Harmony Festival -- experiences and records from 2007

Thank you to all the Harmony Volunteers! That was the best festival team yet, I really appreciate everyone coming together. I'm curious how people feel about continuing to bring SpaceShare to festivals, do you feel like you're part of SpaceShare or want to be, and what do you want to make happen?

Detailed Summary (filed for next year):

* We pretty well met our obligation to Columbia Gorge, who is paying for the booth. Sampled or gave away 8 cases of juice, large sample sizes making up for slow first half.
* We need a booth in a normal location. Harmony keeps having great ideas about new places to put our booth each year, and they rarely have good traffic flow. Whoever talks to them next year needs to insist. The location on Sunday, right across from the info booth, was ok.
* All our locations this year were "traffic" locations (both near the gate and the walkway near the info booth), where people are mostly walking by and we interrupt their walk. This tends to work well for sampling, and badly for talking in more detail or selling t-shirts -- it's generally better to catch people milling about. (If you volunteer with a few different exhibits you'll see the difference -- there were fewer "real" conversations this time, but more "hellos".)
* We really need an artistic/constructive person to create a nice physical rideboard.
* Day by day:
o Friday Kelley drove, Stephen ran the booth in a slow location all day. Arrived on time, which made a huge difference. Working solo was somewhat exhausting and location was unproductive. Harmony is rather slow on Friday day, even in better locations.
o Saturday: full volunteer team, everything ran nicely. Moved twice, afternoon was tolerable location for sampling, bad for talking, near second gate.
o Sunday: super volunteer team, moved to good location (though still "traffic", not "milling"), made everything easy.
* Booth aesthetics: moving repeatedly didn't help. An art team would be a great addition. Lightweight tables with table cloths that boxes go under, always bringing the same tables, would make the move heavier but make it easier to have a standard, more professional looking booth. (We used one of their tables, too large for the current booth-design effort, makes interacting with passerbys more difficult.)

My personal summary: "Receptacle for ideas"

I spend much of these weekends being a receptacle for an amazing collection of ideas on how to improve the booth, carpooling and festival greening in general. It's kind of a weird feeling -- quickly made this big switch from being a volunteer showing up at organizations trying to find a way to help, to being the person that people think of as "in charge," of course without resources to make things happen. It can be overwhelming listening to the each amazing idea ten times over, wishing each would happen and endangering myself with burnout. Here are some of the more common ideas to share:

* Our booth should be beautiful. I don't have the skills to do this, and it won't pay for getting professional help.
* Stickers have been recommended over and over. I've always felt unenthusiastic about stickers, posters that get torn down after a weekend, and other not-so-green ways of getting the message out, but I'm perhaps being too puritanical. These methods seem to work well for other groups... I'm going to treat myself as out-voted and move SpaceShare's outreach into the physical stuff world! Who wants to help create? I have collected a ton of ideas, my own and other's suggestions... shall we meet away from the festivals? Anyone feel free to call this gathering...
* We should have a business plan aimed at venture capital, a business plan for general/activist use. Currently: there are old business plans sitting around. It eats a lot of time maintaining these docs. Like many other things at SpaceShare, I may one day turn full attention to getting venture capital, and otherwise am leaving it on the backburner.
* We should ally with nonprofits, get grants. Currently: I've made some forays into the nonprofit world and find that without lots of connections and years of networking, and with the particular skills I have and like to use, there's been a lot more talk than action. I personally believe in social entrepreneurship more than the ask for grants approach. Would love to have someone else lead up a nonprofit alliance effort at SpaceShare.
* We should redo the homepage.
* We should redo the carpool tool itself.

As they say at Burning Man, it's a do-ocracy, if each person grabs one of these we can do amazing work. I'm going to be centering my attention and commitment on non-festival parts of SpaceShare (not even mentioned here), but will enjoy helping you make any of these happen.

Summary: First, it's stunning the difference between having enough people cooperating, and not. My role is a little odd: this is the second year in a row when, in springtime, people had come forward to take over and I wasn't going to run the booths, but as the summer hits I'm still doing it. 2007 is the first year of retrenchment: we'll likely do two or three festivals less this year than last, unless someone else steps up. The other parts of SpaceShare are going better: the conferences tools are getting much closer to being a real business, and I have a lot of hope for the church/synagogue/mosque carpooling as the next stage. Festivals continue to eat time without contributing much back to SpaceShare. Working with loosey-goosey festival communities that aren't serious about greening -- simply because they aren't serious -- forces me to be more anal or carpooling won't happen. This has been more volunteer work than a job, and I'm stepping back a few steps whether the festivals green themselves or not. The invitation is out there for others to come in and make this happen. I still think, but can't guarantee, that someone who focused on festivals alongside me could make a basic living while promoting the revolution, but it's become clear that I can't do it at the same time as I run the other parts of SpaceShare. You're invited!

Again, THANK YOU for helping at Harmony, I think the next festival we go to is likely to be SolFest though I'm open to WorldFest if others are excited, and if someone wants to write a much much shorter summary for the newsletter (your experiences + grab whatever you like from here), that'd be great.

Dream & Create,
Stephen