groups, as there are more than you could imagine, some

of them far more professional/well-funded than others, but all provide the

opportunity to get some money in exchange for giving them a very diverse

captive audience to talk to and distribute information to. There is always the

concern that you are selling out and subjecting the participants to lectures

from very dull people, but invariably those organisations that are interested

will have members of staff dedicated to giving presentations and should be

relatively good at it. The Brick Development Agency was one such group that

I secured to give a lecture to the participants.

Approaching vested interest groups is somewhat easier than a non-

architectural business or architecture fi rm as there is a very clear investment

opportunity for them, in that promoting themselves is what they are funded to

do. With an architect’s offi ce for example the return for sponsorship is hard to

defi ne, past getting their name known to a group of students who could apply

there for a job. During boom times it is more likely that offi ces are competing

for graduates, but the environment we were working in meant this was low on

their list of priorities. With the Brick Development Agency I simply rang them

page 82


and followed the same script as I used with everyone:

“Hello, My name is ……., I am calling from the European Architecture Students

Assembly which is taking place in Manchester this summer.

[Explanation of how interesting, exciting and worthwhile EASA is whilst

stressing that it will not be back in the country for possibly 30 years, so it is

now or never]

We are looking for sponsorship and we have 450 future architects who would

be a unique audience for you to inform about your area of expertise (bricks).

Would you be interested? I can send you some further information and the

sponsorship pack and then give you a call back when it is convenient.”

Once the initial commitment was there it was simply a matter of fi nalising the

details; it probably took about 5 phone calls over 2 weeks just for this one

organisation, what with people being on holiday and some confusion over

dates, but eventually we reached an agreement on the date of the lecture. It is

a long process and there is always the possibility they will change their mind.

There was some discussion as to the topic of the lecture, but invariably they

will have a set text that they will tweak to the audience. In our case I stressed

that fact that we are students, so possibly more interested in cutting edge use

of brick rather than its history or extant of usage. The fi nal part of the process

is writing the invoice to them, await the cheque and trust that their speaker

will turn up at the agreed time.

Charitable arms of national companies

Many lager companies have a charitable arm that gives money to develop

communities in a PR exercise to ally fears that they are destroying local

identities by fi lling all high streets with the same shops. Whether or not it

is a sincere concern of these companies is not particularly relevant, but the

page 83


chance to get some cash from them is. However, once again personally I was

too late to apply for these funds due to passed deadlines, despite me sending

the odd pleading e-mail for special consideration I got nowhere. So this is

something to start doing as early as possible due to fi xed deadlines and the

complex application processes.

Local companies / National Companies based locally

Appealing to large local companies or national ones based in the locale, even

it they are completely unrelated to architecture, is another avenue we pursued.

For example Bruntwood is the largest offi ce rental company in Manchester,

who pledged their support and all though no funds actually appeared they

were a good name to have behind us. These companies should view it as good

PR to be seen supporting such a unique and special event in their town/city,

but some just don’t care and you will never be able to actually speak to anyone

relevant.

As the assembly approached I made contact with a number of large companies

in Manchester, such as the Co-operative Supermarket Group and Stagecoach

Buses without much success. Once again I was given the impression that

companies couldn’t bee seen to be giving away money whilst they had to

make staff redundant, which was very frustrating. Also they are maybe not so

concerned with marketing themselves to 450 people who don’t live in the city

as they will see no return on that money from the participants. So approaching

them has to be very much about how EASA engages the local community and

supporting us supports the community.

We assumed as a team that international companies would be very interested

in supporting EASA as it is such a multinational group they could promote

their products to a wide range of people at once. However we began to realize

that each country obviously has it’s own headquarters, and as a result they are

mainly concerned with sales and promotion within that country, so there were

not particularly more enthusiastic than national companies.

>>>>>> International Companies

page 84


I would recommend approaching Illy Coffee as over the past few years they have

supported numerous EASAs and the employee who sorted out our machine

told me each year there is a conference in Italy and he had seen the Irish

representative bragging about supporting EASA and showing lots of photos

of trendy Europeans drinking their coffee. As a result he wanted to compete

with the Irish Illy distributors by supporting us as well. This atmosphere of

competitiveness would only play to our advantage with certain companies who

appreciate the marketing opportunities of having photographs of EASAians

using their product. Unfortunately I cannot offer any other suggestions at this

point.

For better or for worse the Welcome Pack is an EASA staple. It is a nice way

for people to arrive, by being given a bag of presents along with promotional

material for sponsors and like. When trying to fi nd products to fi ll the welcome

pack it is important to think of companies who want to market their product to

students, young people of just anybody. We managed to secure 1000 bottles

of Vitamin water as it had only been recently launched in the UK and the

company wanted to promote it as much as possible. Other companies that we

approached but met with little success were energy drinks, design fi rms and

so on. The most bizarre attempt I made personally was ringing up Durex’s PR

company to try to get some free condoms, and trying to explain over the phone

in a polite way of how EASA can sometimes become the sort of place where

condoms are in high demand. I failed with the condoms but they are the sorts

of things that we were trying to get for the welcome pack. Even approaching

companies for branded things like lighters or whistles is worthwhile, although

it was something that fell by the wayside for us as we devoting a lot of energy

on the larger forms of sponsorship as we were in dire straights at times.

I managed to get 450 back issues of MARK magazine by taking a name from

the Ireland008 fi nal report and simply e-mailing them, mentioning Ireland and

asking for similar support. They were delivered to our offi ce a week before the

Welcome Pack <<<<<<

page 85


start of the assembly, we put a link on our web site and that was that. It was

the easiest bit of sponsorship ever.

Fee Pfeiffer ([email protected]) is the woman to contact for future organisers

in search of Mark magazines.

THINGS YOU SIMPLY HAVE TO PAY FOR

I rather naively thought that if we explained to companies that were providing

us a service (eg: portable toilets, refuse management etc) how we were non-

profi t, for the local community, student organization we could get some sort

of discount/ free service in exchange for promotion similar to other sponsors.

In retrospect it is obvious that you will not get something free from a company

that makes its profi t from providing that service. Toilet companies presumably

do not market themselves to the public in the same way that drinks products

do, so you cannot treat them the same way. It is a cynical thing to say, but

no one cares about EASA as much as EASAians, so there are some things that

you will just have to pay for. My only success was getting some free bin bags

from Emerge recycling (explained in the refuse management section), but this

was because they are a charity that promotes communities, so our interests

dovetailed to an extent, also Emerge employees were just very nice. Whilst

we had a huge amount of support from offi cial fi gures, there was a defi nite

lack of philanthropic attitude amongst the business sector of Manchester,

presumably as a direct result of the economic down turn.

GENERAL ADVICE

Have 2 or more people directly responsible for fund-raising. It is too important

for 1 person to deal with and it means that when it gets too depressing for 1

person, the other can take up some of their slack.

The people directly responsible should have been to previous EASAs so they

have an emotional responsibility to do their job properly and appreciate the

page 86


reality of 450 people being their responsibility.

Create a very detailed Google spreadsheet with ALL types of sponsorship on

so that people can easily keep track of what is going on and who is dealing

with which organisation. This stops people harassing the same organisation,

everyone can contribute suggestions of companies to approach, all contact

details are in the same place and so on.

When contacting companies you should ring them up and ask for whom

to speak to (unless you can fi nd a specifi c name on the internet). Having a

specifi c contact means that person is more likely to reply. If you simply send

an e-mail/letter to a company’s general enquiries you will never get a reply.

Ask when it is convenient for you to call them back and then make sure you do

as we found that people didn’t ring back despite promising to.

Get the right people doing the calling, but also remind others who are more

reticent that the worst thing people can do is say no. In all my hassling of

people I no one was ever rude towards me.

With private institutions make contact before the end of the fi nancial year so if

you are successful EASA can be budgeted for. I lost count of how many times

I was told that we were too late as all budget had been assigned for that year.

With public institutions do a lot of research on deadlines and requirements.

The deadlines are invariably a long time prior to EASA so you have to start

researching as soon as you can. There is a whole range of institutions who will

give money to develop exchange within Europe for which EASA is a perfect

candidate.

People will often say they think they are interested in supporting EASA and

then they will never make contact or reply to you again.

page 87


Do not count on any money promised to you until it is in the bank.

The one yes that you get after all the rejections is an incredibly satisfying

feeling.

Try to up sell companies from the minimum cost once they have committed

to supporting EASA.

Have an up to date calendar of events to ensure you do not double book

lecturers.

Prepare a standard informative e-mail to distribute to lecturers as the assembly

approaches so that you know they have the correct location. This is because

people will not check their old e-mails and assume they haven’t been informed

and ring up and complain.

Be prepared to have some idea of lecture topics when talking to specifi c vested

interest groups.

Carefully consider which companies will be interested in different facets of

EASA. Obviously architecture is the main selling point, but it is also a lot of

students which is a big target audience for companies; building communities

which could appeal to national businesses based in the city/area; companies

that make a specifi c type building materials that they want ‘architects of the

future’ to be aware of; European development agencies who are very happy to

have so many people in one place, be they architects or not; local universities

keen to attract foreign students; local shops who want to appear cool and

trendy and so on. Basically you can twist EASA in many different ways to get

different products or types of support, and during times of economic trouble

you have to get quite creative and as much as it pains me to write such a

cliché: ‘think outside the box’

>>>>>> Partners

page 88


[jfr]

Up to this point we have spoken at length about recession, team, tactics,

diffi culties and what not, so how about some straight forward examples? The

following are descriptions of sponsorship I worked on.

Partner status was reserved for institutions providing outstanding service,

sponsorship in kind and cash investment in excess of £10,000.

ASK Developments, as has been discussed previously, were involved from early

in the bid organisation. They provided us with free use of 43 Hulme Street,

the commercial rent on which stood at £50,000

per year, along with free parking for the offi ce.

Manchester School of Architecture, University of

Manchester (UoM) and Manchester Metropolitan

University (MMU) were included for their combined efforts. Due to the

Manchester School of Architecture being a joint course, caught between

the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University, it is

impossible to consider a venture undertaken by the school as independent -

this plaid to our advantage.

The School itself couldn’t fund us with cash, but they gave us fantastic moral

support, from the head to each head of year, meaning that we had fantastic

access to the students, who in turn had great freedom to be involved. We

were given a £1000 print budget for the build up to the assembly and a

further £1000 for the assembly itself and after. The School, as well as MMU

also gave us use of a number of spaces both in the build up and during

the assembly. The Vice Chancellor of MMU was very supportive of the event

and leant his political weight to gaining us support from the ‘who’s who’ of

Manchester and was instrumental in putting together our impressive stack of

A council is a lot of independent, interconnected departments, meeting with one department is not enough to gather all the information. Universities are the same, but each department is a separate business.

page 89


No matter how hard it may seem there is cash out there to be got, and it’s not all about hard work to get hold of it, mostly it’s about being inventive and persistent.

letters of support for the bid. Having the VC backing was essential, thanks

to his letter of support alone I was able to secure all the AV equipment for

the assembly - Digital SLRs, Digital Video Cameras, tripods, digital sound

recording equipment and projectors. His backing was also pivotal in how the

assembly turned out and the efforts to relocate the sleeping accommodation.

Visit Manchester and Manchester City Council must also be considered

together. Once again neither were able to give us cash sponsorship but their

visible support elevated the organisation from student project to international

event. Gaining the support needed from the council came from aiming high

and rolling the support down. First we sent information packs and e-mails to

the Head of the council and the Leader of the council, between them the two

most important people in the city, and to be fair, far to busy to be hands on

with a small event like ours. Out of this I received a call from Peter Babb, head

of Planning for Manchester - here is

a man that every architect in the city

would like to have access to calling

me, he even came down to our bid launch to meet me and fi nd out about

EASA. From here I got meetings with the Events department, Cultural Strategy

and more. When it came to putting in planning permission for Downtex the

planning department and all relevant council departments put in a huge effort

to get is through in time - more on which in Chapter 7. In terms of direct

affect on the assembly we were given a Civic Reception in the Great Hall of

Manchester Town Hall and all the contacts we built up were important when

ever we approached anyone about using their space for EASA.

It is not my intention to explain the politics of Manchester, but suffi ce it to

say that the conurbation of Greater Manchester is split into ten metropolitan

boroughs. In many ways Manchester can be viewed as a twin city divided from

the City of Salford by the River Irwell. The political distinctions between the

two areas are not apparent to most visitors to Manchester so we decided early

on that for easa010 our defi nition for Manchester would be Grater Manchester

>>>>>> Cash

page 90


but to avoid confusion would stick with the name of the city only.

I knew from EASA 2008 that the University of Salford had sponsored EASA -

£500 to have information included in the welcome pack - so I was confi dent

when I approached the School for the Built Environment that we would be

welcomed. We secured an initial £1,000 for the bid and the use of the

North West’s RIBA gallery for an evening. Following the bid we were in the

unfortunate position that the head of the school left and our replacement

contact had an unfortunate string of incidents which kept him out of work

for a signifi cant amount of time. Having turned the contact over to the fund-

raising team I was disappointed with the lack of progress and took up the

issue once more. After a series of e-mails I was able to reestablish contact and

after a couple of meetings - both at Salford and

at HQ they apologised for not being able to come

on as Partners, but offered £5,000 cash to secure

backer level. For this they received all the usual

coverage and it paved the way for a collaborative

day workshop during the assembly.

Not all sponsorship comes out of hard work on the part of the team - it is

worth ending each and every meeting by thanking who ever it is for meeting

with you and asking them to mention you to anyone that might be interested in

the assembly. For us this paid off in the shape of cold hard cash. Colin Pugh,

acting head of Manchester School of Architecture is also an active member of

the Standing Council of Heads of Schools of Architecture (SCHOSA). Though

the School couldn’t give us cash Colin took our case to SCHOSA who agreed to

fund us £2,000 on the proviso that we run some kind of event that they would

be interested in.

Which brings us to a UK only conference we ran in June. The quite remarkably

named United Kingdom Architecture Students Self Actuated Projects

Conference was a fi xture in our thinking of how to convert the energy of EASA

Remember, students are not the biggest spenders in the world, so they are not the juiciest market to sponsor. Work out how you can increase your visibility to other sectors.

page 91


You stand the best chance of cash sponsorship is you work out in advance the audience they want to be seen by and tell them how you can achieve that.

in the UK into something permanent - more of which in Section Four. In our

proposal for the funding from SCHOSA the conference was outlined as the

primary outcome of their sponsorship. The conference was always going to

go ahead and for a long time we had been thinking about doing it for free

participation, but we changed our minds on this due to the miniscule support

showed by schools of architecture around the 4 countries that make up the

UK.

Having personally e-mailed every single school in the British Isles that ran

an accredited, or otherwise, course in architecture and posted out brochures

and letters to heads of around 30 of the top schools I had received in the

region of 5 replies, of which none were offering sponsorship (one school did

sponsor us, but that was prior to this push, and I am coming to that). So

instead I decided that we should charge for participation in the conference

and ask the students to approach

their schools for the money - which

worked, we squeezed a further £700

into the kitty, meaning the conference grossed £2,700 for an event we ran

completely in easaHQ and got free coffee for from the School of Architecture.

When looking for funding there are two ways to do it, the unsuccessful way is

to rely on peoples generosity and hope they give you money just for existing,

the other is to work out what they want and realise you are actually selling

something. To some you are selling a life style and some great photos -

Makita - to others you are selling visibility, and there are a number of EASA

staples that can do this.

The welcome pack is a very useful thing, it is guaranteed to enter the possession

of every participant, and is likely to return home with them too. Because of

this you can sell space within it. Though contacting Sheffi eld University I got

in conversation with the architecture department and with the help of one of

our team who was studying there convinced them of the virtues of EASA. We

page 92


got £500 in return for information in the welcome pack.

Not everything in the welcome pack needs to be advertising space. A contact

of mine who works in a gallery was able to secure 1000 bottles of Vitamin

Water, 427 of which we gave out to participants on arrival.

When I talk about the ability of EASA to reach people I also put my money

where my mouth is. This year we were looking for a wristband sponsor,

and with the deadline looming for submitting the design to the fabricators

I seized the opportunity to gain some advertising for a contribution driven,

online, architecture publication - disparate magazine. Covering the cost of

fabrication, around £260.

Inventiveness in fund-raising can be expressed

in different ways, one way was to grab sponsors

interest with something they didn’t want, but have ready something they did.

In June it was clear that the fund-raising team had not been having success

approaching companies and convincing them to support EASA. I decided to

combine last minute fund-raising with two of my other tasks - the evening

lecture series and making sure the competition workshop happened. I

produced an alternative sponsor document with much more narrow bands of

options, a shopping list almost. For the lectures I was unwilling to jeopardise

the excellent quality of the content of the assembly so I went through the

highly useful RIBA product selector CPD (continued professional development)

lecture section to fi nd interesting companies, institutions and manufacturers

that might be interested in lecturing to ‘400 of the continents brightest, and

highly motivated young architects.’ I worked through the list asking to speak

to the marketing department and went from there. In the end this landed

£500 from the Stone Federation and £250 from Schindlers (lift manufactures).

For the competition I approached the UK’s largest manufacturer of plasterboard,

British Gypsum. Having created interest in the project I was told quite early

You stand a better chance of sponsorship in kind if you can take a product into an unfamiliar setting - a health drink to artists, for example.

page 93


that they would support us with materials, what followed is quite a dull story

to recount in full - that doesn’t always stop me, so you know it must be - so

long story short, the initial contact went on holiday, I was passed around until

she got back, a heck of a lot of work was put in from her to fi nd us a local

supplier that we then need to set up an account for and the go ahead came 2

days before the assembly started and even then it took nearly a week to get

any on site.

Not all sponsor negotiations result in free money or goods, and as Joe before

me pointed out, you wont have much luck getting things for free for an event

from people who make their living from event organising, but you can negotiate

better deals for you by offering exposure and advertising. Two examples for

us were my negotiations with Illy coffee who loaned us all the equipment for

free and Kro catering who not only brought the cost of the evening meal down

from £5.99 per person to £3.50, but also stepped in during the move to offer

us a tremendous rate on beer to retail on their own premises.

To return to the question that must seem like a lifetime ago by now - ‘how

did we cope?’ Simply put we worked as hard on searching out the most cost

effective option at every turn whilst paying close attention to the core issues

of the assembly. If we had had twice as much money I doubt the assembly

would have been too much different, but maybe the organising might have

been a little more stress free.

[cma]

Apple

Approach

It became apparent from when we started reviewing the workshop applications

that there was a noticeable shift towards explorations and projects that were

much more reliant on ‘media’, - for want of a better word. Why this was I

can only speculate; whether a response to the theme and the various ways

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we represent our identity and that of our environs, or simply due to the

proliferation of new and emergent digital technologies.

It was clear we needed some top quality kit to supply some of the demands

being placed on us by the tutors. We needed, and wanted, a media suite,

somewhere in the middle of town so as to be best placed for access to the

other easa010 locations and the city as a whole. No big deal.

We were aware that Apple computers had sponsored a workshop in Ireland

back in 2008. Approaching previous sponsors had had mixed results, largely

depending on the relationship and lasting impressions between sponsor and

organising team. Due to the excellent documentary which was an outcome

of the workshop and stories of top-end systems, we guessed that it had

gone well. We got an e-mail address for the person who they had dealt with.

Interested that EASA was back in the UK, she put me in touch with her UK

counterpart, which resulted in a positive response.

What followed was a one way conversation for the best part of four months.

Weekly e-mails from myself asking for a response to my proposal were left

unanswered. Fearful of a phantom contact, and unreachable on LinkedIn and

the apple web site, I tried several combinations of his original e-mail address

until, Success! A response from a different domain! My relief was almost as

great as the joy and ease of the arrangement we came to in super quick time.

Within a week, three e-mails and a short telephone conversation, we were the

benefi ciaries of a fully spec-ed computer suite that far exceeded what we were

hoping for. What made the deal so pain free was that we were putting on an

event for people that were (one of) their key demographics - young creatives

who aren’t afraid to spend money on quality kit. And Apple were so confi dent

that there products were what the participants wanted that they didn’t want

any public recognition as a sponsor for the assembly. “The product would sell

itself”.

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Advice

Get what you are and what you do into the fi rst line of every contact or

greeting. Once I fi nally got into a voice conversation with the guy at Apple he

remembered seeing a forwarded copy of my fi rst e-mail to the Irish contact.

This positive reaction led to a (relatively) quick deal.

Be persistent. It took time to get where I needed due to technical errors/

oversight, but the action of not letting something drop if you want it enough

holds true

Be ingratiating until they give you an inch, then ask for a mile. I selfl essly put

the ball in their court, gave them a bit of time and information, told them why

they should help and what we could do for them. In truth, we would have been

happy with anything they could loan us. So when they asked what we wanted,

we told them, worked out to the ideal scenario. They came back to us with an

offer that was nearly ideal, so we were pretty lucky.

Talk early to the right people. Its possible to spend too much time and energy

talking/networking to people who will be of no use to you before the length of

the meeting. It’ll take time to learn who are the time-wasters. Make sure you

can take as well as give.

Hard facts

Loaned items:

x8 - MB953B/A: iMac 27” Core i5

x3 - Z0GP0B/A: MacBook Pro 17” i7

x2 - MC375B/A: MacBook Pro 13” 2.66

x2 - MC373B/A: MacBook Pro 15” 2.66

All with Creative Image (Apature, Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio) installed.

[ama]

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Chapter 12 - Communication

Any organisation, especially one with a network structure, would be foolish

to underestimate the central role of communication to everything they do. It

would be easy for me to talk at great length about the specifi c importance of

communication but I hope that the breadth and depth of this document alone

acts as a physical testament to the weight of value we place in it.

It may sound paradoxical for us as a team to state that we believe actions speak

louder than words, that it is easy to talk about things but more important to

do them, and that we wanted to make a statement with what we did rather

than keep talking after the event about what other people should do in the

future. But the communication we mean is not

simply talking, rather it is effectively passing

information. When you start small you need

experience to be shared with people before they are experienced.

Internal

Each area of the organisation has an associated coordinator. This allows

any member of the team to come up with ideas pertaining to any

aspect of easa010 and its build up. The organiser then, having checked

the relevant organising document, brings the idea to the coordinator

concerned. If the idea is feasible, that is to say doesn’t clash with other

work, the coordinator then creates debate within the whole team as to

whether the idea can and should be implemented. Tasks are allocated to

make the idea happen, and then it is the responsibility of those charged

with the tasks to see it happens.

To support communication within the team an account has been

created with social networking site Ning.com This site allows constant

debate and interaction over numerous subject matters. As befi ts

the organisation, nothing is ever decided on Ning it is seen as an

opportunity to fl oat ideas prior to completing a proforma and bringing it

to the relevant coordinator to discuss. Regular e-mails will be circulated,

and easaHQ itself will act as a hub for many discussions.

The importance of communication can not be overstated - it is the glue that holds any network together.

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Network

Individuals within the organising team are free to talk to members

of the network about all aspects of the organisation process, and are

encouraged to take an active interest in the EASA blog www.easa.tk It

is important to remember, though, that an element of the unknown can

improve the experience for participants of easa010.

easaUK2010 has an obligation as a future organiser to regularly report

to the network on progress. These reports start at the easa009 with the

fi nal one at easa011. Along with these presentations there are required

documents to be produced for informative purposes, such as tutor packs

and welcome guides. Further to this required output, easaUK2010 will

also be producing network specifi c information and content in the form

of short fi lms and network press releases. These will contain factual

information about Manchester, the UK and the theme, but will also allow

for organisers creative side to have an outlet.

External

From the start of the process of making easa010 in Manchester a

reality the organisation has worked within two watchwords: visibility

and believability. While it is important to gain visibility with potential

collaborators, it is equally important that all the out put for easaUK2010

be consistent. All situations of fi rst contact with potential collaborators

will be handled by experienced members of the team, supported by

standard information documents.

Media

In order to bring money into the organisation, easaUK2010 needs to

offer the collaborators something in return. As easaUK2010 won’t be

producing a commodity, the only thing that can be offered is visibility

in areas that they want to be seen. To do this we need to pay close

attention to the visibility we are generating for the event, organisation

and collaborators.

There are two sides to gaining profi le:

Internal: Generating our own media content is a simple way of raising

the profi le of easaUK2010. Through the web site and newsletters we

page 98


can make sure that collaborators are up to date on the progress of the

organisation, as well as assuring them that their input into the event

is being broadcast to their contemporaries in the city and beyond.

Generating our own content also allows us to communicate, both in

house and to the wider network.

External: Gaining mainstream media attention will allow us to engage

people we don’t have direct contact with. This has two effects: it will

aid us in our aim to engage the population and residents of Manchester;

it will also allow potentially interested parties to become aware of

our work. Media attention will also be a useful tool when negotiating

with potential contributors about the level of attention their input will

receive.

Communication can be a very complex thing,

but once you start organising EASA you see soon

enough that the vast majority of your work - if

you’re doing it right - is talking to people, there

is not much autoCAD involved. Again, to help us simplify the task we broke

down the broad groups we would be talking to throughout the organising, and

then for each worked out what we would be communicating, from there we

were free to work out how to communicate with them.

Broadly communication broke into two groups, internal - people who know

what EASA is - and external - everyone else.

Team

For us effective communication within the team was essential. Having 40+

schools of architecture in the UK lead to a dispersed team to begin with,

added to that we had organisers working abroad for periods of the process

and even more complication is added with our open door policy for anyone in

EASA to get involved from wherever they were.

The importance of communication was two fold here, fi rst and most obvious

Before contacting anyone, think who they are, what they expect and what you want them to understand. The key to good communication is putting yourself in the other persons shoes.

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Remember that 90% of the time you want something from the other person, so build your communication around this.

was to pass information, second was to make sure everyone felt involved in

what was going on - knowledge is power, to limit what people in the team

knew, intentionally or otherwise, would leave them in a unequal position in

discussions and decision making.

The draw back with such a broad team to keep in touch with was that it could

generate an unearthly amount of e-mails. We constantly explored ways to

streamline the dissemination of information as well as promote discussion, it

wasn’t always easy and was ever changing, but on the whole the determination

to communicate overcame most problems.

To pick out just a few things we did:

Meetings. Meetings are the core for all communication in a team, in the end

everything comes down to face to

face, usually one on one, but getting

a large number of people together

in a room on a regular basis is the simplest, most effective way of keeping

involvement high.

Coordinators. We used coordinators throughout the organisation, the roles

were always open to being defi ned, introduced, refi ned, removed, replaced.

Coordinators were responsible for keeping a view on a set of related tasks -

such as fund rasing or the gallery - and relating the information at meetings,

it was a way of creating a node point for information so as to reduce the

amount of time spent explaining what was happening and more effi ciently

spreading information.

Ning. In some ways www.ning.com is like facebook, but importantly it is built

with small networks in mind. Free at the time we used it, it allowed team

members, while still far apart, to knock ideas back and forth, share online

sources and have light hearted banter. All important, but also important to

page 100


keep out of more formal channels such as group e-mails.

Network

Our communication with the network, in our opinion, is split into two types,

presentations required by tradition and direct information about the assembly.

In terms of communication in presentations, there really isn’t anything very

new for us to say. For each we tried to be as honest as possible, we wanted to

give as many organisers as possible the chance to be part of the presentation

and to be slick without being too professional while also being entertaining

and fun.

For communication outside of presentations, we set the target early on of

being the most communicative organisation ever,

this was born out of a real desire for people to

feel as much a part of it before arrival as possible.

We felt that if people felt involved with the event

before they arrived they would take less time to

settle in and in turn would generate a real feeling

of community, a tough thing to achieve in just

two weeks, and something that wont happen without effort of all concerned.

External

As with internal communication, external communication split into two broad

types, collaborators - anyone we contacted directly to become involved in the

assembly - and the media.

Collaborators

EASA is a very large thing to explain, just look at this Final Report - believe

me this has been edited a lot - and this is just for one event. When talking to

collaborators, be they potential sponsors, contractors or talent, it is important

to remember a few things. First off EASA is a big thing, don’t try and explain

it all in one go, I must have explained EASA to hundreds of people and over

The majority of our communication to the network was with tutors, making sure we could provide materials, tools, talent and spaces they wanted. Our policy was that any communication from tutors went to the top of our to do list. Of course some tutors don’t get in touch nearly enough, and some you just can’t get rid of!

page 101


I found the quickest way to explain what to expect form EASA in contrast to other conferences was to explain accommodation and duties - and that EASA wanted it that way.

time I developed an understanding of the things that get people hooked and

importantly what makes them understand what to expect. Start small, a one

line explanation of EASA, if they are interested a bit more, then a bit more. The

next thing to remember is EASA is not quite unique, but it is certainly unusual,

this applies to both EASA the network and EASA the event. This unusualness

is a double edged sword, but if you frame it right it should always be a benefi t

when meeting people for the fi rst time. Being unusual means that people will,

at fi rst, imagine it run how everything they are used to is run, explaining that

it is not is a pivotal moment, but a real opportunity. Explaining it is run as a

non-hierarcical network with no voting can put a lot of business people off,

explaining that this can be frustrating but is also one of the great reasons to

be involved as it gives a different perspective can get business people to think

a bit more about it - remember that EASA is fun, when they meet with you

they are having a meeting that is more fun than the rest of their working week.

Media

The media is the most tricky for an

event like EASA, it is unlikely that media coverage will translate into cash or

spaces directly, but it would be foolish to dismiss the overall impact of media

attention. Our approach was to generate media attention with the hopes that

the benefi ts would be felt by EASA 2011 - the more media they could point to

regarding easa010 the easier their period of believability building would be.

General

Having defi ned the types of and focus of communication there are some

mediums that cross the boundaries, this is communication material produced

by the team that is generally available to anyone. Our approach with this

material was to producing it specifi cally with sponsors in mind, not so much

the content of information, but the nature of the tone and language used.

Web site

The easa010 web site grew out of amateurish ready made blogs. Timed to

page 102


come online exactly one year before the assembly, easa010 backer AODL

built for us a site to our specifi cations, complimenting our graphics style at

the time, but it ultimately suffered from lack of updates. The fi nal iteration

of the web site, built in house, lacked some key information and due to being

built in fl ash could only be updated by one of the key organisers. Of course

this is zeroing in on faults, and a web presence is essential, especially with no

central EASA web site.

Newsletters

Another of the success stories were the semi regular newsletter updates.

Compiled as and when news worthy stories were available, the newsletter

were a way of keeping everyone, participants and sponsors alike, up to date

with progress of the team. More than this though they had the effect of

demonstrating a level of industry that was going on to get the assembly

organised. Another by product of the newsletters was the mailing list they

were sent to - more than once sponsors positively commented on the people

who were on our newsletter mailing list.

[cma]

By defi nition a web site is essential should you want to display information

to a worldwide audience, and is the easiest, but not the best, way of telling

people who you are, what you do, and why you do what you do.

The easa010 web site went through a number of evolutionary steps, at

signifi cant times during the organisation. It started as a modest blog,

primarily for the network with information on the founding and establishment

of easa010 in Manchester. A more expanded blog was launched exactly a year

before easa010, with added content, information and links that was constantly

being updated through that time of rapid development and change.

In the new year came a new look and a change in the layout - intended for

easier navigation to the relevant information - in time for the SESAM and the

page 103


fi nal 6 month countdown to easa010.

This fi nal iteration was a massive undertaking. Rewriting the web site, with

a bloated content of information and news on our events, developments, and

releases to tutors, NCs and participants in a new language from scratch is

only for the brave, and, as it turned out, the foolhardy. Although the site was

custom made and had the easa010 design structure, it was, in hindsight, too

big a task for one person with limited skills and resources. This sometimes

slowed the fl ow of information and small front-end tweaks actually involved a

lot of back-end re-edit and work.

My advice is to keep it simple. We tried to do too much with one site. A

combination of rich media and simple text information ended up losing focus

and pulling focus from each other. If I were to do it again, I would build a site

that was dedicated to the gallery and our smaller, offshoot events, which could

have loads of rich media and inter activity within it, and a separate site for

the ‘business’ end of easa010: the assembly itself, information for sponsors,

participants, tutors, etc. These would be heavily linked and integrated, perhaps

under sub-domains of a top-level domain, for example: www.easauk.net and

hub.easauk....

A twitter account was set up for easa010 as means to expand its Internet

presence. While unused for a few months at the beginning - let’s be honest,

no-one really knew what to do with Twitter - it was kicked into life during

the INCM in Liechtenstein as an attempt to document the event. From then

onwards, it was used as a tool to quickly provide information and news about

easa010 and our various other events. With the development in the web site,

sometimes it took a longer than anticipated for information to be available, so

a tweet or two was a valid stop-gap.

It was also useful as it brought us in direct communication with a different

sector of the Internet. It has been widely documented that Twitter has had

page 104


a slower uptake and is used less by ‘younger’ web-users (roughly 16-25).

This happens to be the EASA age range, more or less, so messages posted

on Twitter weren’t necessarily read by the network. Instead, local businesses,

creative people, and Manchester’s art and design scene were using Twitter.

So we could target messages that perhaps they wouldn’t look for or read on

our web site, but pick up on their smart phone. This came in handy when

promoting our gallery events, and communicating with the various people we

were collaborating with in Manchester and further afi eld.

[ama]

Site Visitors - World Map (Europe missing)

page 105


Site Visitors - European Map (UK missing)

page 106


UK site visitors

IRE BUL FIN TUR BLRESPI TA HUN NOR

Site Visitor comparison with top 10 countries

page 107


facebook.comsesam.co.uk

easa.tkgoogle

Direct 29.8% 35.3% 34.9%ReferralS earch Engine

Browser contribution to total visits

page 108


Chapter 13 - Events

Prior to deciding to bid Paul and I discussed a number of issues, one was the

amount of effort that organising teams put in compared to the experience

they get out of it, 2 1/2 years of organising and the event whizzes by in 2

weeks. This was a particular problem for us because of the nature of the team

- we would be relying on bringing people in as organisers who had never been

to EASA before so wouldn’t know quite what they were letting them selves

in for, or what they would be getting out of it. We decided that the obvious

way to get around this was to reconsider what it means to be a host nation of

EASA, we decided to take it as a once in lifetime opportunity and to make the

most out of it - put simply we decided that in the run up to easa010 we would

run a number of build up events.

As well as providing the organisers with

interesting things to look forward to, these events provided the means to

achieve a number of things that were at the core of the ideals of easaUK2010.

It was our opinion that EASA has had a history of landing in a location for

two weeks bringing a huge amount of energy and generating interest and

then leaving. These events would allow us to work with interesting people in

artistic community before the assembly, meaning we could build a reputation

for achieving what we set out to do and therefore be more believable when

discussing collaboration for easa010.

Bringing EASA to Manchester opened the door of many important people’s

offi ces, we saw easa010 as an umbrella and platform for Manchester to take

advantage of, though working with people we could fi nd out their values and

from there put them in the consciousness of others and even pass on contact

details - we were operating in both the art circles and boardrooms.

Hosting events allow integration with members of different sections of the

Manchester population, and provide profi le for sponsors that EASA doesn’t

Events played a key role in helping us achieve both Integration and Legacy - two of our four pillars of the bid.

page 109


naturally have while also improving the profi le of EASA to aid recruiting new

sponsors.

As mentioned already they provided a creative outlet for members of the

organising team and will broke up the organisation process with fun events

- they allowed the team the chance to do things that normally we wouldn’t.

Documenting the event is responsibility of the event organiser and as

such should be considered during the planning stage. Documentation

allows the organisation to present events that have been held so far to

prospective sponsors whilst also recording the events for posterity.

Documentation will usually take the form of photographs and video

footage. This will be fi led on the offi ce hard drive in accordance with

guidance on fi ling. When documenting events it is important to consider

the merit of the footage being recorded. Whilst a lot of coverage can be

required to capture all aspects of an event, having a lot of images on fi le

for one event will generate future work for organisers having to decide

which are relevant for use. As a guide something in the region of 300

photographs for an event will normally, depending on quality, be enough

for most purposes.

Beyond internal documentation of events it is important to generate

general media interest in the events with the result of getting media

coverage for all easaUK2010 events. Mainstream media attention is

useful to the organisation as it is a tangible result that lends further

credibility to EASA.

Events were proposed by any member of the organising team at any time.

The fi rst event that we took part in was the offi cial opening of a new pubic

space in the Ancotes region of Manchester. The event organisers set up a

web site for ideas to be posted and then voted on. Realising the opportunity

to be involved we posted an idea - Faceless Identity - based on the theme

for the summer assembly. Having submitted the idea we mobilised the EASA

>>>>>> External


page 110


network through promotion on the blog and also by setting up a dedicated

facebook page, on top of this we promoted the vote through our newsletters

and the web site. Within 7 days, despite entering over a month after the other

contenders, we were the number one rated idea on the web site and were

invited to take part in the day. The experience allowed us to demonstrate the

numbers behind us on the continent, and it helped us realise the amount of

work needed to get people to vote. The event itself was a good introduction

to working with others - long discussions were required to wrangle who would

get the boxes for the event. And we even got our selves in the paper, albeit a

passing mention, more than 12 months before the assembly.

Run up events also gave us a trial run in contingency, and planing for things

that may go wrong. At a preview evening for an exhibition I was approached

by the organiser of Future Everything, an international conference that had

been running in Manchester for 15 years. He was interested in what we were

doing and we discussed how EASA could be involved in the upcoming Future

Everything event. After lots of meetings, e-mails and ohone calls we were in a

position where EASA was collaborating with three other parties on the project,

but it was clear time was against us and many things remained unclear -

the critical thing became making sure we could walk away from the project

with our reputation intact. It was vital that there was a paper trail available,

e-mails and minutes from discussions, showing clearly what we had agreed to

matched with what we had delivered.

As already mentioned, when we moved into easaHQ it was clear the space

could be divided between the need for offi ce space and the opportunity of

gallery space and therefore the ability to host our own events. After deciding

to open the gallery we discussed the kinds of exhibitions it should be available

for - what did easaHQ Gallery stand for? We moved into the offi ce in March

2009, around 1 1/2 years after the decision to bid, so 1 1/2 years into

the process of organising EASA. In this time we had met many people as

passionate about the city of Manchester and the art community as we were,

Exhibitions <<<<<<

page 111


A full list of exhibitions held at easaHQ is available in Section Five - Appendices

but we had not been really able to connect on a level more than as visitors to

a gallery - outsiders - HQ gave easa010 the chance to become embedded in

the scene in Manchester. Our own experiences of gaining a foothold, being

taken seriously and looking for spaces gave us fi rst hand knowledge of the

diffi culties in the modern world dominated by market forces for emerging

artists to get a fi rst exhibition without experience. We also knew that without

a reputation we would struggle at fi rst to attract exhibitions to the space.

For all these reasons we decided that the gallery would be free to use, but

exhibition priority would be given to Architecture, community groups and

emerging art talent, the space was not to be used by established artists or for

commercial purposes.

The decision not to charge for use of the space also insulated us from the

possibility of contractual problems with either the exhibitor or the landlord.

When you start charging for something

you create the situation of customer

and service provider, and as a student

team with no experience of running a gallery and our attention fi rmly on the

summer assembly it would is reasonable to expect some hiccups along the

way, so providing the space for no charge left us free to focus on the assembly.

Our agreement with ASK was based on the idea that the space was being

used to organise EASA not to generate income, though all the money would

have been going to the assembly any attempts to create revenue though HQ

itself would have left us in a vulnerable position and would have damaged the

reputation of our words.

Architecture

If you build it (t)he(y) will come. Not true, a gallery without exhibitions will

remain that way, the best way to advertise a new gallery space is to host

events there and promote them. Being students of architecture Tom and

I both knew the demand for spaces outside of the School’s 3 fl oors of the

Chatham tower for exhibitions and events - so we started with our contacts

page 112


there. We hosted the 2008 Manchester School of Architecture event month

exhibition, which was also the closing party for the Manchester Architecture

and Design Festival. Following EASA 2008 we hosted the [Re]Map 590 BArch

unit book launch as well as the MA fi nal exhibition.

Emerging Art Talent

In absolute truth the exhibitions varied wildly in both quality and hassle factor,

but each one brought its own merit to the process. Through easaHQ some

artists were able to exhibit for the fi rst time while some gained experience

of curating. Through the exhibitions we met many interesting people, some

became involved in EASA, others spread the word of what we were doing, some

taught us the benefi ts of collaborating and some showed us the potential

pitfalls.

When we moved into HQ we had some pretty big ideas - moving into your own

offi ce will do that - but so did our landlord. It may have been our intention to

paint the building, but it was Julian’s insistence that drove it to happen. Julian

told us that 13,500 vehicles passed the round-a-bout situated next to HQ on

their way in to the city centre and as many went back the other way - that is

a lot of people to see the building every day, and an indication as to why so

many people knew the location of our offi ce so easily.

We decided that instead of simply designing a new paint job for the building

we would open it up to the EASA network and beyond. This meant producing

a brief, making a competition info pack and promoting it on sites like bustler.

The competition info pack was downloaded over 1,500 times and we had

interest from fi ve continents. We set up a judging panel and drew up a

short list for them to see. After deliberation a winner was chosen and the

announcement was made at our fi rst exhibition / house warming in easaHQ

complete with candles and home made cake.

Following the decision we entered into the legality of the design - we needed

Painting competition <<<<<<

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to gain advertising consent, a version of planning permission. With minimal

tweaking to the submitted design we submitted the drawing and the fee (there

is always a fee) and permission was granted. Painting began, and let me tell

you painting white walls white is a drag, but not so much as painting hundreds

of perfect squares in grid formation. A special mention for organisers Miles

Reay-Palmer and Emma Uncles is due at this point for their fortuity and

stubbornness to get it done.

It’s clear that the experience of running this competition gave us great

experience for running the workshop competitions of Hope Mill and

Docu+Mation.

In 2009 the Manchester Architecture and Design Festival announced the

model of that year’s festival would be strikingly similar to that of easa010 -

work done by students of architecture would be displayed in city centre public

space. Our intention was always to inspire this kind of response in the city,

but the team felt that with the festival happening a matte of months before

easa010 it would be good for EASA UK to be involved and therefore avoid the

appearance of stealing what in reality was our own idea.

The support of the school was critical and, once again, fantastic. Both Colin

Pugh and Head of First Year and event month coordinator Helen Aston were

accommodating and as a team we were invited to tutor two workshops.

Alex Maxwell and I tutored a workshop called ‘Spatial Propaganda’ and

was run in, where else, easaHQ. The workshop looked at the importance

of communication and the relationship with architecture. Students watched

exerts from fi lms and worked on videos to express a single aspect of a building.

[cma]

A lot of people we were, and wanted to collaborate with were involved in the

Manchester School of Architecture event month. Our major collaboration on

>>>>>> Workshops

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this front was working with the university to produce 2 workshops with 1st

and 2nd year students from the school. There were 20 or so other workshops

too, run by masters students, kind of like easa. We used easaHQ to host the

workshop sessions, which were once a week for a month. Chris and Alex ran

a workshop about Branding, whilst Tom and I a workshop about narratives in

architecture. The outputs were exhibited at the climax of the event month at

Manchester’s CUBE gallery. As well as networking with people who could help

us for the summer assembly, this was also a great way to speak to students

about easa, who would quite often let it slip past them, we corralled some

volunteers. The overall experience was refreshing to a team under a lot of

stress, and reminded me of why I wanted to

organise easa010 in the fi rst place, and there was

a lot of free wine that month.

[pfa]

So far we have been to extrapolate lessons and benefi ts from events run

tangentially to the organisation of easa010, but we also ran two events aimed

solely at the network.

In February EASA UK hosted a SESAM in Manchester. The SESAM ranks up

there with our best ideas during the organisation process. SESAM allowed

us to do a lot of the things that would be required in organising EASA but

with a much more manageable number of people - time tabling, promoting,

applications, getting fees, organising food.

SESAM also gave the newer members of the team the opportunity to take

responsibility and the established ones to hand it over. We decided that

running the SESAM would be the second year’s of the team with the older

members available only for advice and support if called upon. In many ways

this was a sink or swim scenario, but we reasoned that if the worse happened

getting dinner for 12 people was a fi nancial pain, but not fi nancially crippling

Though out the planning and discussion of all events, the summer assembly must always be considered the priority and central to your thinking.

EASA <<<<<<

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A full review of SESAM is available in Section Five - Appendices

as it would be with 400 people here.

SESAM really gave an opportunity to get a feel for the things you can anticipate

but until you go through it wont know for sure, like what it is like to anticipate

people’s arrival, or to have a group of people depending on you for every

aspect of their day.

We knew we weren’t the fi rst team to run a SESAM in the same year as an EASA,

Italy did so the previous year, but what we did differently was the scale and

purpose. I would recommend all organising teams to run a small international

event in the run up to the assembly, but limit the size or the effort put into

the organisation could leave you jaded for the real thing. The injection of

EASA spirit that only comes from being around EASA people (free from the

pressures of organising) makes it worth it on its own.

The workshop of SESAM was entitled

‘First Sight’ and focused on the preconceptions and fi rst impressions of

EASA participants in Manchester. Over the course of two days of walking

tours the participants were shown the glossy council brochure sights of the

city and then taken on back ally tours by born and bread Mancunians. The

out put from the workshop was a piece of installation art to be included in

‘EASA an Exhibition’ at easaHQ, the fi nal day of the SESAM coincided with the

preview night of the exhibition attended by many of our partners, backers and

prospective sponsors. The added attraction of having EASA participants from

the mainland was a great draw and it proved to be one of our most successful

exhibitions.

[cma]

A SESAM (small European schools of architecture meeting) was organised

during the winter for several reasons.

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- It would serve as a proving ground for us as on organizational team, testing

the systems and methods we had put in place and the infrastructure, events

and workshops - albeit on a much smaller scale - that we were planning on

scaling up for the summer assembly. We had to go through every process

that we would have to do before the summer. Starting with looking for

accommodation, organising the catering, and formalising the workshop with

its tours and guides around Manchester that complemented and informed it.

Also the participants’ process was very enlightening. From devising the forms

and promoting the event, through to dealing with applications and questions,

communicating with embassies and the foreign offi ce over visa applications

and requirements, it was a hugely valid learning tool.

- The event was also held as a precursor to a large

retrospective exhibition about EASA that we were

putting on in the easaHQ gallery. Featuring lots

of archive material and showcasing all the work the organisers had done up

until that point, it was a chance to show the city of Manchester what we were

about, what we were doing, and how they could be a part of it going forward.

The SESAM workshop was given a room of the gallery, and occupied it with

the output of their week long workshop. The brief and theme for the SESAM

was ‘fi rst sight’. It was an opportunity for us as organisers to expose a small

group of European students, a mix of those with EASA experience and those

completely fresh, to Manchester, to a preview of easa010 and to our approach

to organising a summer assembly.

- It was also intended that the SESAM would introduce those members of the

organising team who had had no direct experience yet with EASA to get a feel

for the atmosphere and feeling generated during an EASA event.

- We, perhaps I, had hoped that it would give an opportunity to those in the

team who had not yet really engaged in the organisation process to take a

SESAM was planned, among other things, as a way to test ourselves before the main event. The feedback from participants was generally very positive.

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Following the SESAM the team held a special review meeting and a Final Report for the SESAM was drawn up, it is available in Section Five

leading role in the preparation and see the project through to its completion.

Unfortunately this didn’t happen to near a level I had hoped, and I oversaw

much of the organisation myself. I don’t want this to sound self-deprecating,

I was happy to take on the work and have no complaints, just that it was an

opportunity for someone to step up and no-one did. Perhaps it was I who

stepped up as my attitude and level of commitment noticeably changed after

the SESAM. Saying this, when the event started there were very noticeable

contributions from a few of the team, while everyone was involved in the set

up of the exhibition.

Some constructive criticism that came out from the weak long event was that

our involvement in the actual workshop was very minimal, and that we took a

backseat approach to its application. Considering the effort we had put into

this, and what the output meant to the exhibition this could be seen as very

valid. We put in a lot of effort into

the last week before the exhibition

opened, which took our team away

from the SESAM until the evening. Ways to overcome this are two-fold. Prepare

the bulk of the exhibition before hand, and put aside an amount of the team

to run/coordinate/take part in/be with the participants. Unfortunately we

were bound by when we had access to archive resources, so it was a case of

all hands on deck when we got them.

[ama]

Where the SESAM was outward looking and engaged the existing EASA network,

we also ran a conference that was inward looking to the UK with the intention

of starting the process of creating a network of Students of architecture here

in the UK. The quite remarkably named United Kingdom Architecture Students

Self Actuated Projects Conference was a fi xture in our thinking of how to

convert the energy of EASA in the UK into something permanent - more of

which in Section Four.

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Though the organisation of easa010 we had the opportunity to go through the

EASA archive giving us an interesting insight into the history of the assembly,

and we met many UK participants from days gone by. Though these two

things we learned a lot, particularly about the UK involvement, that hadn’t

been passed on in the traditional word of mouth manner that EASA runs on.

We found that EASA began as an off shoot of the UK based winter school series

- a much used name, but in this instance it was driven by the founders of

EASA in a similar style to EASA. We found out that 1991 wasn’t the fi rst INCM,

that there was a record of autumn meetings as far back as the fi rst year of

the assembly - 1981, when it was held in Delft, where it was decided to make

EASA an annual event.

Where as EASA went from strength to strength winter school slowly lost

momentum when the original personalities left, it stuttered along until the

late nineties but the fi nal one was held in 2000, and since then there has been

no student for student movement in the United Kingdom.

Having spoken to a number of Heads and Professors around the country as

well as the huge UK team put together to organise EASA it became clear that

the appetite for the resurrection of this kind of network matched the clear

need for it, so as a fi rst step we decided to host a small conference.

The conference consisted of a day of seminars run by the directors of

easaUK2010 Ltd as we fi rst went through the importance of running events for

yourself of all scales from a workshop to an international architecture festival,

and then drew on our own experiences to pass on advice on how to achieve

these things.

The conference helped the main organisers to focus their understanding, it is

one thing to know what you are doing but it is only when you try to explain it

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to someone else that you become critical of your own methods.

[cma]

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Chapter 14 Spaces

Up until this point we have talked at length about the process of organising

easa010, this chapter will cover all the aspects of the assembly itself and the

work that went into making them happen.

Organisation is a process of give and take, the only way to make progress is

to set out your objectives at the very start and work around the possibilities

and restrictions that occur in the pursuit of your vision. No where else is this

approach more critical than in the choice of location and the following search

for spaces for the assembly.

Our main driving point for decisions was the desire

to move away from the ‘ideal’ EASA mind set, and

the idea that there was some golden formula for

the perfect EASA that could be transferred, year on year, from country to

country. This meant handling every decision with care and attention, but we

believed that the reward would be a summer assembly unique to the location

and therefore unacceptable and hopefully unforgettable for all involved.

Early in the organisation process we realised that this constantly questioning

approach could lead to a lot of naval gazing and slow progress, so when it

came to looking for spaces our approach can be explained (yet again) by using

the four pillars of the bid, for each we will look at the positive and negatives

thrown up.

Urbanity

Inspired by the experience of EASA in the city in 2006 the decision to hold the

assembly in an urban location was essentially the fi rst decision we made, the

second being which city.

The decision of location was the single most critical decision for

“I want to walk out of the door and be in the middle of the city” pfa 2008

page 127


the success of the assembly. With the whole of the United Kingdom

available as a potential location a number of key factors were focused

on.

The organisation team decided very early that the event should be held

in one of the UK’s many vibrant cities to showcase most fully what

contemporary UK has to offer. It was also felt that an urban environment

would be more stimulating for the production of what we are

determined will be a successful and inspiring assembly. Immediately

Manchester was singled out as the ideal location to host an event of this

type for numerous reasons.

The city enjoys inspiring past, among many other things Manchester

was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and later played

an integral role in the information revolution, where better to

bring architecture students to inspire them towards the future of

architecture?

Manchester also enjoys a healthy status on the world stage, with the

recent hosting of the commonwealth games and both major UEFA

club football fi nals. Finally and possibly most importantly Manchester

was seen as a positively minded city, with a track record of supporting

events, that would embrace the EASA community and show the

ambition required to live up to the expectations and efforts the

organisers are investing in bringing this internationally respected event

to England.

Among the negative of hosting EASA in a city are: raised visibility to the

authorities, more potential neighbors and therefore problems from creation of

noise, there will always be other things going on in the city you must compete

with for funding and fi nally the classic from INCM discussions - a city offers

distractions that participants may fi nd hard to resist. In honesty we probably

put more effort into understanding the complexities of planning an event

like this in an urban setting than we did looking at the positives, naturally so

because they need more attention to deal with, but organising in a city does

come with substantial benefi ts compared to rural or small town locations.

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Mostly the positives come down to choice and competition, there is a greater

fl exibility of services available so its possible to shop around and drive down

prices, there are back up options incase - as happened with us - contractors

and suppliers let you down at the last moment, there is a real depth of talent

to draw on, for participants it is much simpler to get to, and there are more

options for events on the timetable.

Density

The point of this pillar was to keep EASA feeling like EASA, without density it

would be easy for 400 students to be swallowed up by a city of 1,000,000.

When looking for spaces density was not the top of our priorities, it was

something we had to discuss at regular intervals as our portfolio of spaces

grew, changed, and contracted until we had our fi nal solution.

Integration

We decided that more comfortable EASA experiences come when you know

your stuff is safe, because of this we always wanted the accommodation

spaces to be closed to the public, how then do you achieve integration. As

with density, integration was something we discussed as it became clear

which buildings we would be using, and as almost the opposite of density the

two were considered as balancing forces, creating an acceptable trade off of

density to achieve integration.

Legacy

In terms of spaces legacy was the least impacting of the four pillars, but as

you will see in Part Four: Output the spaces we occupied have a huge impact

on legacy.

Having worked out our requirements we needed to fi nd spaces, which sounds

simple - fi nd a building, talk to the owners, strike a deal. It is as simple as

that, but there are a few other things we kept in mind. It had always been

our intention to have the accommodation and workshop spaces in place when

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Section Five: Appendices contains a glimpse of an alternate reality, two alternative easa010s that could have been.

we went to bid, we had 12 months to work on it until that point, and that

would give us a year and 9 months to organise everything else. At the time

of the bid we thought we had reached a pretty solid understanding that we

would be able to use a building in Ancotes - Hope Mill - and that’s the bid we

submitted. Unfortunately almost at the same time as the bid, it became clear

the people we were dealing with couldn’t make the assurances we needed.

This left us with no spaces at all, but we were not to worried at this point. Way

back at the bid stage we reasoned that there were three windows in which we

would be able to get hold of spaces and in each we stood a better chance of

getting what we wanted, one was at the bid stage - around two years before

easa010, the second was 12 months before, as companies move in to the

same operational year as the assembly they would be better placed to make

the decision of use, and the fi nal - though scary - window would be in the

three months before the assembly. We had success of some kind in all of

these windows.

Our approach for looking for spaces

started with us talking to major developers, we then moved on to having

many, many meetings with various people in the council at fi rst to ask for

buildings, but in the end to ask for simple advice and suggestions. Paul and

I walked every inch of the city centre noting empty, disused or even just large

buildings, we’d then start the hunt though public records to fi nd the owners

and contact them in the hopes of securing the space.

In the end we got hold of and used a huge variety of spaces, but there were

more that we secured and didn’t use, and there is the third category of spaces

we were offered, had planned on, and subsequently lost - an indication of how

we learned to cope for what was to come during the assembly.

[cma]

No spaces, No easa.

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An EASA with multiple sites was necessary in our case. To have acquired

a campus big enough to host the entire assembly, would have resulted in

easa010 Manchester, not being in Manchester at all.

By having Downtex as our hub, we tried to keep the communal and homely

feel that easa does so well. At the same time participants would be able to get

out into the city exploring on the way to their workshops. The location of the

major sites was not strategic, but ended up triangulating the entire city. The

weekend events changed this, and I will talk about that in due course.

On the whole, you should start gathering the spaces you need early. However,

don’t panic if you are reading this the month before are short of one or two.

Spaces you acquire from private companies will be a lot easier to negotiate the

closer to the assembly they are. As for spaces from the council/municipality,

these should be booked early as spaces in the calendar will fi ll up.

We rented the Downtex from 1st June - 1st September. We found the building

in mid may and as soon as we had the keys the assembly felt very real. People

in the UK weren’t very respective to the idea of 400+ students sleeping in their

buildings. We thought at fi rst we would be able to persuade some forward

thinking property owner or council member into helping us fi nd a building,

and we’d be able to get it for free. This became a big time waster (despite

actually getting one two days after signing for Downtex). Using our contacts

to get information and more contacts was the way to go for us. Downtex was

well located and affordable so we went for it, despite it needing a lot of work.

Hope Mill, the home of all the built workshops, was made possible by a

mutually benefi tting offer, the design competition. The owner of the building,

David French was keen on the idea easa as it would help to put the mill

more on the Manchester arts map, a market they were moving into. The big

downstairs rooms used for the majority of the workshops are normally rented

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out at cost. By putting the same money into the studio conversion competition

we got the downstairs space and the chance to hold an international design

competition which would bring a lot of press and sponsorship opportunities,

and importantly bring an architectural element into being an organiser. He

got studios built and designed by architects. Win Win. EASA has lots to unique

things to give, not normally lots of money.

Hive was a last minute and vital addition. This kind of space was created for

events like easa, so they were great to work with and didn’t charge us. It acted

as overfl ow for classroom activities and provided us with a genuine gallery to

exhibit work in, great for visibility.

Madlab was the home for the media workshops, and very close to The Hive, so

the two site worked well together allowing the limited number of computers to

be shared. The building is normally a research facility for digital technology.

People like this were all interested in easa and the prospect of working with

architects, it was lucky to meet one with the keys to an offi ce.

easaHQ was home to all the organiser for a year either side of the assembly,

and for the event itself with the volunteers. Having somewhere completely

of your own was invaluable. It really did, and still does feel like home. This

was leant to us rent free by a big Manchester property develop, ASK?. Having

an offi ce space to yourselves keeps easa separate (to an extent) from your

personally and professional/university life. The building also functioned as a

gallery for students and young artists to help us promote ourselves prior to

the summer assembly.

After the eviction from Downtex, the Sugden Centre became the easa sleeping

accommodation. To get this at such short notice was one of the biggest

achievements of the organising team, and proof of the saying “its not what

you know, its who you know”. The situation wasn’t ideal, as participants had

to be out of the gym by 10:00 every morning, but as the space was cleaner

page 132


and more spacious than Downtex there weren’t too many complaints. This

lack of possibility to sleep in the day resulted in an unprecedented level of

workshop attendance, and in my opinion one of the major reasons easa010

workshop standard was so high.

After the suspension of the alcohol licence KRO2 became the easa bar. This

was again fortunate, as our caterers owned this bar and were happy to let us

buy their beer and sell it for a profi t. This helped ease cash-fl ow diffi culties

incurred by losing our own bar. The close proximity to the Sugden centre that

KRO2 had helped to keep hub feeling we originally planned for, albeit in a

different part of the city.

Getting between all these different spaces was

extremely time consuming for the organisers.

Three of the four main organisers were the

only people insured to drive the two easa vans. This was due to the age and

lack of licences of the less involved members of the organising team. This

resulted in three of the most knowledgeable people being behind the wheel

for the majority of the working day, which is defi nitely not advisable to future

organisers.

The morning bus ran 3 times between 09:20 and 10:20 to take participants

to the most distant workshop site, Hope Mill. We saw this as essentially for

the success of the workshops, due to the distance and the possibility of rain.

[pfa]

At the time of booking the club visited on the fi rst night out in the city - Sankeys Soap - had been rated as the No.1 club in the world by Mix Mag.

page 133


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Chapter 15 - Timetable

Planning out the timetable for easa010 was a delicate operation, the timetable

for an EASA can never be refi ned it can only ever achieve the status of best fi t.

For 2010 we had a couple of really long meetings at key stages - the times

we had accommodation in place - to set out some preferential options, we

decided that there would be no lectures opposite workshops, for example,

so instead we would have dinner lectures to complement a lecture day at the

start. We realised there would be a draw with participants to go and see what

the city had to offer, so it was decided to start with walking tours and to have

a number of nights out in the fi rst week, this worked also with having more

nights in during the second week once people were fully in the fl ow of the

event, and wanted more parties together.

With these main thoughts in place, and once the

accommodation was confi rmed, the rest of the timetable came together as

places and people were either booked or declined. From this point the thought

was about the experience of the participants. The fi rst day was dedicated to

orientation and getting settled in, there was the fi rst meetings and a welcome

talk with safety advice, the night was planned as DJs from the organising team

playing UK only music as a welcome.

The second day was for the workshop presentation in the morning and

stretching of legs with walking tours in the afternoon, rounded off with the

offi cial opening with the civic reception in the town hall, that night back at the

accommodation was the UK evening - intended to dig a little deeper into the

cultures of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than people might

have known before.

Day 3 started was the lecture day during the morning and early afternoon,

after which was the workshop fair, having workshop presentations the day

before was intended to give participants as much time as possible to discuss

With 24 workshops 5 minutes each is 2 hours, meaning presentations run to an unkindly tight schedule.

page 135


The results of the decisions can be read in Section Three.

options and make a decision. That night was the fi rst club night. On Tuesday

the workshops started, and for many (me included) this traditionally marks the

real start to EASA, and from here on out there was a rhythm to the timetable.

Worth mentioning is the timing of Day workshops, we avoided having them on

the fi rst day as we wanted everyone to attend workshops that day, and we also

avoided having any on the fi nal two workshop days.

The most striking difference of easa010 to recent EASAs was it’s urban location

which gave us an opportunity to re-imagine the traditional end of EASA

exhibition and in turn redefi ne the attitude to the workshops, thus easaDAY

was born. We decided that we would use the fi nal day of the assembly to take

over public locations, both indoor and out, for a city wide exhibition of work

from the assembly.

To do this we needed to work on a

number of things at the same time,

we obviously needed indoor spaces and permission to use public outdoor

spaces. I met with various members of the council to fi nd out who specifi cally

we needed to approach to gain permission, I even set up a collaborative build

up event so we could get the relevant experience of the process - a good

decision as the build up event fell through due to insurance issues and a

compression of time. Other build up events had allowed us to network with

various artists and gallery owners which, with the usual number of false starts,

allowed us to make some good connections for indoor spaces to use on the

day - more on the spaces later in the chapter.

Just as importantly we also needed to work carefully and closely with the

workshop tutors in order for them to get a relevant space for their output,

it was important that we didn’t dictate to the workshops where they should

be, but likewise we wouldn’t necessarily be able to secure their fi rst choice

location, this is one reason we held the workshop application deadline as

page 136


early as possible. Once we’d chosen the workshops we invested a lot of time

talking to the tutors via e-mail and face to face to workout issues such as

spaces and materials.

[cma]

easaDAY most certainly goes into the list of very good ideas - it generated a lot of interest in the assembly overall and allowed us to give something to the city.

page 137


page 138


Chapter 16 - TalentThe issue of talent - people giving lectures, walking tours etc - would have a

signifi cant impact on the feel of the assembly and therefore required careful

consideration. The selection of Mancunian lecturers, for example, would

allow us to consolidate the feeling of integration between the event and the

location, but we felt we needed a good balance to this in order to achieve the

other goals of the assembly, such as leaving slots free for participants to sign

up for, both to give evening lecturers, or to arrange evening entertainment.

Through various discussions on individual parts, such as lectures, parties etc

we decided on the key aspects to achieve in the selection of talent for and the

associated planning of each event on the timetable.

Variety - We for lectures we didn’t want an endless

parade of Architect’s talking their buildings,

lovely as they might be. Architects would be invited, but we would seek out

others with something to say.

Identity - As far as possible events should at least intend to relate to the

theme. Obviously this would be less so with evening entertainment, perhaps

20% of the nights, but a lot more with the lectures, around 60%.

Manchester - Where possible we wanted to give people a feeling that the

assembly was very defi antly Mancunian, we wanted to keep the soul of the

assembly untouched but to provide a nonhomogeneous, new experience. To

do this we planned about 33% of the nights to be in the city, along with a

UK music theme to the fi rst night in, we also approached Mancunians and

Manchester practitioners to make up about 50% of the lectures and Day

workshops.

Interesting - This was the one underpinning rule. When talking to people

The results of the decisions can be read in Section Three.

page 139


about the topic of their lectures we asked only that they be interesting to young

architects. Apart from that, they could be on general themes of Architecture,

Identity, Manchester, Urbanism or anything really.

The fi nal and most signifi cant goal we set our selves was to break the

feeling of workshops tutored only by students and lectures given only by

professionals. To improve on this we approached a number of Manchester

based professionals from different fi eld with the suggestion of running a

workshop, this lead directly to Datascapes. We also ran an essay competition

for all participants to write an essay on the theme Identity. From these entries

11 were selected to give short talks - how ever long they felt comfortable - as

part of the main lecture series.

page 140


Chapter 17 - Workshop SelectionThe fi rst thing we wanted to right with workshop selection of previous years

was to have the selection date before the participant application deadline.

Allowing denied tutors the opportunity to come as participants themselves.

Our deadline was in early February for this reason, and also that we could use

the revealing of the workshops as part of an exhibition about easa at HQ.

The submission deadline was a week previous to the big reveal, and we

selected twenty of the sixty workshop over one weekend. The decision time

was very quick as we had a sesam to run, and workshop posters to print. Some

felt it was a too rushed process at the time, and in the following weeks there

were a couple of workshops we weren’t even sure why we had selected them.

EASA workshops at proposal stage are often very

vague, so I would recommend choosing on a

balance of strength and clarity of concept, cost,

initial feasibility and your personal knowledge of the tutors if they’ve attend

an easa event previously. The workshops we feared would be weak ended

up being some of the strongest, going to prove how much workshops can

transform.

The process itself involved invited whoever wanted to attend from the

organising team. About twelve people attended. This was a good number as

it allowed everyone to read each application and the pass it along. Following

this we used a simple, Yes - No - Maybe pile system and select by consensus.

Having an impartial invigorator present during the selection part of the process

would have been valuable to allow quieter members of the team to voice their

opinions with more ease.

We knew that being in a city, plus the architectural beliefs of the organising

team that having lots of big build workshops was important, but not our main

aim. We knew we needed them to make easa enjoyable to certain participants,

All workshop applications are collated in Section Five.

page 141


and saleable to certain people in Manchester. With this in mind we aimed for

a mix of about 8 built, 8 media and 8 theory, with a handful of workshops

blurring the boundaries between.

As for legacy, we knew how hard it would be go get a permanent project built,

and we already had enough planning and legislation to keep us busy for a

lifetime. After none of the permanent big build application didn’t stand out to

us we aimed to fi nd such a project through our contacts in Manchester. Most

people in Manchester we met were more interested in smaller scale projects

and day workshops. In the end the permanent workshop came through our

own means of the competition and allowed us to give others the chance to

design (which is kind of the point of organising) and not lose to much control

over a potentially fantastic/potential nightmare venture.

[pfa]

page 142


Chapter 18 - ParticipantsStarting at the beginning with the NCs (your new best friends).

It is absolutely critical that you make sure the e-mail list is up to date. Roles

often swap round from year to year often after the summer event the role of

the NC will change hands. E-mail all countries to make sure you are up to date

with their situation. If someone doesn’t receive the messages and information

it can be incredibly frustrating for both parties. It will stand you in very good

stead. Send an e-mail de¬tailing the plan you intend to follow for the process

of application including dates, fees and even essays if you wish! This is a more

in depth look at how ours panned out:

The mathematics

Having decided all the workshops, the number of participants needed to

fi ll their varying sizes is then calculable. Countries with special quotas for

past and present organisers must be removed from the overall places for

workshops. The places left over were then divided equally between the 39

remaining countries.The 4 countries that have priority (Spain,Italy, Lichenstein, Denmark)

removed from the 43 overall countries providing 5/6 participants.

Basically having 6 participants (from the 39 remaining countries, not 43)

= 341 total participants overall with 12.25 per workshop.

Having 5 participants = 302 participants overall with 10.625 in each

workshop.

I get the feeling this is a little on the small side.

Whatever you decide make it clear that that is the fi nal number of places

available and people who e-mail you everyday do not get more places, stress

this point or have a standard e-mail ready to reply to ALL the NCs who want

more places!

19th February

The Application Form

Make sure you are careful when creating the application form; it is one of

the most important documents you will be making. Bear in mind information

page 143


As part of the application process, all participants were asked to write an essay on the theme of easa010. Though there were too many to reproduce in the Final Report a selection are collated in Section Five.

needed for those countries that require visas. It would be much more sensible

to gather all this information in one go from everyone instead of trying to

track down much needed information later on. Find out what information is

needed to create a legitimate invitation letter and create the template ready

for fi lling in as soon as applications are ready. The ‘International Relations’

unit of your university will be able to help you with this since they deal with

international students making applications to study. This is an example of the

information and layout required for invitations to be sent to the UK Embassy’s

from the University of Manchester.

page 144


page 145


page 146


Essential details to include on the application form are as follows:

Name /

Current Address /

Home Address (if studying abroad) /

Mobile number /

Contact e-mail /

Date of Birth /

Passport number /

Gender /

Dietary requirements/

Emergency Contact /

Medical needs /

Visa requirements/

Date of arrival / departure /

Visas.

Your responsibility with visas is to send invitation letters, on time, to the

participants for use in their application. You can do no more than that and

neither is it your responsibility. Visa can be applied for three months in

advance of a visit to the UK embassies, meaning the invitation letters should

have arrived by this time. You should have your Visa Invitation Letters ready

to be sent to the participants as soon as you confi rm their places, some letters

took more than a month to arrive and I understand this is quite normal, factor

in this time to the plan.

Make sure all letters are HAND SIGNED and on headed paper, otherwise you

will they are not recognised by the embassy. The original letters must be sent

to the participants to take to their interviews.

NCs will e-mail way in advance of any quota announcement since this takes

such a long time to organise and should be one of the fi rst things prepared by

the organisers but is often left too late. If you prepare the letters and before

the quota announcement you could even get them to fi ll in their details on the

invitation letter, with their application. Transferring all the details takes a long

time for one person to do and can easily make and error. Make sure you scan

page 147


Invitation letter on page 145

all the letters and keep a record of all the letters. E-mail the correspondents

to check whether the information is correct before you post them.

With around 200 invitation letters, one small mistake in their details can mean

the difference in some¬one coming to EASA or not. Check through the details

yourselves and make sure NCs and participants also see the letters before

they are sent.

I worked hard to get an invitation letter from Manchester Metropolitan

University, a recognised body by the UK Border Agency which should have

been a smooth cruise through customs. We also sent a letter from easa010

detailing exactly what the event entailed. The specifi cs included in the letter

were: The participants full name and address, address of the UK embassy in

their country, passport number, fees paid for food and accommodation. Here

is the easa010 invitation letter:

The participants who require visas also must

start to gather their own information ready for application. Visas in the UK can

be applied for three months in advance of the visit.

Check what evidence they need to prepare for their individual application, for

the UK this involved:

1. Evidence from your university that you are in an Academic Institution

2. Evidence that you will be study here and have an invitation from a university.

3. Evidence of accommodation that has been arranged.

4. A passport photo

March 23rd -7th April

Quota Announcement: the fi rst round

Each country has places for SIX participants.

NCs are included in this fi gure.

Past and future organisers benefi t by being allocated more places,

These are as follows:

Spain = 20 places

Italy = 15 places

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Liechtenstein = 10 places

Denmark = 15 places

This is the TOTAL number of participants you are allowed, not

additional to the six above.

Please note these places are for the specifi ed countries only. You cannot

exchange places to different countries and participants can only be

accepted from the nation they are living in.

In order to expand EASA’s reach, we are trying to involve a few

participants from outside of Europe. 20 places have been allocated

to the wider world, in the hope that EASA inspired assemblies could

happen further afi eld. These will be divided between continents with 3

people per continent.

- Applications must be e-mailed directly to me: [email protected]

- They must be in PDF format.

- The picture must be on the form and no more than 150 dpi.

(This is most easily achieved by taking into Photoshop and fi lling in the

form.)

I would very much appreciate it if you could fi ll in the summary form

attached to allow me to get an overview of where you are at with fees

and sponsorship. It would help me a great deal.

I hope this is clear. Remember the closing date for the fi rst round is 7th

April at 12pm. No applications can be accepted after this period.

A few things that were overlooked:

An important thing to note is having a system of naming the fi les, people call

the PDFs all sorts of incomprehensible names and this can get very confusing.

It will save you a lot of time instead of renaming fi les as I did, a logical approach

would be: Country> First name > second Name

Make sure you stress that everyone puts their photos on the application form,

not as a separate fi le. Otherwise it takes ages to do this!

Also include the fees to avoid confusion:

page 149


GROUP 1: 100% = 270 euros

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy,

Lichtenstein, Luxemburg, Monaco, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden,

Switzerland, United Kingdom, Malta.


Greece, Portugal.


Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moscow

(*), Po¬land, Slovenia, Slovakia, and non-European participants (such as ELEA,

CLEA etc).


Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Armenia,.


Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina,

Georgia, Moldova, Russia (**), Ukraine.

7th April

Receiving Applications

Make sure all applications are organised within their own folders. When

handling 400 applications things start to get confusing, I found the most

logical way around the fi ling system to be:

participants folder > country folder > applications folder > fi le named correctly

as before > essay folder > fi le named correctly as before

This may sound time consuming but went people start to change people

around applications can easily get mislaid. If you have time, it is a good idea

to make an excel document of everyone’s details so that all information can

be accessed at one time rather than opening individual fi les constantly, a

laborious task but recommend. This only left two days to sort everything out

from the fi rst round. With hindsight I would leave more time, a week or so, to

organise and process the information and decide on how extra places are to

be delegated.

page 150


9th-19th of April

The Second Round

Lots of people have asked for more places already and I can now

confi rm that some more places will be granted since some new and

exciting projects have just been unveiled in Manchester....!

EACH NATION CAN SEND A MAXIMUM OF TWO MORE

APPLICATIONS (IF NEEDED).

Please send these to me again by the 19th APRIL in PDF format.

(Just the same as before.) Keep in mind that it may be good to keep

some people in reserve list in case people drop out. These will then

be confi rmed on the 20th April and a total payment for each country

calculated and e-mailed to the NCs. Payment will commence for that

week only from the 20th- 26th April. Please contact me if you have any

problems. I hope you are all happy and well.

This was worked out by adding the addition places from the competition and

any remaining places that weren’t fi lled and dividing them equally between

the countries. I would suggest under estimating the number because for some

reason or another people just keep adding on to the list - be fi rm!

In hindsight this was a misjudgment which in turn had knock on effects that were felt right throughout the assembly. In the desire to turn away as few people as possible and to respond to the huge demand from the network for places the wrong criteria were placed on the decision to add more spaces.

At the time of the announcement the team had just lost their fi rst choice location of accommodation and as such were back to looking for space. The addition of two places per nation for 39 nations plus the addition of the Docu+Mation workshop places added 86 people to EASA, putting this is around the number of people at INCM 2008.

This added number caused huge restrictions to the possibilities of spaces we could identify for accommodation as the total delegates shot from 349 to 427. This affected potential options that weren’t large enough, it affected the planning application process for Downtex, and it affected the atmosphere in the Mill as each event space was legally large enough for 300 (physically around the same).

Though possibly seeming innocuous at the time the team should have discussed the decision in depth as the number of participants

page 151


at EASA is as vital a component to the event as the budget and location.

20th -26th April

Payment

E-mail each country stating how many participants/ tutors / NCs they owe

money for. Make it clear and concise:

All fees should be paid in ONE lump sum by ONE NC. Please make

a reference of the COUNTRY you are paying for on the bank transfer.

EG: United Kingdom. Bank charges must be paid for in full by each

individual country otherwise we cannot accept your payment.

Please send an e-mail to both :

[email protected]

&

[email protected]

Detailing the following:

Country:

Name of NC making the payment:

Account Number:

Sort Code:

Amount Transferred:

The payment should be made in to this account:

Working out who has paid on your bank statement can be very confusing if

you don’t have a ridged system in place. NCs can make a reference titles for

their transfer which we asked them to state their ‘country’ only. This makes

things a lot clearer, but failure for many NCs to do this also means it is very

useful to have their bank account number to check back where the money has

come from. Also make sure you bill the NCs in EUROS because exchange rates

change and you may well lose money if the exchange rate changes.

After the storm

Once all applications are in and payments paid, people like to swap things

around, drop out and generally mess up your fi les and documents. It is a never

page 152


ending process until the event so be prepared for change and embrace. There

are often ongoing issues with visas, many of which are beyond your remit and

out of your control. You do not have a free pass through the embassy and

beyond ‘inviting’ the participants to the assembly it is very diffi cult for you to

do much more, but you can try.

Six weeks before the start of the assembly, an e-mail of confi rmation was sent

to all the NCs containing the list of participants I had down to come and their

e-mail addresses. This was a critical to make sure everyone had the correct

information in time for registration.

Then there are many questions to be answered from 400 eagerly awaiting

EASA’uns. Something which you might like to add to the web site is a ‘Frequently

Asked Questions’ part in which all problems are solved and will save you many

hours in typing the same thing over and over. Some very crucial questions that

I am sure will crop up are:

1. Can people come early?

This depends if the accommodation is ready, ours defi nitely wasn’t but meant

we needed a helping hand. It is very diffi cult to say yes because a few hundred

people would come and really EASA is for the two weeks but fl ights often

dictate the dates more than the organisers.

2. How do I get involved?

We would get a few hundred e-mails in from people looking at the web site

and wanting to know more. It would be of great help to have a list of the NCs

e-mail contacts for each country to allow people to get involved and save you

much time.

3. How money is paid?

Through the NC then paid collectively once

4. Can we come as guests or helpers?

These are very diffi cult places to allocate. In the end we decided people we

knew and trusted could be part of the organising team, not guests. We decided

to have guests makes a mockery of those working hard every day and people

would have to earn their keep! The helpers were an infallible part of the team,

page 153


people with experience and calm in chaotic situations. Choose your helpers

wisely!

5. Can we have more places?

Places were always allocated openly to everyone, make it clear that because

NCs e-mail you it does not give them access to a infi nite number of places.

Places stack up without you even realising and numbers must be set to a fi rm

fi gure.

6. Can people have their money back if they cancel?

This will happen a few days before the event, and if there is no chance of

the place being refi lled then this would be no, often places will be taken up

by someone else in the team and they can just swap around. However in the

EASA guide it is a strict NO. People can often claim money back off their travel

insurance though.

I think these are the main questions asked but keep adding as you go along....

Overview

The application process worked very succinctly but don’t underestimate the

size of this job. You will get an average of 10-20 e-mails per day asking for

things, maybe we should have kept more contact with the NCs and updated

them more regularly to avoid this but obviously everyone is going to have

their own individual questions. I did this as the same time as my course, the

dates decided did not always fi t very well around life - make sure the dates

application are in don’t clash with hand in dates for you projects and give

yourself as much time as possible to get things ready. Participant places are

determined by the number of workshop places; make sure these are sorted as

soon as possible to give as much time for visas can you can. It is really nice

to get to know everyone slightly before they arrive though because you never

have enough time when EASA starts!

13th march ‘Sponsor a Participant’.

In order to strengthen the network and create a more stable model to create this

event for the foresee¬able future, we felt that each NC and their prospective

page 154


participants should make real attempts to drum up support and fi nances.

With such an unpredictable economic climate it must be made clear that the

EASA is to be built by everyone not just the organisers. This is reiterated in the

‘EASA guide’ that all participants are responsible for fund-raising. This was

our idea for sponsorship:

This would involve approaching sponsors for 100% of the cost of a

participant instead of the 20% fee which you pay. Easa subsidises the

cost of the assembly per person by 80%. This means it costs £875.00 for

each participant to attend the event.

We want to gain the most sponsorship we can as a collective network

and involve everyone in contributing to the event, to create the best

easa it can possibly be. So we are asking you to go for the full whack

(£875 or as close to this as you can get) when asking for sponsorship

rather than just covering your own costs.

Several teams did donate very generously to the cause but this could be more

widely and rigorously approached and give a sense of achievement for all

that come to the event, that they were part of the making of the EASA. It is

defi nitely something to be worked on for the future of the event and the well

being of the organisers.

[jsh]

page 155


page 156


Chapter 19 - Waste Management

Waste management is a vital component of a successful EASA, primarily

because 450 people in one place for 2 weeks create an unbelievable amount

of rubbish. As with most aspects of the assembly, none of us had much of

an idea as to how to go about dealing with and disposing of general waste,

organic waste and recycling in such quantities, and we also had little idea

of how much it would cost. As it is such an important and costly aspect

of the organisation it is vital that as soon as the sites are secured that the

team begin working on waste management. It is not the most glamorous of

tasks, but if there is not an adequate system in place the assembly could

easily be jeopardised, as people will not want to live and work surrounded by

rubbish; it is unseemly and unsanitary. In this section I describe the different

waste management systems we used at Downtex and Hope Mill, in section 3 I

describe how they worked and how they could have been improved.

Downtex - Before EASA

As Downtex was uninhabited before EASA moved in there was no pre-existing

system for dealing with waste at the site, as there would have been had we been

occupying a school or university campus. We researched different companies

that dealt with the waste at music festivals, and the possibility of constructing

our own system using different companies to deal with the different types

of waste, but eventually we decided on using the contractors responsible for

Manchester’s residential waste management: Enterprise Manchester. We went

with Enterprise because they could provide the entire service and this was far

more convenient for us than to try to organise different companies to take

care of different types of waste.

Through discussions with Andrew Turner, our contact at Enterprise, we

organised a refuse strategy that was essentially a large-scale version of the

standard domestic one. This consisted of 3 skips in the car park of Downtex:

1 for general waste

page 157


1 for card and paper

1 for bottles and tins

These skips could be replaced when full with 24 hours notice, which meant

that we didn’t have to commit to a certain number of them beforehand, which

was good as we had little idea of how many we would eventually need. Along

with the skips we hired approx 13 sets of wheelie bins to be distributed around

the building. Each set consisted of

1 for general waste

1 for card and paper

1 for bottles and tins

1 for organic waste

These wheelie bins would then be emptied into the correct skip each day by

the country doing the cleaning duty. Hiring the bins was very cost effi cient,

approx £3 per bin for as long as we needed them, and it meant we were not

left with 50 bins to dispose of at the end of the assembly.

With regards to organic waste we decided that it would have to be removed

from the site each day as the proximity to the River Irwell meant we were in

danger of attracting rats. We agreed with our caterers that they would take our

organic waste away when they came to pick up their leftovers each day.

So in theory we had a simple effective system prepared for handling the waste

at Downtex

Hope Mill - Before EASA

As with Downtex our site at hope mill wasn’t equipped to deal with the

numbers of people working there for the 2 weeks, however as there were only

150 participants there during the day we did not need such a large scale of

refuse management. To deal with the general waste we ordered another skip

from enterprise, and we hired 4 sets of wheelie bins like the ones used in

DOWNTEX to be placed in the different parts of the building. With the recycling

we used a different company called Emerge Manchester, who are a charity that

page 158


charges companies for daily recycling pickups to fund their charitable work.

The system was that you bought bin bags with their logo on, and then placed

them on the pavement at the end of the day to be picked up by the Emerge

truck as it drove around the city, a “pay-as-you-throw” system. Through

some negotiations we managed to get 200 of these bags in exchange for

promoting the charity through our web site and promotional materials. So

the recycling bins in Hope Mill would be emptied into these branded bin bags

at the end of each working day to be picked up, and all general waste would

be for the skip. The plan with the organic waste was to transport it back to

DOWNTEX each day to be bundled with the organic waste there before our

caterers collected it.

Once again, the system was in place for all refuse

to be disposed of properly and effi ciently.

[jfr]

page 159


page 160


Chapter 20 - Food

Calculating Quantities

One of the biggest feats we had to undertake during organisation of the food

was calculating the quantities. Even though quantities needed for the assembly

could only at most be estimated, it was crucial that the amounts were as

accurate as possible as these numbers had an impact on many other areas of

organisation such as budget and logistics. To put this into perspective early

on; the total cost of feeding the participants was one of our biggest outlays

monetary wise during the assembly; totalling just under £30,000, broken down

into £1500, £2500 and £26,000 for breakfast, lunch and dinner respectively.

This meant that it was clear that these fi gures

were to be monitored closely to ensure costs

didn’t spiral out of control unnecessarily.

However, it did make sense to over-estimate numbers for the fi rst few days

of the assembly rather than fall short of providing anything. We were always

going to be able to change the amounts we bought when needed which would

subsequently reduce our estimated costs and in turn alleviate funds.

Our total participant number was 427 with extra needing to be added for

helpers, volunteers and organisers. We worked on the basis of 400 participants

eating breakfast, 460 eating lunch and 460 eating dinner. From this rough

consumption estimates were calculated per person to establish the daily

amounts needed. These numbers shall be covered in more detail in a later

section.

Sourcing Suppliers

Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner

As stated earlier, due to the large costs involved extensive time was spent

Note: a 1p increase per person per day equals a total increase of £69, an increase of £1 equals an increase of £6900.

460 (catered for) x 15 (days of meals) x £0.01 = £69

page 161


Note: if a participant drinks four cans of beer (on average) in a day450 persons x 15 days x 4 cans= 27000 cans

Beer is sold by the crate = 24 cans27000 / 24 = 1125 crates

You can fi t 56 crates on to a pallet1125 / 56 = 20 pallets

This is enough to fi ll 2 articulated Lorries.

researching the lowest costs possible for each individual item making up

the daily meals. In the UK we are lucky that the supermarket industry is

very competitive, with companies constantly battling to have the best value

products. With the use of price comparison web sites and online shopping

facilities it was easy for us to discover the cheapest prices and it became clear

that ASDA would be cheapest for almost every single item, even over the bulk-

buy ‘cash and carries’. Knowing this, we approached ASDA directly to come to

an arrangement with them to supply the large amounts we needed. They were

happy to do this, however wouldn’t offer us any discount.

In the weeks leading up to the assembly, frequent visits were made to the store

we were dealing with to speak to various managers. However, with the way a

supermarket is run; the only form of

contact was either a visit in person

or via a telephone call through

customer services. This meant that

when trying to arrange any kind of

orders with them we were always

left unsure as to whether they would

hold their word, as they had no obligation to fulfi l our requirements at any

time.

There were some items that we needed in very large quantities daily such as

bread for the sandwiches and the fruit. We made the decision to have these

supplied via local businesses that would be able to deliver every morning too

exactly where they were needed. To source these it was as simple as ringing

various businesses from internet directories and establishing quotes. This

proved very successful and prices for these were extremely reasonable and

the service was impeccable.

We felt that the main meal of the day dinner would be best outsourced to a

catering company . This was probably the only way we could have done it;

however, if another method was available I believe this would have still been

page 162


the best decision. Having the most important meal of the day outsourced to

a professional company meant that the quality of food was extremely high. It

also ensured prompt serving times and a good variety, something that always

seems to be a major concern with participants at previous assemblies. To

source a caterer we again tried to get the best value for money. KRO caters

were extremely competitive and came in at £4.50 per person, per day. It is

important to mention that ‘haggling’ in these situations using other quotes is

extremely successful.

Café & Bar

In the current climate, revenue sources during the assembly become crucial.

While taking every effort to reduce the cost for participants, profi t made over

the café & bar allows money to be fed back directly

into the assembly specifi cally the workshops.

This leads to a situation where, as organisers, you

must fi nd means to retail at a cost below that of shops – which unfortunately

are still your rivals – but also turn enough of a profi t to add to your overall

budget.

With this in mind, it made sense to maximise the profi ts where possible. A

major part of our efforts was to source the alcohol served over the bar as

cheaply as possible but still retaining quality. For this we decided that cans of

Carlsberg would be the best option. This was because it isn’t considered to

be a ‘low-rate’ beer and it didn’t come with the high cost of a premium rate

brand.

In the UK, supermarkets buy alcohol from suppliers and sell it at a loss to attract

customers into their stores. This meant we were able to buy a fair amount of

alcohol at a very low price. However, the promotions that allowed us to buy

the beer this low level were only available for a short period of time coinciding

with the World Cup, and before the assembly started, capital available for

such expenditures wasn’t in large quantities therefore we couldn’t afford to

Due to the conditions in Downtex it was impossible for us to install a kitchen, and impractical for us to cater off site and deliver ourselves

page 163


To fi nd a caterer we went through an initial process of researching the market and calling various companies for outline quotes. Following this Chris’ Dad, who worked for many years in the catering supply industry, produced an invite to tender which was issued in a competitive nature.

From the entrants we received we invited three to come for interviews, and Chris met with representative to discuss the respective bids. At tender the cheapest quote we received was for £3.50 including VAT (Value Added Tax 17.5%) per person per day, with Kro at £5.99 excluding VAT. In the interview process it we were confi dent that Kro would deliver quality on a daily basis and be able to work within the nature of the event. Also after discussing the nature of the event, including issues like students bringing their own plates etc, we were able to negotiate the price from £7.03 per person per meal down to £4.50.

buy huge amounts. However, we were lucky to fi nd a company by the name of

‘Bargain Booze’ that had an on-going promotion throughout the duration of

the assembly allowing us to buy alcohol at a very cheap price.

For spirits and mixers it was surprisingly cheaper to get them from ASDA

than any other sources and there was never an issue in getting the quantities

needed. The items we were unable to get from ASDA at the cheapest cost

were mainly branded items concerning

the café &bar, items such as Coca

Cola cans, Walkers Crisps and bars of

chocolate. We used a local cash and

carry Bookers. This also meant that on

our revealable items, we could pick up

needed supplies at short notice without

the chance of losing money through

loss of sales during the assembly.

Purchase and Storage Strategy

The purchasing and storage strategy

came hand in hand. We needed to be

able to buy as much as possible in one

go to satisfy the quantity requirements and at the same time have enough

infrastructure to store what was bought. This separated into dry store and

refrigerated store for both the bar supplies and food supplies. Dry store in

general was simple and only required the needed secure space which meant

we could buy as much as we wanted and knew it wouldn’t become spoilt. The

refrigerated storage was slightly more diffi cult as this would require close

attention to stock levels because large quantities couldn’t be kept for long

periods due to the limited refrigeration space.

Pricing Strategy

page 164


Once the costs had become apparent we needed to establish the prices of

the profi table items during the assembly. As stated previously in the report

we had budgeted the assembly on what funds we had available and anything

taken over the bar would essentially become profi t that we could feed back

into the assembly. With this being understood, we knew that we were able

to have complete control over pricing and therefore keep the costs as low as

possible for participants, but at the same time, we wanted to make a healthy

profi t to improve the EASA experience. To facilitate this we decided that a

maximum 100% profi t would be applicable were

appropriate.

System of Operation, Staffi ng Arrangements and

Roles

The roles broke down into specifi c task areas;

organising and supervising the serving of

breakfast; organising and supervising the

preparation and delivery of sandwiches;

supervising the serving of dinner and running the bar. To allow the smooth

operation of this we decided to create a solid team of four organisers,

comprising of Miles Reay-Palmer, Dido Graham, Julija Dubrovnik and myself;

Jonathan Curtis. This meant that throughout the two weeks one organiser

would be responsible for each role. Alongside this, a set number of volunteers

were time tabled to assist the organiser in the running of each operation;

specifi cally preparation of sandwiches and the running of the bar. The system

of operation of each role broke down into the following:

Breakfast

Breakfast was served between 8am and 10am. The organiser on duty aimed

to be at site for 7am. This allowed the organiser enough time to arrange the

quantities for breakfast and to begin setting up. The breakfast was to be

served in the usual manner; by the participants of the time tabled country. It

Two issues to remember. 1. Unlike shops you have no overheads in terms of wages. 2. Be sure to put a portion of your initial budget into stocking the bar and cafe, after this restocking can be done from revenue from tokens. We achieved this by scheduling purchase of some materials for built workshops for late in the fi rst week, safe in the knowledge that design work would dominate until then.

page 165


Having met with representatives of In-Bev, the world’s largest brewing company, and Carlsberg it was clear that it was not only cheaper to purchase through retail, but also we would be able to manage the quantities we purchased more easily. To deal direct with a brewer we would fi rstly have to set up an account with them, but we would also have to make the order in one go, allowing no room for revision. This did mean that we would have to collect the orders our selves.

was required that the organiser be there earlier to begin setting up in-case

participants were late. Breakfast was arranged in the typical buffet fashion

allowing a queue of participants moving down the tables being served. The

organisers’ role was to watch over proceedings and restock supplies from the

store when needed.

Lunch

Lunch was served between 1pm and 2pm and consisted of one sandwich per

person and a piece of fruit. These sandwiches were made by four helpers and

one organiser during the period of

breakfast at our HQ building. It would

be the organisers’ role to insure that

the sandwiches were made correctly

and the appropriate numbers of

meat and vegetarian sandwiches

were prepared. The time allocated to

make sandwiches was between 9am-

12.30pm. It was arranged that the van driver would collect the sandwiches

from HQ and deliver them to the info points at various locations within the

city; the organiser on duty would help with this.

Lunch remains one of the most tricky aspects of organising EASA. It was said that ‘an army marches on its stomach’, and the same is true of EASA workshops. It is vital that every effort is made to provide participants with opportunity of three meals a day – though it is impossible to make sure they eat them! Lunch was an issue at two of the three previous EASAs I had attended – in Budapest 2006 participants made their own at breakfast, so they were responsible for if they ate lunch, though this can lead to a loss of control on quantities it seems the best option.

In Ireland in 2008 lunch was made and delivered to the workshops, meaning participants needed to be at their workshop to get their food, this of course puts the responsibility on the tutors to make sure their participants get their fair share. In Italy 2009, by far the most generous lunch I’ve seen at EASA, the lunch was prepared by the participants as part of the breakfast duties. The lunches were then supposed to be collected by tutors only at lunch time. The main issue was participants helping themselves to sandwiches throughout the morning as they felt like it. Bizarrely, as can happen at EASA, when the sandwiches

page 166


were made, but not available until collection to ensure everyone could eat, the person in charge of the kitchen often met with hostility and resentment from participants.

In Manchester we had no possibility of food production in the accommodation area due to the industrial nature of the building and the prohibitive cost of renting catering facilities for the duration. So the decision was taken that organisers would make the lunch in the kitchen of their accommodation and delivery would be by van on an alternating daily basis by Alex Maxwell and me (Chris Maloney). In many ways this worked out well, but it seemed we were consistently making about 100 sandwiches too many, having been to each site twice there would still be sandwiches in my van and left over’s on the sites. It had been made plain to the tutors that is they were to be elsewhere at lunch time they were to let the organisers know, so all we can suspect is that people bought their own, or didn’t turn up to their workshops every day.

Dinner

Dinner was to be served between 6pm and 9pm.

As stated previously, KRO prepared the food off

site and delivered to Downtex each evening. In

the same method as breakfast, participants of the

time tabled country served the food overseen by

the duty organiser. Dinner was served in the bar

communal area and eaten in the large dining area

known as the ‘Aviary’. The caterers dealt with the organic waste from the

previous evening by collecting it when delivering the next nights food.

Café & Bar

The café & bar was situated in the heart of the accommodation operating from

the same point. We had very strict limitations over the licensing agreement

which meant alcohol could only be served from 12pm until 1am Sunday to

Thursday; and 12pm until 3am Friday and Saturday. – see licensing in this

chapter - We decided it would be best to open the café at 10am to maximise

sales of coffee and confectionery around breakfast time before the start of

workshops. It is important to note that during the organizational discussions

we decided that if any construction workshops, i.e. involving the use of

power tools, were to be active at the accommodation building, we would not

As an alternative to the dinner arrangements, and an unscheduled surprise for the participants, on two evenings we organised a hog roast dinner, with veggie burger barbecue for vegetarians. The response was overwhelmingly positive, further proof that good food makes for happy campers.

page 167


The drawback of the token system is the relatively large unit of 50p allows limited ability to adjust prices.

serve alcohol until these ceased operations. We made this decision purely for

insurance.

For the operation of the café it was decided that this required only one

organiser and one volunteer. The organisers’ role was to evaluate stock levels

and sales from the previous night. The fi ndings of this evaluation would then

be passed to the organiser responsible for purchasing to ensure stocks were

kept at adequate levels. The volunteer at this point would be there to help

when needed and to serve the café.

We decided upon operating a ‘can bar’ over the traditional use of draft. This

decision was made purely for logistical reasons. We felt that the risks and

drawbacks of using a draft system outweighed the cost benefi ts and believed

we could provide a much better service over the bar using cans by reducing

waiting times. Alongside this, we

served a variety of spirits and mixers

such as vodka, gin, whisky and rum

with coke, lemonade and tonic. It was decided that every measure should be

an offi cial UK double, the maximum legally allowed to be sold. This was due

to the cost of spirits being relatively low with aim to providing better value

for the participants. When the bar was fully operational it would require one

organiser and two volunteers. This would allow for re-stocking to take place

and the adequate number of staff to meet demands.

A large part of our ethos was to minimise waste as previously stated in the

report. To ensure this would be most affective we decided that we would

only serve drinks into the participants own cups. This meant that no plastic

disposable cups were handed out over the café & bar which would therefore

have a dramatic reduction in clean-up and disposal costs. We had a large

stock of cups that could be bought by participants for a small fee to use for

the duration of the assembly.

page 168


Token Operation

Everything sold over the bar was with the conventional token strategy. We

decided to keep the tokens as the standard value of £5 dissected into 50p

segments. We believed that in some past assemblies there has been an issue

with the attempt of forgery. With this in mind we decided to design a token

with anti-counterfeit measures. One mainly being a very light blue pattern

which wouldn’t show up when photocopied and the other being that the token

would only become valid when stamped with an offi cial ‘easa010 Manchester’

stamp that we designed and made. This would only be done at info point when

purchased. We believe this was a very successful way of operation.

[jcu]

Millfo Point

Having numerous locations for EASA Manchester

presented us with many logistical problems, one

of them being the need 2 locations where we sold food and drink. Whilst it was

not absolutely essential to have a café in Hope Mill as there are shops in the

vicinity it was a valuable source of revenue for the organisation and was far

more convenient for the participants themselves. We realised quite early on

that the café would also become a de facto info point, so Hope Mill Info Point

became Millfo Point.

General Set Up

Luckily the interior space of Hope Mill already had a bar installed so we did

not have to build one as in Downtex, and from here we sold all the food and

drinks, stored valuables, cups, cleaning supplies and stationary. There were

approximately 3 members of the team behind the bar, 2 in charge of the tool

box, and 2 people at all times acting as security for the workshop space. There

was a bit off ebb and fl ow with the numbers of the UK team over the 2 weeks

and generally we were a very well staffed Millfo Point. In terms of sorting

out Millfo point we simply added a fridge, a toastie maker and a small set of

For a report on the operation of these spaces please see Section Three: easa010

page 169


drawers to keep valuables in.

[jfr]

page 170


Chapter 22 - Rota

Rota’s are very useful things. Particularly when organising 60 individuals, in

various locations, across a 2 week period, 24/7. Due to the huge size of the

assembly team, it was vital to instigate some form of routine and timetable

to ensure everything ran as smoothly as possible. Embrace the spreadsheet.

Where To Start:

The fi rst consideration when approaching the organisation of the rota is the

timetable for the assembly. What are the key events? When are the workshop

days? When is the excursion? It is important to make provision for potential

date changes and additions; you must be fl exible. Do ensure that any changes

to the timetable are relayed to the rota.

Organisers, Lead Helpers & Volunteers:

The rota positions for easa010 were split into 3 categories: Organisers,

Volunteers & Lead Helpers. Different tasks require a variety skills or specifi c

knowledge. During the year before the assembly, Organisers will fall into

specifi c roles, which will generally dictate their responsibilities during the

assembly. It is their responsibility to relay information and delegate to the

Lead Helpers & Volunteers who will be working alongside them.

It was important that Volunteers & Lead Helpers had an enjoyable time as

well as working with us. Shifts were approximately 8 hours a day (Although

this fl uctuated with each different task), and each person had a day off. The

concept of a “rotating rota” was implemented to ensure volunteers experienced

a variety of tasks & shift times. Due to the 24/7 nature of an easa, people

are working throughout the night; ensure there is time for sleep after the

graveyard shift!

Teams:

Each vital location across Manchester, and specifi c everyday task had it’s own

EASA is not a holiday

page 171


team, consisting of Organisers, Volunteers & Lead Helpers:

Events Team (lectures & evening activities)

Info Point Team (ran info point throughout the assembly)

Bar & Food Team (stock & running café/bar, making lunches, overseeing

breakfast & dinner)

Hope Mill (tool box, café & workshop coordination)

HIVE & Madlab (workshop coordination)

Roamers (exclusively Organisers: transportation, stocking, money coordination

of event as a whole)

This resulted in an effi cient workforce who knew the roles expected of them,

and made the rota far easier to digest.

In Practice:

The rota was sent out via e-mail a week before arrivals. This helped to answer

any questions, and to change any mistakes. Each member of the team had

a specifi c colour and letter that they would refer to on the rota. Volunteers

registered on the fi rst day (which clashed with arrivals, it would be advisable to

have them arrive a day earlier to orientate) and were given a brief presentation

explaining their roles.

The rota worked well in the initial days before the “big move”- and it was

important to ensure this was continued, and adjusted to the new locations,

to provide a sense of organisation and calm to the chaos that preceded this

upheaval. Regular updates of the rota were provided on info point.

A rota is vital when working with large numbers of people- no questions, no

confusion, and no fuss.

Participant’s Duties:

EASA is not a holiday, and with 450 people living together for two weeks,

page 172


it gets messy. All participants must undertake responsibilities during the

assembly. These are not that strenuous, but absolutely must be done. It is

the Organiser’s responsibility to provide the information and equipment to

ensure these tasks are completed.

Duties perform two roles during EASA. One is to ensure tasks that require a lot of people for a short amount of time can get done without dragging organizers away from other tasks. The other, even more important, is they are the door through which participants really feel part of the EASA family, part of the daily operation of the event. Without tasks it would be easy for a feeling of served and servers to grow during the event. It has been our experience that duties actually remove this feeling over time, with the second week of all EASAs standing out as more community based than the fi rst.

An explanation of roles & the timetable was provided in the welcome pack: no

false expectations of a fi ve star retreat. When considering the timetable, ensure

that there is a fair share of duties across all the countries. Countries with fewer

participants should be paired together, and those with large numbers divided.

It is the NC’s duty to ensure their country is prompt and complete their task

allocated to a suffi cient standard. Info Point was the “Duties Station”: it was

from here that instructions and equipment were given. A huge A1 poster of

the participant’s duties timetable also provided participants with a gentle

reminder of when their shifts were.

Appropriate numbers of cleaning supplies must be bought (buying in bulk

reduces the price considerably). We were lucky enough to neighbor a cleaning

supplies company, who provided us with free some products. The more

supplies you have, the happier your participants (less waiting around).

A typical shopping list for cleaning supplies should include:

Bleach

All Purpose Cleaner

Washing Up Liquid

Anti Bacterial Spray

page 173


Sponge Scourers

Dish Cloths

Bin Bags

It was decided to provide participants with a toilet roll each as part of their

welcome kit to reduce waste. There was no soggy toilet roll on dirty bathrooms

fl oors, and people were far more considerate concerning usage…

NC Duties:

Part of our strategy concerned a considerable amount of stewarding &

circulating throughout Downtex. Tedious and boring it may have been, but

safety is a priority. It was decided at the previous INCM in Liechtenstein, that

NC’s should be given more roles during the assembly. It was concluded by

the Organising team that NC’s were to be given shifts stewarding doors and

circulating on the nights of “internal” events. Many embraced these new roles

and were a great help, however frustrations arose when NC’s did not turn up

to vital shifts. This was partly due to the new role of NC’s that they may not

have been aware of, or the context of these shifts: in the middle of the party,

sat by the door. After a few teething problems, and an NC meeting, we were

back on track.

Relocation Relocation:

With the relocation of the accommodation, and the bar, duties either changed,

or were no longer valid. We were left in the predicament of determining what

roles were still required, what were not, what new roles had arisen, and how

we were going to relay this information to the NC’s. Info Point provided

snippets of information, but unfortunately many people abandoned their

duties. With such an extreme change of situation, Participant’s & NC’s Duties

were unfortunately overlooked. The easa spirit prevailed however, and many

were kind enough to help out whilst not on the rota.

[eun]

page 174


Our ambition of holding easa010 within a major city centre presented us with

many opportunities to showcase Manchester, and all it has to offer. The theme

of “Identity” leant itself to various locations and interactions across the city.

Naturally, this requires a large workforce, and a lot of spreadsheets.

How To Get Volunteers:

It is a rather daunting prospect… how to get architecture students involved

in volunteering for an event the majority have never heard of, let alone been

to. A tactic of mine was to not shut up about it for an entire year, it seemed

to work.

Following EASA Italy those who were interested in easa010 after returning to

University from a blissful summer and got involved became Organisers. They

were able to follow the journey of easa010 and have a lasting input into the

decision-making. There was no advertising campaign at this point, it was

those who listened, used their initiative, and made a particular effort to get

involved. These are the kind of people who you want on your organising team.

The campaign to get volunteers started in the New Year 2010. To start posters

were dotted around the architecture department, enigmatic in style to promote

a reaction. This campaign continued until around April, and interest came in

drips and drabs. It is important to be patient; generally people will leave it

very last minute to become involved (I had an application the day before the

assembly started…). EASA does sell itself.

Around April we began holding lectures, travelling to nearby Sheffi eld University

to spread the word. By presenting and explaining your own experiences,

people are able to obtain a far better understanding of the easa concept.

Short presentations were given in lectures, and an easa010 fund-raising event

was held, which not only provided us with income, but in addition a larger

Chapter 23 - Volunteers

page 175


audience. An advert in an RIBA magazine provided us with national coverage,

and people were contacting us via the web site.

An e-mail relationship was set up with each individual enquiring about

volunteering. Answering questions as clearly and precisely as possible is a

great help. By providing an accurate description of expectations and roles

before the application process, people know what to expect.

Application Process:

It is a wise decision to have a template e-mail for those enquiring about

volunteering. This should include:

Dates

Cost (we asked volunteers to cover food and accommodation costs, £5 a day)

A short explanation of what easa is

Expectations & Roles

Think about how many Volunteers you will require. Due to the multiple

locations, we knew we needed a team of around 50 to be effi cient.

Have a contingency. Some may not turn up, or leave. We were able to provide

each volunteer with a day off as we had enough people to cover shifts. 10

extra individuals should cover it.

The application process for volunteers is very similar to that of participants.

It is, however, recommended that you ask for their mobile number too- very

useful for when someone does not turn up for their shift! Ensure that all details

are exported into a spreadsheet for ease of reference, and no loss of details.

A week before the assembly, a Welcome Pack, specifi cally made for the

volunteers was e-mailed out. This provided volunteers with details of their

rota, what each task involves, and what they should expect. We had excellent

page 176


feedback from this document, which meant that each individual knew what to

expect.

Potential Issues:

Without volunteers, easa010 quite simply wouldn’t have happened. They

were vital in holding the assembly together, even when we had to relocate.

However, it must be remembered that their affi liation with EASA only lasts 2

weeks- and many may be (and were) seduced by the partying aspects of easa.

It is advisable to highlight the importance of their roles, and ensure that in the

event of a volunteer not turning up to their shift, or being incapable to fulfi ll

their role, that someone is able to cover.

[eun]

page 177


page 178


Chapter 24 - Info Point

Info Point is the true hub of an easa, and a secret weapon in ensuring

participants happiness. A well organised info point = happy participants.

For us, Info Point was the fi rst introduction to all participants as it took on

the mantle of registration. First impressions are important; a well-rehearsed

registration process puts participants at ease after a long journey.

Do consider that Info Point will generally be populated by those who are new

to easa (more queries), visitors, lecturers, deliveries, and in our case security

and the fi re services. It is important to show an organised team, try to prepare

for visitors in advance if possible, or create posters for those questions that

seem to reverberate constantly (“No, the internet is not working yet, sorry!).

Location:

Info Point had various incarnations across the assembly, and multiple locations.

The principle Info Point at Downtex was located in the Loading Bay, instantly

recognisable upon arrival, which is particularly useful to visitors. By placing the

entire Info Point upon a stage of pallets, there was a clear defi nition between

Info Point and circulating space (no invasions!), and it also saved us from

many a fl ood…

We found that throughout the assembly, it was vital to have a separate offi ce

space to the info point to work at (if you want to get anything done without

a thousand questions bombarded at you). This also provided a sanctuary for

those who needed a small nap to get through the long working hours (40

minute nap does the trick nicely).

Smaller versions of Info Point were also the Café in Hope Mill, and at MadLab.

These were not fully-fl edged info points, but satellites, answering any

questions and keeping participants up to date.

page 179


Info Point took up two locations when we moved to the Sports Centre. A

temporary satellite answered questions & sold tokens, and provided an

extensive lost & found collection. Eventually a lost & found fashion show was

provided to reunite lost items with their owners.

Equipment:

As few workshops were taking place at Downtex, we merged the stationary

depot with Info Point. Stationary goes missing constantly; try (if you can) to

have a logbook of Stationary items (although as we found, this is diffi cult to

stick to in busy periods). It is therefore extremely important to ensure that you

are well stocked. Specifi c items that you will require include:

The obvious: Pens, Pencils, A4 Paper, Stapler, Ruler, Glue, Sellotape, Scissors,

and Scalpels

The absolute necessities: Blue Tack, duct tape, permanent markers, Exercise

Books (Very useful as Log Books), Sticky Labels

Electrical Items: At least 2 printers, extension cables, megaphone, torch,

batteries, telephone, Internet

First Aid kits, and certifi ed First Aiders are vital to have at the Info Point to

ensure the safety of all. We also kept a “First Aid Guide” within the First Aid kit

to jog the memory of the sleep deprived, however you will fi nd the majority of

cases are common sense.

Lockers:

A secure room was dedicated to lockers, which were in fact kitchen cabinets

with labels of each country’s name attached. Only NC’s could log items in and

out (all noted in the appropriate log book) to prevent a traffi c build up at Info

Point. This worked well, there was only 1 large padlock to the room, and the

key was in the complete control of the Organisers. No 48 separate keys for

page 180


each country, or lost keys.

Lost & Found:

The “dynamic” nature of our relocation saga undoubtedly increased the

number of items of lost and found. Although every measure was put in place

to try to reduce this, we were rather overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of

items we had. All items of value were kept behind info point, with clothes and

bulkier items in large boxes. As these overfl owed, we ended up with piles

everywhere, and a mess. It is advisable to keep a note of each item handed in,

with a description, so that people can look through words instead of clothes…

and make less mess!

Recharging:

A recharging station was located behind info point, with about 10 plug sockets,

which seemed to be suffi cient. Items were left in the responsibility of the

owner, upon a “fi rst come fi rst served” basis. Participants are told beforehand

to bring adapters; it is not your problem if they do not have them!

Tokens:

Tokens provide a huge percentage of income during easa, in cash. It is very

important to have a safe box that is regularly emptied (the money being sent

straight to the bank..) To avoid any money going missing, token sales were

marked in a Log Book, with any discrepancies easily spotted. We had a system

of stamping each token when it was sold to “verify” it. This helped avoid the

situation of tokens being plagiarised, an unfortunate but true situation that

could arise.

Merchandise:

We really missed a trick with the merchandise. Grand designs were projected,

with an entire workshop dedicated to producing merchandise, instead of

producing it before the assembly started. Unfortunately faith was given to

this being undertaken, however for various reasons no results were produced.

page 181


Merchandise can be a money maker, and it is worth considering this before

the assembly, buying & printing in bulk to gain a reduction in price.

Attitude:

The most important aspect of working on Info Point is your attitude. A smile

goes a long way. As soon as participants seen concern within the organisers,

this creates gossip and tension within the assembly, the last thing you want.

We had a huge amount of unexpected situations, one blow after another. This

hugely affected the organising team, as the assembly seemed to be crumbling

around us. But by putting on a brave face and pulling through, along with the

incredible easa spirit of the participants, we made it out the other side. By

raising spirits, being friendly and smiling you can get through a lot.

A great example of this was on a typical Manchester summer’s day: pouring

rain. Info Point was fl ooded, and everyone was arriving after a long walk back

from Hope Mill soaking wet, cold and fed up. So us Info Point girls got out our

sunglasses, turned up the volume to some particularly cheesy summer tunes,

and danced around like maniacs. It did the trick. We had everyone singing

along, dancing, and most importantly laughing (at us). It may have been sleep

deprivation but it was jolly good fun.

[eun]

page 182

Chapter 25 - Downtex

Section One: Bidding

Downtex is a former industrial building on the banks of the river Irwell just

outside the inner ring road on the north side of Manchester city centre. It

consists of two distinct halves: a nineteenth-century brick mill building of

four stories and a basement, and, across a double-height loading bay, a lower

modern steel shed with offi ces and a mezzanine fl oor that covered most of

the area. (Maps, fl oor plans and photographs accompany the text and are in

the appendix).

The building presented an exciting opportunity. It was the most promising

potential venue because it was close to the correct size, near enough to the

city centre, available for a low rent for a short period of time, and, crucially,

the landowner was open to the idea of it being used for parties and sleeping

accommodation. The building was also interesting in itself; in the past, EASA

has occupied unusual environments including a converted train, second world

war ship, and abandoned factories. Here was a genuine mill, an authentic

piece of the gritty red-brick Manchester that the world knows.

For all these opportunities, the state of the building was far from perfect.

Thieves had stolen the electric wires and pipes, so none of the lights or

plumbing was functional. The roof leaked in many places and as a result the

fl oors suffered from damp and rot. All of the windows had been bricked up,

so the fl oors were dark and unventilated. The building was full of rubbish and

was fi lthy. It had been used by squatters and there were hypodermic needles

around the back. There was a lot of work to do.

The Task

It would be a race to make this building ready for the Assembly. The task

of preparing the mill was dominated by the regulatory requirements of

authorities such as the county fi re service, a task which was complicated

signifi cantly as the fi re service continually increased the standard of work

required to reach a satisfactory condition throughout the period leading up

page 183


to approval and afterwards. This escalation of requirements would eventually

have consequences which threatened the continuation of the assembly, as

recorded elsewhere.

In order to sleep people in the building we would have to obtain temporary

planning permission for sleeping. During the process of obtaining planning

permission, the fi re service, police, and environmental health would be

consulted by the planning department and they would have to be satisfi ed

with the proposals. We also had to obtain a premises licence in order to sell

or serve alcohol, play loud music, show fi lms, and allow dancing. Police,

fi re, environmental health and the planning authorities were again statutory

consultees in this process.

We had always expected to have to do some work to build the easa

accommodation; we wanted a really personal, cool place that we could do

whatever we wanted to. We had a big pool of labour to call on. Some of us

enjoyed the practical work involved and had the necessary skills to do as much

of the work as possible. We would pay for labour only when we really needed

to, get materials for free, and fi nd the most effi cient and creative solutions

wherever we could.

On the 28th May we walked around the building for the fi rst time with an

enforcement offi cer from the county fi re service. The advice which he gave

would form the basis of our plan of work.

The original list of work to be undertaken at Downtex was as follows:

Work necessary for the fi re service to not object to our planning and licensing

application

1. Clear all fl ammable rubbish from the basement.

2. Clad both sides of the old doors with plasterboard, to increase their fi re

rating to ½ hr

page 184


3. Where doors to stairs are missing or irreparable, to replace them with

new ½ hr fi re doors

4. Seal all other openings to the staircases with minimum 1-hr fi re

resistant construction. This meant boarding over three large internal window

openings and rebuilding partitions.

5. Seal all other openings between fl oors.

6. All fi re doors to be smoke sealed and to have self-closing devices.

7. All fi re doors to be signed appropriately.

8. Break out existing blockwork wall in aviary, fi x roller shutter in opening

and construct escape staircase in courtyard to provide additional fi re escape.

9. The existing (broken) fi re alarm to be made to work and tested by an

approved electrician.

10. The existing emergency lighting to be tested by an approved electrician.

There were some places such as the back alley where supplementary emergency

lighting had to be fi tted.

11. Install a new push bar on the door at the bottom of the front staircase.

12. Ensure that the signage throughout conformed to modern standards.

Plumbing

1. The landlord agreed to replace the missing pipework in one side of the

building.

2. Replace all water supply pipework in the mill and repair leaks in existing

pipework and fi ttings.

3. Construct some sort of facility for washing plates and also for general

hygiene and brushing teeth.

4. Provide showers. We were not sure at this stage if we could afford to

provide hot showers or to hire specifi c shower cubicles.

Cleaning

1. Clear out assorted rubbish from courtyard and all other spaces.

2. Sweep, mop and power wash all fl oors.

3. Clear out existing WCs, which were full of excrement and paper.

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Other building work and security

1. Seal off former kitchen where the fl oor is structurally unsound

2. Remove fl ue blocking alley.

3. Build a bar and info point.

4. Work out a way of ventilating the toilets and sleeping fl oors.

5. Fix all broken roller shutters and doors to car park and side alley.

6. Repair and augment where possible razor wire to fence in courtyard.

7. Get the council to fell the large tree that fell on the fence from the river

side.

8. Repair holes in fence to river side.

Utilities

1. Sort out electricity contracts for both electricity supplies.

2. Arrange broadband internet supply requiring new telephone line.

Furniture and aesthetic considerations

1. Find and transport to the mill as many stackable chairs for lectures,

tables to eat from and work at, sofas and armchairs to relax on, and lockable

cupboards as possible.

2. Paint certain areas of the mill.

3. Improve the lighting of the bar area.

4. Break out and make good 1960s partition wall and suspended ceiling in

the main stairs.

5. Put up fl ags in loading bay.

Additional work that we had to do to satisfy the fi re service (not mentioned

during the fi rst few meetings):

1. Install double swing doors in a fi re-resisting wall between the bar and

the aviary.

2. Install double-swing doors in a fi re-resisting wall between the loading

bay and the Tin Room.

3. Install another, independent, comprehensive smoke detection and

page 186


alarm system throughout both spaces.

4. Provide an additional fi re escape from the bar to the loading bay by

breaking through the window opening, making good and providing another

set of stairs.

5. Build a door to cover the opening made by removing the block work

wall over the additional fi re escape in the aviary.

6. Remove the treads of the stairs to prevent access to the mezzanine in

the tin rooms.

7. Replace all older type door closers with new lever-arm door closers.

Additional work that we had to do to satisfy the police

1. Arrange for a CCTV and recording system to be installed to cover the

licensed areas and the bar.

2. Arrange for a double-walled pen to be constructed to protect the

entrance to the premises.

3. Include signage identifying licensed areas, person capacity and signs

instructing people to respect the neighbors and be quiet.

Additional work that we had to do to satisfy ourselves

1. Arrange for scaffolding platforms to be installed in the Tin Room to

accommodate the greater number of people than we expected.

2. To provide hot showers.

The way the task was met

The structure of easa010 as an organisation would be critical in our efforts

to carry out this work. It is discussed in detail elsewhere in this report, but

it is important to summarise here the level of responsibility, knowledge and

commitment of the various members of the organising team and volunteers.

As a non-profi t organisation incorporated for the public benefi t, easa010 did

not pay any of those involved for the work they did as part of the organisation.

In this sense we were all volunteers. There was also a strong desire to

create a so-called fl at hierarchy, where responsibility for decision making is

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distributed equally across all team members. Inevitably, however, there will be

inequalities in the level of commitment that individuals can and will put into

such a voluntary enterprise. Possibly the clearest of these distinctions was the

difference between the directors, who had legal responsibilities with severe

personal and fi nancial penalties, and everyone else. The team was set up on a

responsibility/reward model, where individuals taking on more responsibility

were rewarded with greater infl uence.

It is important to provide this background in order to clarify the defi nitions

of certain terms used in this account. Many of the people who were members

of the ‘organising team’ had the same level of responsibility and commitment

as simple volunteers, and so will be referred to as such. Those who were

responsible for managing the whole project and would suffer if it failed, will

be called ‘organisers’.

We did the work listed above during the two months from June to August

with a minimum of employed labour. Many of the jobs were repetitive, dirty,

dangerous and hard, and the days were always long. And yet people came

back day after day, with the only reward being the work itself. This volunteer

spirit has much in common with the EASA spirit. Volunteers come because

they feel part of something good, they can see and feel proud of the progress

being made, and because the atmosphere is enjoyable and sociable.

Managing volunteer labour presents several unique challenges. First, it is very

diffi cult to predict who or how many people will turn up at any particular time.

If too many people turn up they will feel they are wasting time and are unlikely

to come back; if too few turn up certain tasks are impossible to accomplish

and deadlines are diffi cult to meet.

There are ways to get around the worst of these uncertainties.

1. Communication

We held infrequent meetings amongst the team at which we made it clear what

page 188


the plan of work was and when it had to be achieved. In this way everyone was

made aware of the scale and complexity of the work, and could themselves

begin to suggest solutions and see how they could be part of the work. It

would have been better to have a brief meeting regularly such as every week,

as well as a continuously updated board with all the jobs on it.

2. Responsibility

At the fi rst of these meetings we divided the tasks up into areas and people

volunteered to take them on. For instance, the construction of the bar, where

those responsible for building would also run the bar during the assembly.

This gave the individuals concerned greater responsibility for the work so

that they could advance beyond simply turning up and needing to be told

what to do. In the case of the bar, this worked relatively successfully as it was

a simple, self-contained project for which we already had the materials. In

other cases, however, tasks were harder to defi ne.

Ensuring access to the building was a challenge that we had not planned for.

With any project like this, a great responsibility will fall on the individual who

has the keys to ensure that the building is open whenever people are available

to work. The effect of this is that it will mean that the most committed person

– usually the person responsible for coordinating the overall building project

– is dedicated to being at the building for most of the hours in the day, every

day. It requires careful planning to allow them to get away and work on other

essential work in the offi ce or buying supplies.

All of the tasks that needed to be done could be described in terms of skill. At

Downtex, the less skilled tasks were fewer in number but greater in magnitude.

Often those that were skilled were high in number but smaller in themselves,

for example fi xing the plumbing.

Matching the tasks on the critical path with the skill level of the volunteers

available is an essential job. When they fi rst started at Downtex, many of the

page 189


volunteers were almost completely inexperienced at practical building work

and without careful guidance could harm themselves, ruin tools and materials,

and do work that took twice as long to put right. These issues will be familiar

to tutors of building workshops at EASA. The more skilled could spare only a

small amount of time from their own jobs to train others. A suggestion for the

future would be a kind of super-apprentice scheme, where two or so helpers

are trained by someone who knows for one day, and then they repeat the

lesson to others.

Another challenge is maintaining the variety and interest of the work. It was

a management challenge to try to balance the desirable tasks like building

things with the less desirable ones like cleaning, while ensuring that everything

progresses on time.

Special help

Certain tasks could only be undertaken by paid workmen. We brought in:

1. a scaffolding contractor to build the two additional fi re escape stairs

that we needed and also the raised sleeping platforms

2. a roller shutter installer to fi x a broken shutter

3. an electrician to mend the fi re alarm and test the emergency lighting,

and install the electricity supply for the showers.

Other work was beyond our ability but we knew people kind enough to help.

These were Paul’s father and Tom’s father Keith Bennell. Paul’s father is a

hands-on property developer and knows how to hang doors and build stud

walls. He lives in London but agreed to come up to Manchester for a week to

fi t the new fi re doors and board up the openings. Keith Bennell fi xed all the

plumbing and lighting in the mill, including cleaning and redecorating two

toilet blocks.

Sam Patterson, UK NC, was not technically part of the organising team but

spent a large part of the summer in Downtex, quickly becoming another

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coordinator of the project.

Building as material resource/furniture

When we moved in, there was a lot of rubbish in Downtex, but a lot of it

could be useful to us. The melamine-coated chipboard was used to board up

openings and in the bar; pallets were used for the bar; the bar top was made

from a 1960s suspended ceiling; bricks and blocks for the retaining wall/

bench in the courtyard. This creative re-use of materials must be familiar to

those who have attended EASA, and it is becoming increasingly common in

environmentally aware trophy projects. For us it was an economic necessity.

As a former industrial building, Downtex had no furniture, which we would

have to provide. Because food is served over several hours and the lectures

are never attended by all participants at once, we did not really need suffi cient

seating for 450, more like 200 or so. It is possible to hire seating for events, but

we were anxious to avoid the cost and the risk of damage to hired equipment.

One member of the organising team was tasked with the job of fi nding free

furniture. In Manchester we are fortunate that there are numerous large

universities close together and we had had success asking them for old

furniture in the past. We found that the most effective strategy was to fi nd

a well-spoken, smartly dressed and knowledgeable member of the team to

go and visit the reception desks of all the university buildings. The reception

staff were often more than helpful, putting us in contact with the porters and

house-services staff who were grateful that someone was taking away their

old furniture for a good cause. We found that it was helpful if we at least

pretended to be a student at the institution in question.

We found that it was generally essential to get out and meet people face to

face. Our organiser did not make much progress over the telephone or through

e-mail with many of the institutions. There are wide variations however. At the

University of Manchester were simply told desk to speak to Simon Atkinson,

the waste disposal manager. Simon proved to be an enthusiastic, open minded

person who went out of his way to help us.

page 191


The search for furniture for Downtex often coincided with materials for

workshops and furniture for other locations. We got most of our sofas and

armchairs from house clearances in Fallowfi eld, an area dominated by privately

let student housing, as well as other materials. From the Manchester Green/

Realcycle online swapping networks we got pallets, a piano, fridges, some

tables and most of the fi re doors. All of this collecting took time – to search for

items, to collect them and to unload them, but also opportunities presented

themselves over time. We could not have made use of these resources if we

had not had both a van and the accommodation for two months before the

assembly.

We passed the fi nal fi re inspection one day before the assembly was due to

begin. The pressure of that week had been tremendous, not only to make

Downtex meet very basic standards of accommodation, but also to meet the

ever increasing requirements of the fi re service inspectors. In spite of the

hard work that we had put in throughout the two months, work was not quite

fi nished even the day before. Now, we were able to make use of help from

participants that had arrived early and all the volunteers from Manchester.

[tbe]

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Chapter 26 - Safety

It took a while to decide on the title of this chapter because it covers quite a

few things and mainly looks at the legal aspects that needed to be organised in

order to get offi cial permission for certain things. The chapter is certainly not

about Health and Safety, because, well we didn’t really go down that avenue -

Health and Safety is a phrase that is thrown around quite a lot, but is really not

relevant to easa010, yes we had requirements to meet that related to safety

but we didn’t have someone in a specifi c Health and Safety role. But this is

boring and could take quite a while to explain about something we didn’t do,

so just take my word for it.

In the end though I just thought about all the

times I was asked why we went through such

lengths to gain offi cial permissions and licences,

the only answer is that we did it for the safety of the participants - simply for

their wellbeing, not the responsibility we were under.

For future organisers thinking of skipping the legal part of organising, no

matter where you are based, let me fi rst say that if we didn’t go through

these avenues there would have been no insurance cover for the participants,

volunteers or talent in case of an accident. If a small issue had come up

bringing the authorities to the accommodation the attention would have

resulted in the whole assembly being shut down, and there would have been

no way back from that, we would have lost the trust of everyone associated

with it, we would have lost spaces, we would even have lost sponsor money

due to us. Possibly the most convincing thing I can say is you could go to jail.

It would be easy to think this is a chapter that could have little relevance for

future assemblies, the UK has its own laws, right? Today though EU law covers

most (of course not all) of Europe, so many of the regulations will be the

same. More than that though, this Chapter is more to do with way we had to

All specifi c documents including the terms and conditions for participants are included in Section Five

page 193


do the things in general, rather than the specifi cs of the regulations.

The fi rst thing to stress is we had these issues in mind from the very beginning,

from right before we bid, which is why we had set out at the centre of our

organising strategy to meet with as many infl uential people as possible and to

gain their active support.

Knowing the implications of not getting these things in place in time I had

been hoping to have issues resolved well in advance of the assembly, and

we would have if we had not lost our fi rst choice accommodation location in

February of the assembly year. We fi nally secured an alternative in June.

To give an insight into the size of the task we faced you need to know the

process we should have gone through. To get a change of use on a building

we didn’t own we should have given the owner 3 weeks notice of our intention,

then put in the planning application which would take 8 weeks to process,

after getting permission for change of use we should then have applied for a

premises licence which takes another 8 weeks. Meaning the minimum length

of time to get everything in place was 19 weeks. This was the minimum

because if there were any ‘representations’ - basically objections - from the

public, police, fi re department, environmental health, highways agency etc,

etc, there would be another 8 weeks added to either or both the planning and

the licence process. Meaning the length of time could be 19 weeks, 27 weeks,

35 weeks... We had 7 (seven) weeks, less than the time it takes to process the

planning application alone.

This huge compression of time meant we needed to do both the planning

application and the licence application at the same time, and we needed all

relevant bodies to agree straight away.

To get the best understanding of what you need to do to meet the relevant

regulations try to get insurance, you wont without doing everything legally, or

>>>>>> Insurance

page 194


perhaps worse, it wont pay out when you need it.

For those thinking about producing a waiver for participants to sign on arrival

to indemnify the organisation against being sued - they have no legal worth.

Under European law an individual can not sign way their rights, but, as we did,

it is important that you get all the participants to sign a declaration stating they

have read and understood the terms and conditions of being there, otherwise

they wont be covered by insurance incase of accident.

In total we had four insurance policies, building insurance for easaHQ, building

insurance for Downtex, event insurance for building things, sleeping and

such like for the two weeks of the event, and single day event insurance for

easaDAY’s public spaces.

Downtex is a commercial building in an area zoned for commercial, not

residential use. In order to sleep there legally, to get an alcohol licence and

be covered by insurance, we needed to gain permission to sleep people there,

this meant a full planning application for change of use for a given period of

time.

As we’ve seen already, we had a lot less than the required time to get the

application through and absolutely no room for mistakes. It was now all

our efforts in meeting with the council, running small build up events and

generally building a reputation in the city paid off - when putting in a planning

application for an international event it helps that you have the written support

of the leader of the council, as well as written and active support of the Events

Team at the council as well as the Head of Planning, no less. It also helped

that we were a bunch of architecture students, and having two years practice

experience I was familiar with planning application requirements.

(The majority of the information that follows directly with our experience with

licensing in England & Wales, and specifi c information for other countries

Planning permission <<<<<<

Licence <<<<<<

page 195


should be referred to when seeking a license. However, the information and

advice seen generally should hold true across countries.)

Why

After agreeing terms on the mill, we started thinking about how each thing

was going to work within its context. The bar/cafe/party space was forecast

as the most used space during the assembly, so therefore the most ‘revenue-

able’ area. A bar we could sell alcoholic drinks at, cash or token, would be a

great profi t earner.

To sell alcohol in the UK you need a licence, or if the event has a limited number

of people and duration a Temporary Events Notice (TEN) can be applied for. We

looked at the possibility of running the bar from TENs, but a few factors meant

it wasn’t going to possible: limit of TENs for one location, arrangements with

other events organisers, time limit would impose nights off on the bar which

is not ideal for our main revenue source. So we would need the mill licensed.

Getting a Licence

The licensing laws in the UK changed recently, with the intention to help both

the licensees and the authorities giving out the licences. While this may be

the case, it has introduced various new steps and legislation that created new

bureaucracy and cost for current licence holders and those wanting to gain a

licence.

After some research, our fi rst task was to get a member of the organising

team a personal licence (1). This required a day’s training on alcohol law and

the licensing objectives, followed by an exam set by the licensing authority. I

was nominated/nominated myself for the position. In all honesty, the course

and examination were relatively straightforward and based upon common

sense, much like a driving theory test.

Next came the laborious process of the premises application. There was a lot

page 196


of work and planning which needed to be done before we could start fi lling

out the application form. Things like areas of control, fi re escape routes, noise

control, provision of sanitary services, refuse disposal strategies and security

strategies were being set up to support not only this, but further planning

applications, fi re inspections, etc.

We tried to get all the main responsible authorities - Police, Fire Department,

Environmental Health - to the venue to talk through and explain what we were

doing and what we wanted to do, as on paper it looks rather extreme. This

perhaps was the fl ip side of EASA being such a unique event, and it not having

a recent precedent in the local area.

It was a huge task of negotiating, accepting

compromises and conditions on the licence and

a number of grey area liberties, but we were

granted our premises licence by Licence Hearing at the Town Hall on July 29th,

48 hours before the bar opened for business at the start of easa010.

Responsibilities

The main responsibility I had as the licence holder and designated premises

supervisor for the bar at easa010 is that I am the one making or authorising

the sale of alcohol for consumption on the premises. In practice this is near

impossible, which is why all persons of the organising team who worked on

the bar signed an agreement with myself, authorising them to sell alcohol,

after a basic training session on the licensing objectives and the law in regards

to the sale of alcohol.

The DPS is also required to spend a signifi cant amount of time on the premises,

given that I was responsible for the day-to-day running of the bar. I was

also making sure that no licensing offences were committed, such as the sale

of alcohol to persons who are drunk or allowing disorderly conduct on the

premises.

Permission is not enough in itself, with regular visits a possibility adequate training as well as vigilance in terms of restrictions is essential.

page 197


As we found, moving the easaBAR II to a licensed premises takes pressure off the organisers, but the feeling of easaBAR I was never recreated.

Advice

If you are holding EASA in a city or town, fi nd a bar that is already established

and can accommodate you for the duration of the assembly. It will cut out

a lot of stress, time, effort, stress, resources and stress. It may be diffi cult

negotiating the opening times, drinks and snacks costs and space, but there

will be less opportunity to trip yourselves up. (2)

Do not underestimate the amount of disorderly conduct EASA participants can

produce.

Start your research early. We managed to get a licence in the shortest time frame

possible, through some very rushed hard work, some useful connections in

the city council, smiling faces, and a small miracle. An extra three (two?) weeks

would have made a big difference.

Speak to people who have been

through the process before. Tips and tricks of negotiating the legal minefi eld

this area is are invaluable, from the language you should use, to highlighting

the relevant parts of the application to each authority.

(1) For any licensed premises, the new system requires a DPS (designated

premises supervisor) to hold a personal license, and the premises itself to

have a premises licence. More information on the Licensing Act 2003, its

measures and objectives can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Licensing_Act_2003

(2) Advice given to me by two Policewomen who deal with the licensed premises

of North Manchester.

[ama]

page 198


As part of the exhibition on easaDAY we were to utilise public spaces, this had

the support of the head of Events Team at the council and therefore we had

assurances that there would be no problem getting the spaces once all the

required information was submitted by us.

This fi rst meant negotiating with the tutors to get a rough defi nition of their

use of the space, then a long conversation with insurers to get a quotation for

the day - required by the council - and submission of the application.

It must be impressed on every single member of the team just how serious this

work is. In all honesty we struggled as a team because often, despite warnings

to the contrary, people would not recognise the

importance of doing things a certain way until it

had caused problems - once again it is diffi cult to

recognise the results of good work, but easy to see the results of bad work!

The seriousness of your legal responsibilities should be respected at the

beginning of organising, throughout organising and during the event too.

So let’s start the review with the problems, and let’s the problems with the

problems we caused from within.

It’s been said a number of times that we had only 7 weeks to concurrently

get planning permission and a licence for entertainment and the provision

of alcohol. To do this Alex Maxwell and I (Chris Maloney) worked on the

frontline, researching, fi lling out forms and meeting relevant people. In the

back line there were a number of people working on the fabric of Downtex.

Due to the short amount of time to get everything done the people at Downtex

were working on getting the place clean and tidy as well as working on fi xing

it up to the standards required by law. The third element of compression of

time came because we weren’t just applying for permission to carry out work,

we were doing the work at the same time.

easa010 owes a huge thank you to Anne Schofi eld of CityCo for making this part so easy for us.

Public Spaces <<<<<<

Review <<<<<<

page 199


Organising EASA is not just draw in plans, making timetables and building bars, there are elements of huge individual responsibility and it is down to the team as a whole to respect this and support each other in a mature manner.

The major internal problem the team had was this element of organising

required a chain of command, something the team had not had until this

point. This resulted in Alex or I receiving instruction from the Fire department

or police for the minimum requirement for us to gain permission, relaying

this to the team working on Downtex to fi nd later that they had modifi ed the

instruction to their own idea of what is good enough. This simple lack of trust

in the judgment of Alex and I lead to a signifi cant amount of time wasted on

multiple complicated explanations of what was needed and why, when time

was already at a premium, it also lead to things just not being done because

those responsible for doing it couldn’t see the need.

It is a terrible feeling to stand in front of people capable of shutting EASA

down as the company signatory on legal documents and being made to look

like a liar because what had been

agreed, drawn and submitted had not

been carried out.

This problem continued into the assembly itself, the most striking example

coming with the fi rst visit by the fi re brigade. On coming into the site the fi re

offi cer and I stood next to the info point and asked the organiser at the time

to fi nd the fi re log book for inspection, we then toured the building. When

we returned to the info point to look at the log the organiser asked ‘what log

book?’. Right there and then we could have been shut down due to lack of

regard for the seriousness of tasks. The next day I went back to info point

and asked the same organiser, this time there was a log, but it was not fi lled

in! It was fi ve days into the assembly - and a lot of shouting later - when the

log was fi nally working as it should.

Both of these situations placed a huge amount of pressure on the people

ultimately responsible in the eye’s of the law, and demonstrate the problems

that occur when the ideals of an organisation meet the every day reality of

page 200


legal structures. Unfortunately in the case of easa010 their were people who

were insistent on equal footing on decisions but not on responsibility, leaving

those who had signed to work, and to worry, to a disproportionate degree.

We also faced external diffi culties to getting the application accepted. We had

learned about the space when an associate organisation held a club night in

the building, this was a double edged sword though as the event had received

dozens of noise complaints from local residents and was therefore a known

location with the authorities, each of which was initially very negative about

using the building for anything other than warehouse space.

Our approach of - meet people, listen, talk, meet again - worked to overcome

the initial resistance to the assembly, we found

that once we had got representative to the site,

shown them our info documents and explained

the history to EASA there were few if any problems in principle. EASA is not

quite unique, but it is unusual. This is always a benefi t, although it also means

you must work harder to make it understood to outsiders.

To understand the situation you are facing you need to understand the role of

the person you are talking to. In most situations the person you need to grant

you permission is the person responsible if anything goes wrong, they are

unwilling to make compromise because it is not in their interest to put their

job on the line for your event.

Having cut a swathe through the problems, it is worth refl ecting on the success

too. A lot of things needed to come together for us to gain all the permissions

required to get easa010 the go ahead, and having spoken to people in the

profession since there is a general feeling of disbelief that we managed to it

in such a short time scale, this is an achievement that can not be down played

- a few weeks into the process one organiser asked me what we would do if

we didn’t get permission, my response was that there would be no EASA, this

We struggled to get the Police down to the site in the run up though due to their World Cup commitments.

page 201


is how close we came.

Ultimately we faced problems from the Fire Brigade, which I talk about in

length in Section Three, but this doesn’t take away from the fact we received

permission in the fi rst place. In fact the pressure felt getting the permission,

including having our fi nal fi re inspection on the eve of the assembly, gave a

huge amount of experience of coping when we had to look else where.

page 202


Chapter 27 - Review

Our organising period stretched over two years nine months, so it is fairly

diffi cult to review! I’ll start by listing the signifi cant choices we made along

with a brief summary of what informed the choice.

National EveningIdentity / tradition

National evening didn’t exist in its current form until 2004, previous to that

countries would do their own presentations on evening right throughout the

assembly. Once again the short living memory of EASA had turned it into a

tradition written in stone. We decided that on a variation to national evening

we would split the night into two halves and each country would be paired with

another on the opposite night. The two countries

would then have to represent each other rather

than themselves. We made sure we gave all NCs a good advanced warning so

they could prepare, talk between each other - or not.

QuotaIntegration

In recent years an excel spreadsheet has been employed to work out how

many participants from a country can attend EASA, this was based on the size

of the country, involvement etc. The spreadsheet seemed to us an arbitrary

way of working out the numbers wrapped in the mystique of a mathematical

formula - none of us were comfortable with it. We reasoned that the difference

in bringing 4 or 8 participants when you were faced with a country with

thousands of students was ridiculous any way, we discussed it and decided

that a fundamental part of EASA is the cultural exchange, and we all miss

out if some countries are smaller than others. To this end we decided that

easa010 would have equal representation from all countries in EASA.

Library / Debate spaceIdentity / interaction / density

For a review of all these choices in practice see Section Three

page 203


We sent out a plea for people to bring books and journals for a library that

would be part of our cafe. This wasn’t a new idea, but it was something that

hadn’t been part of the EASA set up for quite a few years. The idea was that

the space could be a place where people could take a short break from their

workshops without getting distracted by the lure of the city’s cafes.

Day workshopsIdentity / interaction / density

Day workshops, like the debate space, were included in the timetable to give

participants the chance to vary what they were doing without completely

abandoning their workshop. We decided to limit the number of day workshops

so that the impact on the main workshops was limited. The day workshops

also gave us a chance to bring in some really interesting people who weren’t

able to give us a whole two weeks of their time.

Student LecturesIntegration / identity

There was a feeling in the team that though we’d had some great lectures in

the recent years there was now a feeling that lectures were for professionals

and workshops were for students. We felt that having participants take part

in the main lecture evenings easa010 would get more of a feeling of being

student for student, we hoped it would send a message out that the organisers

valued the input of the participants. Speaking to former EASA participants

from the 90’s and 80’s during the organising we had this thought reinforced

- originally EASA was more involved in discussions and talks of this kind.

Lecture sign upIntegration / identity

We decided that after selecting some essays to be part of the main lecture

series we would leave some spaces blank to allow participants or tutors to get

up and talk about whatever they wanted, it could be their essay, it could be

their workshop progress. We hoped that this kind of encouragement to be

part of the timetable would help people feel more involved in the assembly, an

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indication of the fl exibility we had built into the entire timetable - our desire

not to overly control the proceedings, rather to give a form work for easa010

to be defi ned by the participants.

DatascapesIntegration

We had hoped to have total of fi ve competition and invited workshops, in the

end we had two competitions and one invited Datascapes. We invited the

tutors of Datascapes to be involved as we felt that it would be interesting to

give participants the option of working with student tutors or professional

local tutors. It was a shame that a workshop we had lined up with a prominent

local architect didn’t go ahead.

Workshop applicationsTradition

Umbrella is a grey area. It has been a workshop at EASA since EASA began

- personally I think this is a good thing. It had become tradition that the

organisers of EASA would invite the tutors to run Umbrella, but we felt that

this was not the right way to do it - we were proved right with disagreements

that arose - some participants felt that Umbrella was a certainty to be selected

and that the previous tutors should select the next. We decided that both

approaches were not in the best interests of EASA, an organisation that doesn’t

vote for reasons of openness should not have a situation where tutoring is

closed and decided in private.

We opened Umbrella up to all comers, as we invited people to propose a

‘media coverage’ workshop.

Docu+MationLegacy

We decided that we wanted to run a workshop dedicated to documenting and

information gathering at easa010. We also decided this workshop would be a

competition workshop with a difference, rather than a competition for to fi nd

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tutors we held a competition for participants. We decided that we would hold

this competition back until after all quota places were fi lled in order to relieve

the headache for NCs.

easaDAYIntegration / legacy / urbanity / interaction

Debate has raged long and hard over how to get a better feeling of location in

EASA, how to integrate with the local community with more than just parties.

We decided that a great potential for integration lay in the fi nal exhibition,

we also thought that the exhibition could be so much more than a series of

rushed posters. easaDAY was set up to be a chance for the workshops to

display their output as an exhibition of public space intervention, then head

off to the fi nal presentations for a chance to see the work others had done.

Welcome talksIntegration

Integration is not only about how to interact with the location and residents,

it is about how to integrate participants with the assembly. In recent years

there is a general feeling that there has been a swing in attitude to a situation

of service and servers leaving a strain on the organisers, but also a gap in

what the assembly could be. We felt this was one of our biggest challenges,

and one we would not be able to fully overcome, but one we could attempt to

improve upon, turn attention to and hopefully improve for EASA 2011.

As well as being as communicative as possible in the build up, using inclusive

language and stating the roles NCs, tutors and participants would play in

making easa010, we realised the importance of holding a welcome talk on the

fi rst day as well as having an offi cial opening to the assembly.

DutiesIntegration

Duties are central to what EASA is all about. At recent INCMs there has been

a lot of talk about how duties had become a tourist attraction for participants

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and not engaged with. Again though the organising we had chance to see what

previous assemblies had done and it became clear that recent assemblies had

adopted the same model - food service and cleaning - for reasons of tradition

mostly. A good example of taking things to the extreme, on The Train duties

included an 8 hour stint in the kitchen cooking.

We decided that to best cover the needs of the event we would focus the

duties on what would have most benefi t. We felt duties should be relevant in

order to give participants a feeling of being productive.

Lead HelpersIntegration

From the outset of the process we had been keen to make the organisation of

easa010 a multinational cross border affair, this can be seen in the presentations

given in 2008 INCM and 2009 EASA. We opened up the chance to be involved

to the whole network as it was in 2008 and from then kept a large number of

people on the organisers mailing list, this helped us stay more connected to

the network and also to get an outside opinion of what we were doing. In the

end as well as bringing in volunteers from the UK we opened up the chance for

non-UK and former UK EASA participants to come along as Lead Helpers for a

period of time - not guests. These lead helpers would provide experience and

knowledge for the organisers as well as volunteers.

Having gone through the headline decisions in terms of the assembly itself it’s

worth doing the same for some of the organizational decisions, don’t worry

though, I will get on to what could have gone better at the end.

easaHQIntegration / legacy / identity

Both the securing of an offi ce space and the use of half of it as a gallery were

100% gold standard good decisions. The offi ce gave us a presence that lead

to a respect with people we talked to, and it changed the mind set of us

organisers. To insiders and outsiders we were more than just another student

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organisation.

The gallery gave us two things that are hard to get and yet invaluable - contacts

and experience.

SESAMIntegration / identity

SESAM could have been a major distraction if handled in a different way, but

we kept it small both in length and numbers of people. Holding a SESAM gave

us experience, but it also gave us an injection of the EASA feeling. Having

a lot of EASA people around at the end of a long cold winter really helped

with our focus and moral, the hope is it also sent out a positive message

to the network about the intentions of easa010 - we left the tutoring of the

workshop to participants, we gave them experts assistance and guided tours,

we wanted to show we were active but also inclusive.

I mentioned before that this review is diffi cult, my aim is to give some

condescend notes from all the chapters in one place, but there is plenty I am

skipping over. But now I turn to some of the things that didn’t go so well.

Fund-raising + team

To be fair, we were in the worst environment for fund-raising possible,

but that said the approach of the team wasn’t the best. At fi rst the more

experienced members of the team were so tied up doing other tasks, such as

looking for spaces, that newer team members worked on fund-raising. This

produced absolutely nothing. And once main organisers got involved in the

fund-raising other elements of the organising suffered. Over all there was a

huge pressure placed on the team because of the economic circumstances,

and some team members didn’t strive to meet this demand, meaning the

usual suspects had to do even more work to fi ll the gap.

Media

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We had high hopes for our media push, but the truth of the matter is that

media doesn’t help your EASA as much as it helps the next one, so as soon as

there is a short fall in man power for tasks media is the fi rst thing to suffer.

In the end we still managed to get a wide coverage for the assembly and the

organising process, but we fell short of getting a marque journal to cover us

in any substantial way.

There are other small shortfalls, but you should read the whole document to

fi nd out more, others are covered in the next section. So to wrap up from me

I have a few fi nal thoughts.

Don’t be afraid

EASA has happened 30 times in a row now, and some years more than once

(in all but name). There is a huge pressure felt by organisers, and it is easy to

feel you are alone, that you can’t show any form of weakness because of the

judgment that comes at every turn. EASA can happen, and there are just a few

simple things to remember to make sure you have a success.

Prioritise. Towards the end of the organising process we split the budget

into four categories - things to keep people alive (shelter, food), things to

make an EASA (materials, tools), things to make a good EASA (lectures, waking

tours, parties), dream items (morning bus, sticks of rock) - this helped calm

the nerves in terms of 400 people arriving and needing food and shelter for

2 weeks.

Focus. Throughout the process you will have thousands of small decisions to

make, often members of the team will have to make decisions on their own

and without discussion with the rest of the team, this isn’t ideal. In order to

help us stay focused on our goals for the event we met regularly, once a month

until a year before when we went to once a week and in the month before the

assembly it was nearly once every two days. These meetings helped us to

keep the overall picture of the assembly clear. Another thing that worked

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well for us was defi ning the pillars of the bid, once written we could go back

to them and see if our decisions were working in that context. More than this

though, we developed little phrases to sum up our thoughts, towards the end

when we were negotiating with tutors and looking for materials and furniture

we worked to the mantra - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - intended as a list of

importance to both be environmentally friendly and cost effi cient. The most

notable among the others was the bold statement - Go big or go home - this

phrase came out every time we had a discussion that lead to doubt about

whether we could pull something off. It was delightfully Mancunian with its

aggressive undertones, but it could have been rephrased - dare to dream a bit

bigger - and still have the same essential meaning.

Connections. Meet as many important people as possible. People should,

where possible, work to their strengths, my main role was to meet people

and make them fall in love with EASA. easaHQ really helped with this, it was

a thing people could see, and it was run in the same ethos as EASA. Once

important people fall in love with the event you have collateral you can spend,

but don’t, you should save it for a rainy day.

Contingency. Always be working on a number of options at the same time,

you don’t need to have a plan B fully formed and agreed, but you should live

by the rule that until a contract is signed nothing is certain, until money is in

your bank the agreement doesn’t mean anything.

Communicate. Talk to the network when possible. You don’t need to tell

everyone all your problems, but do try and be human. You’ll be busy and

communication can take time, but still do it. The worst part of communication

is it can make you feel more isolated as a team as often you’ll be sending

out messages, or asking for input and you’ll hear nothing. Worse can be

the repetitive communication by the same small group of people, you should

always take on board what they are saying, but remember that just because

they are the only people contacting you it doesn’t mean they speak for the

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whole network.

Trust yourself. At the end of the day you have to make very tough decisions

and only you can take responsibility for them, hesitation can lead to huge

problems so be confi dent and considered. It is also important for the network

to have faith in what you are doing.

Remember - Go big or go home!

[cma]

If nothing else EASA provides the framework for the exchange of ideas and

information. This was also the key issue in organising the assembly. Holding

it the city context forced to meet and communicate with a variety of people

and institutions.

Early on we had forged strong links with the universities and school of

architecture and those links provided me and others on the team extracurricular

activities.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to be a guest critic twice for undergraduate

level reviews. After some initial nerves, it was a great experience, and I hope

my modest guidance, praise and critique were at least half as benefi cial and

enjoyable as their projects and presentations were for me.

Toward the end of the academic year I was asked to co-tutor a four week

long studio for level 1 and 2 students. A great insight in to the workings of an

educational workshop, the exciting and sometime daunting experience was

an opportunity to break down teaching into a progression of processes and

appreciate what went into university teaching.

The students’ response was mostly positive and the results were of a high

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standard. It was great that students of a relatively basic level responded so

well to what was a challenging concept and brief. It was a rewarding experience

that I am very thankful for to those who allowed me the opportunity, and

hopefully not my last foray into teaching.

[ama]

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