Nordic Permaculture Festival Design - Part Two, The Festival Project

Integration & Action

With the Kurki team we decided the dates of the festival based on the analysis, Kurki ecovillage preference and the board’s suggestions as well as the length based on the analysis and the resources & wishes of the Kurki team. Thu-Sun 4th-7th of August, 2022 was chosen.

Planning the core circle model 

I started thinking about how to organize the team to get everything done effectively. 

Helps

• the information that the NPF16 (Nordic Permaculture Festival 2016 in Isnäs, Finland) team had following roles/areas: project coordinator, finance, program, tickets & sign-ups, writing, graphics, area planning and permits, volunteer coordination, food, consulting
• active team from Kurki Ecovillage
• the Finnish permaculture people
• the communication channels and networks of FPA (Finnish Permaculture Association)

Integration (needs) & Limits

• the main need is to get everything done so that a great festival can take place
• the festival planning should be tightly connected to the FPA structures like sosiocratic, consent based decision making and transparent communication to enable transparency and effectiveness (read more about sosiocracy here, link to Wikipedia)
• small team → effectiveness! I personally am unable to function in 20 people decision making groups and endless discussions about unimportant details.

Ideas & Principles

I developed some ideas using the principles:

Each important function is supported by many elements

• there is one person responsible for each area (The Sheriff/leader)
• they have a Deputy (delegate)
• they together create their own subcircle/group → find the people they need to do all the tasks in that area

Each element performs many functions

• lateral communications encouraged between sub-groups and circles

Cycling of energy

• sharing everything and learning from each other

Small-scale intensive systems

• max. 10 people in the main circle

Patterns to details

• circle model enables cascading of tasks -> not everyone has to worry about every detail
• core team is to function as a “loosely sosiocratic” ad-hoc circle in the Finnish Permaculture Association
• this core festival circle links to the Association's General Circle
• sub-circles can be sosiocratic circles or loose groups or something in between, as long as they are open and transparent

Observe & Respond to change

• if this doesn't work, we can look at it again and realign

Integration

Combining all this information, I came up with this suggestion:

5 areas of responsibility

• Bureaucracy & Management: general project management, tickets, insurance, permits...
• Communications: social media, PR, Nordic connections, working with FPA’s Comms circle...
• Finance: budget, sponsor and funding search...
• Location: prepping the location, café, volunteer coordination...
• Program: call for papers, schedule, kids' program, party

This was my design but I wanted to see what the community would come up with, so I called a third open-for-all call on the 9th of November ‘21 to group tasks. Several tasks were sorted to different areas than I originally thought, which was great, but the main idea was accepted.

Action

November 2021

With this we had our five areas, and now needed to find people to work on them. We decided that

• the five areas of responsibility will be created: Management, Finance, Location, Program and Communications
• Tania and Tiina (from Kurki) will take care of Program
• Satu with Tania (from Kurki) will take care of Location
• Lumia will take care of Management
• We will strive for a sosiocratic circle model with Leaders and Deputys for all areas
• We will have open calls for people to join the festival planning team
• We agreed to use Slack and Google Drive for communications in order to align with FPA.

What comes to sosiocracy, it’s good to mention here that we use it loosely! The “talk” is not accurate, and we only used it to give our circle model structure and for consent decision making.

For the rest of the roles and team members we started the search at PermaPuheet live in Tampere -event on the 13th November where we presented the project and the work structure (link to presentation (Appendix 6), the Knowlegde Café was skipped due to time constraints).

We got started with some tasks with the people we had, and trusted that the people we needed would appear.

Ideas & Integration

Task management 

For task management, I turned to the team to find ideas and analyze solutions. This meeting was held on 12th of January 2022. See the full agenda/presentation here (Appendix 7).

Everyone present quickly agreed that tracking tasks in a tool is necessary. I then shortly presented the participants some alternatives I was familiar with, namely spreadsheets and Kanban tools.

We did a PMI on using spreadsheets or Trello as our task management tool. After this the time ran out and we didn’t deep dive into the open source kanbans. Trello was chosen. I was delighted to be using a kanban process, which I am familiar with and use in my work daily. Read more about Kanban here (link to kanbanize.com).

Momentum

In January 2022, there were changes to the team as some members left and others came.

But in the first February meeting (2.2.22) everything seemed to click. We had on the agenda 

• present the festival situation
• Q&As
• find a new Program lead and
• decide the next steps.

Dora, Maggie and Rosabella appeared and were interested in helping with Program. Dominik promised to lead the Program team. 

So the team at this point looked like this:

• Comms: Piritta, Dominik, Sampsa
• Location: Tiina, Satu
• Program: Dominik, Rosabella, Dora, Maggie
• Management: Lumia, Sasha
• Finance: Lumia and Alexis - OR perhaps merge with Management

I borrowed the Associations meeting minute template and revamped it to suit the groups, and offered it as a template. By the 23rd all teams had met in one way or the other and things were moving on. 

Continue reading in Part Three, Action Phase.