Hey everyone welcome to the first discussion thread. I decided to start with something that most people have an opinion on ‘EASA Spirit’. The EASA guide says “The essence of the EASA, since its beginning in Liverpool in 1981, is maintained by the ‘EASA spirit’ - easy to feel but difficult to describe.” Obviously part of this is true, the friends, workshops, connections and good times, the shared experience that keeps you coming back to EASA events, but it does have other manifestations that are more easily described. For example it is EASA spirit that motivates someone from being a participant through to being an NC, Tutor or even an Organiser. You give your time and effort for no real personal gain but in an attempt to further the community and event. It is this feeling of responsibility for EASA that truly defines ‘EASA Spirit’. This is not to say that people who have never become NC’s, Tutors or Organisers do not feel a responsibility to EASA but I think it is something that at the level of participant really needs to be looked at. The idea that doing set duties absolves people from other responsibilities, feeling they have done their part for the event, rather than everyone pulling their own weight throughout the whole event, is quite widespread. This idea of everyone taking more responsibility for themselves and the event is actually mentioned in the EASA guide however I feel that more and more the organisers end up taking responsibility for too many small simple tasks that most of us would have no problem doing in our own houses. I think it would be quite easy for NC’s to possibly arrive one or two days earlier than participants, obviously to help the organisers with the final preparation but also to be given a walkthrough of the site and explained where many of the things that would be required for daily tasks can be found. It would then be NC’s responsibilities to ensure that their participants act in this event responsible manner instead of just leaving things broken or in a mess for the people on duties or organisers to deal with.

How can we instil this spirit in people at EASA though? Can it be evoked or is it necessarily spontaneous? Should duties be abolished and people clean, fix, look after problem as they find/create them or would we be mature enough to rely on ourselves to do this. I know that I have walked passed many overflowing bins in my time and not emptied them, would this change if I knew where I should put them and where I could get a replacement bag? All I do know is that we as a group need to change our attitude, to accept more responsibility for ourselves our actions and the event. We need to use the EASA spirit that shared experience creates and make the event better with it.

Hey everyone I hope all of you guys have begun to get over the post EASA blues now that we are 2 weeks out and almost fully re-assimilated into the ‘real world’ and for those of you that couldn’t make it bad luck. Firstly I’d just like to say a huge congratulations and thank you to all of the Italian organisers. I can only imagine how difficult it was to organise an event in the current economic climate and to have put together such a successful meeting is a real credit to all of you guys. All that remains now is to have yo’selves a good party and relax a little/lot.

Secondly hopefully feeding off of everyone’s post EASA love I am looking to start a series of threads on the blog leading on from the ‘Future of EASA discussion’ held at this year’s event. The aim of these discussions is to get everyone to put forward their opinion on certain matters that will no doubt be discussed at the INCM in Liechtenstein. It should also help form agendas and topics for meetings at the INCM. This will hopefully allow for a much broader input into the INCM but also facilitate more focused discussions during the actual event. Each thread will have a general theme, such as EASA Spirit (something commonly discussed but ill defined as to what it could mean) EASA and its context (people feel that it has become a tenacious link in recent times) EASA Finance(in harder economic times how should the finances of EASA work) and other topics. The idea being that a new topic for discussion would be posted on the blog every few days to a week in the run up to the INCM. I’m suggesting as a starting point for each discussion that I will put my thoughts about the issue down and people can then add to, disagree with or totally reject them and put their own views forward.

Obviously suggestions for topics of discussion are more than welcome and necessary but I ask that they are somewhat controlled so that we don’t just overload the blog with hundreds of threads. So if anyone has suggestions I would ask that they are sent to me at patterson.neal@gmail.com (so that I can take credit for any good ideas!!!) and then they can be either included in a topic that they are relevant to or started as a new thread and then give people some time to think about and respond to them.

Now all I ask you guys to do is go to the get involved (and possibly have a read of the EASA guide, if you haven’t already done so). I hope to hear from most of you guys on this and for those people that didn’t get this let them know.

Keep your eyes on it

Neal