In my previous posts, I talked about how the Transeuropa Network began and what we did at the first meeting. It was only at the next meeting in Paris that the ideas started cross-pollinating on how we would organise activities on the different strands and how public space is the space in which people can create a more social environment that was closest to our everyday lives.
Most debates on Europe focus on what type of social market economy we want, an institutional compromise between those who want to reinforce a social economy and those who want to extend the market into society. But what about if we prototyped the social market?
So at the next session in Rome, feedback showed that to mobilise for the festival, we need people working on more than theme.
We brainstormed new themes and with the experience and better understanding of the outcome of the festival, we were also able to refresh the brainstorming of the existing themes. We then clustered the ideas into activities that could be focused on and made transitional.
And there some hidden themes emerged, including public space (or rather open space as it was called!). This wasn’t to separate ourselves from other themes but on the contrary to create a space to build bridges between different ones.
This was the turning point for the development of the activity on public space for the festival and in many ways for the network. It was when we moved from conversation to action and moved to prototype concepts and ideas to develop the public space theme.
So we turned the thematic groups into working groups on activities treating specific topics. In that session, we discussed how we would do this and what would be the emerging priorities for the newly formed working groups to act on.
Start with your instinct, be ruthless in your judgement
Experiment and reflect. Your activity will never be 100% perfect, so go with what you feel is best and at that particular time and then carry forward what’s worked well and discard what hasn’t.
