This is a very quick post about the meeting we had yesterday, to be followed by another post with more detail on a couple of webby bits I promised to follow up on. The most important news is that the next two meetings will be on Thursday 12 Nov and Saturday 21 Nov - full details below.
So yesterday we started out by catching up a little on ideas from the first meeting, particularly looking at the events ideas that came up and thinking about the practical obstacles we faced (money, time, space and people). I've squished the ideas we came up with into one mega mind map with the help of the very easy to use bubbl.us, and we used this as a way of helping first-time attenders see where we'd been before.
The practical obstacle we talked about most was money. With a starting budget of £2,500, some acts (particularly celebrities) are beyond our means unless we can find sneaky ways of convincing them to get involved. Fortunately several people at the meeting immediately volunteered sneaky ways of getting people involved, so in the sessions to come we should probably think about working out who we can contact and realistically hope to get involved.
In the light of this we turned our attention to the sort of festival weekend we wanted to run - whether it should focus on a few big events or lots of little ones, whether we should have a theme or not and who we wanted to come. The feeling was very much that we wanted a festival offering 'different things for different people', with a real sense of something different going on and an exciting atmosphere. To help this it was decided that we should look into the possibility of using the Market Place for events during the weekend. We also agreed that having two 'headline' events on the Saturday and Sunday evenings, accompanied by a varied programme during the day, would be a good structure.
The group agreed that we probably would want a theme for the festival to give it a sense of coherence. Various ideas came up, including funfair, art and artists, cardboard monsters, fantasy and films/comics. However, there was one idea which dominated, which was taking the idea of booting parents/adults out for the weekend and running with it - sofa forts, creches for grown ups and bouncers armed with super soakers were all mentioned. The group didn't want to finally settle on a theme without further thought, though, so we decided to open up discussion online to try and develop more ideas before the next meeting.
To this end we moved on to talking about the Ning. This was on the agenda from the previous meeting - basically, the idea is to set up a social network at Ning.com for private Take Over discussions. Any information that needs to go out to the public will still go up on this blog and on Facebook, but having a separate space to throw ideas around should help us get discussion going. The Take Over Ning is now active - hop on over and sign up! More detail will follow in a dedicated post, but do be aware that membership is moderated so it might take a day or so to go through. Over-25s won't be able to join the Ning at all, so if you're reading this, don't try!
The last thing we did was to confirm the dates of the next couple of meetings:
- Thursday 12 November, 5-6.30pm at the Corn Exchange (Bar 1861)
- Saturday 21 November, 5-6.30pm at the Corn Exchange (Bar 1861)
If you can't make it along or you need help, or even if you can make it along, let me know.
That's it for the moment. I suggest you head over to the Ning and sign up now! See you there or at the next meeting, I hope.
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