First meeting!

It's official: the Take Over has begun! We had our first proper meeting on Saturday to start getting some ideas down and planning what kind of festival we'd like to run in the Corn Exchange.

It was particularly nice to have a good mixture of ages, from 12 to 23 year olds. Even better, everyone was able to contribute equally and some fantastic ideas came up. Below is a quick summary of what we talked about, but most importantly the dates of the next meeting is Wednesday 4 November, 4-6pm at New Greenham Arts. Anyone can come along (especially if you weren't able to come on Saturday!). If you need directions or help with transport please contact Sam Sampson.

Meeting summary - Sat 24 October

We kicked off with an opportunity for everyone to get their hands dirty and mess around with some of the Corn Exchange's sound and lighting equipment, which quickly resulted in an impromptu disco. This was also a chance for everyone to meet, chat and get to know each other a bit.

After this we knuckled down to the business of mapping out what sort of events the festival should include. To start off with everyone tried to picture their ideal event - the one thing they would really like to see happen if there were no constraints at all. These ranged from a battle of the bands between Coldplay and U2 to turning the whole building into a swimming pool!

Once everyone had warmed up with this exercise, we split into groups to try and splurge as many ideas as possible into mind maps (pictured below). This was really valuable, with a whole range of really creative ideas springing up. I've included photos of the maps themselves here and will be bringing them along to future meetings so that we can use them as a basis for discussion. One thing we did find was that each of the four groups hit on some common threads, specifically celebrity events, immersive or ongoing events, outdoor events and variety/mixed events. This is such a big area that we'll be posting again soon with more details, and will try to gather all the ideas into one place in a useful format (let me know if you have any bright ideas!).

Talking through the programme ideas that had come up gave us some sense of what we wanted to do, so for the last part of the meeting we moved on to the how. This was a lot trickier, but we managed some sensible conversations touching on how to set up meetings, how we might make sure that people of different ages and from different areas should be involved, and how decisions could be made. At the end we'd firmly decided two things:

1. Future meeting dates should be decided at each meeting, to ensure that they are as convenient as possible.
2. At the next meeting we will look into setting up a ning network for the Take Over, as a private forum to discuss ideas.

To round off the meeting we gathered a bit of info about when people felt was best to hold meeting for the future. The two most popular times were weekday evenings and weekend afternoons, with weekend evenings coming in third. So, I will be putting forward some potential future dates at the next meeting on Wednesday - check back here for confirmation of times!

Please remember to leave comments here if you've got any input or questions. This would be especially useful if you were at the meeting and think I've left anything out!

Here are the mind maps we produced (click for large versions):