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Agora Alicante is approaching (to be more precise we have just 41 days till it starts) and it means that it’s time to gather Chair team, Juridical Commission and Secretary General at one place for working on content part of the Agora. In this blog post I will try to describe how we were working during Chair meeting in order to give you an image how Agora is usually prepared.
So this time we’ve had meeting in Madrid, great capital of Spain (where else we can have meeting before Spanish Agora with mostly Spanish Chair team?! J). This time we have quite a lot of people involved in Chair meeting: whole Chair team, Dawid from JC, me and for one day Carol and Miguel from Agora organising team.
To make this blog post more interesting and alive I’ll write not only about serious stuff but also about my personal impression of what was going on around. So I’ve arrived to Madrid on Thursday night and on Friday together with friend from AEGEE-Madrid we’ve gone for small city tour around Madrid under rain. What I can say, I love Madrid, Spanish people and Spanish language around me J Even if I cannot understand most of words I was enjoying it as much as I can! After walking around city and having really nice lunch I went to the University for meeting point with others. So Friday, 18:00 Chair meeting was started. On Friday we were going through proposals (this time we have 22!!!! of them) trying to understand which of them will start a big discussion during Agora and which we can allocate for one prytania. After this hard discussion we’ve agreed on plan for Saturday and Sunday and closed meeting for Friday. As me and Roberto (Vice-Chair) were hosted by our lovely Secretary of the Agora/EBM Bea from University we went to her place to drop our luggage before going for a dinner. Dinner time in Madrid is 11 pm J(which is not usual even for inhabitants of CD house). I was really happy to see a lot of familiar faces that evening and to meet new people. We were at the nice place called Eucebio were you are buying just a drink and having lots of tapas for free! So whenever you are in Madrid – go to Eucebio for a drink J As we were starting our meeting on Saturday at 10 am we’ve decided not to stay too long and to leave at 1 am in order to be able to work next day.
On Saturday we’ve started from workshop selection. This time we’ve received 25 workshop applications from which we’ve accepted 16. As usual we had a lot of applications for organisation development topics and from thematic part we had one of the most popular topics for workshop: Social inclusion. After evaluation of all applications we’ve chosen the best ones and the most important for our members. So during Agora you will be able to choose the best workshop for you among 20 approved workshops (4 of them will be from our external partners).
Then it was time for dividing prytanias and allocates people for it. As most of proposals made by CD members it was a bit hard to divide prytanias in order not to have 1 CD member at the same time at different places. But we’ve managed to arrange it! After lunch we were working on participant’s selection. As this time we have almost 300 applications more than we have places we were making selection of visitors. Meanwhile I had short meeting with Dawid about some JC procedures that should be done for Agora. Because of amount of proposals, elections and reports approximately we will have 60 000 ballot papers so we were morally preparing with Dawid for packing it and then counting J
We’ve finished Saturday meeting at 7 pm and went home to change and finally access Internet. That evening we’ve met even more people from Madrid and had nice dinner all together at the main square and then went to the party place of AEGEE-Madrid.
Sunday meeting started at 11 pm in Starbucks. Our morning we’ve started with questions and requests to local organizers and checking facilities which we will have during Agora. After lunch we’ve moved to Dea’s place (Dea is ex JC member who is kindly agreed to host our meeting at the last day) where the most complicated part of the meeting started. This Agora we have unusually huge amount of candidates for all Commissions and of course for CD. It’s almost impossible to fit to the program all candidates, questions, proposals, presentations etc. But we are trying to find the best solution in order not to skip anything during Agora. Meeting was so hard that even Roberto started to speak English with Spanish accent instead of his usual British one J
Meeting is finished. Honestly I was really happy with this meeting, we’ve managed to discuss a lot of issues, to make everything what was planned and to have social part of the meeting which is also really important for teamwork. After this meeting I know better our Chair team and can say that they are really great people and doing hard work, for them this Agora is going to be a huge challenge but I’m sure they will manage to do everything as good as they can.
And at the end of my post I want to say thank you to Ricky, Mara and Bea for hosting me, to Percin, Roberto, Alberto, Bea and Dawid for great Chair meeting, to Carol and Miguel for joining us for the meeting and to all AEGEE members whom we met during these few days in Madrid for spending time with us! J
And hope to see all of you in Alicante in 41 days!
P.S. Blog post was written in ryanair plane going from Madrid to Brussels at the same time as blog post of Percin for Chair tweet. J