New Workshop Colleague

A little history

Anne Lakeman worked on the workshops since October 2018 and was joined by colleague Iines Råmark in January 2020. Iines was first working as an intern, and in June 2020, she became a full member of the staff. Elise Chalcraft joined the team in April 2021 as an Aquaponics intern and then later took over from Iines in September 2021 until November 2022. Now it is your turn!
The role of workshop manager can be paired with other responsibilities in the organisation. It was possible to work 3 days a week only on workshop production, but depending on how involved you are with the other projects at Mediamatic, more days are appreciated. 

Over the years Mediamatic has been quite successful in hosting workshops. It has always been part of our program, as we see passing on and sharing knowledge as an important part of our practice. Since Mediamatic shifted more to exploring and experiencing through the senses, the workshops also shifted to that direction. In 2019, we had an incredibly successful year, full of learning and doing. We also found a way of repeating workshops each month in order to create a steady output of events, where people felt they could join and plan whenever they had time. 

We collaborate with an artist or someone with a specific interest that we meet, which we then translate into a workshop. These workshops sometimes turn out to be not as popular, which we see is part of our workshop development. It is ok sometimes that workshops do not work out. We use them as learning experiences and do better in the future. 

We celebrate the fact that when people come to us to learn, we facilitate that through not only giving the information but by also providing an activity to apply the knowledge. Some of the best workshops I have experiences (Elise) are the ones with a simple skill being taught but with the added artistic layer that the specific artist, expert, specialised person brings to the workshop.

COVID

Since March 2020, we have been confronted with hosting workshops with changing measures. We took this as a design challenge and looked at how we could still provide shared learning experiences in times of distance.

When the first lockdown started we, unfortunately, had to cancel all our workshop except the Open Aroma Lab. We found a way to work with two time slots and a maximum of four participants.

When in June 2020 we could open our doors again to host workshop participants, we had to learn how to deal with Covid by observing how people behaved during the workshops. First of all we had to decrease the maximum participation number of all workshops. Many of them were max. 12-15 participants, now our max. had to be 8-10 people. We found a way to re-organize workshops spaces with 1,5 distancing. We also adopted a new welcoming ritual which consisted of asking health questions and disinfecting participants hands with alcohol spray. At times when the measures were stricter, we also asked people to wear a face mask and disposable gloves. The rules change frequently and as workshop producer, it is good to keep ontop of these rule changes and discuss what can be done to follow the guidelines.

In 2022, we used the fact that a lot of these workshops were educational and therefore could run during the time that the cultural sector was closed. Mediamatic is an art organisation that has both educational and cultrual events and workshops. This was one way we could continue with our program. My suggestion would be have in writing clear guidelines for the tutors to take when teaching the workshop and communicate them in the pre-mails to the participants well in advance. This way everyone can come to the workshop knowing what to expect. 

Getting Started 

First thing you should do is to add the workshop@mediamatic.nl to your Chrome browser user. 

1. Open Chrome
2. Click your little icon on the top right corner of your browser (should have your initial letter) 
3. Click "add" 
4. It takes your through the process of adding a new profile
5. Workshop gmail logins can be found on the password page.
6. With the workshop profile, you should get all the bookmarks useful for workshop management.
7. You can now easier switch between your personal profile and workshop profile! 
   
   

Attend workshops!
I found that the best way to get into this job was attending workshops as assistant at least once per workshop. This is a great way to start building rapport with the workshop tutor and have a better understanding how and if everything is working well. But make sure not to also have enough weekends off and delegate assistance as much as you can.

Read all the knowledge pages!
There is a lot of knowledge written on this website. Be careful to check when it was written or edited however as there is also a lot of out of date knowledge. You can see this at the bottom of each page where you can see who last edited the page and the date. 

Write a list of questions!
The best way to learn about where the holes are in your knowledge is by writing down your questions and finding what is not clear in the knowledge pages. These questions can then be asked during the workshop meeting/team meetings. 

Introduce yourself!
There will be an introductory email to staff at Mediamatic when you arrive, but not to workshop tutors (I will try to change this (Elise)). It is a nice idea to introduce yourself to all the workshop tutors that are currently working at Mediamatic. 

Day to day workshop management

Workshop management requires you to have an overview of multiple simultaneously running projects, workshops and events. I've found it easiest to have a weekly reoccurring event in my google calendar for things that take place every week, e.g. sending of the pre-mails, setting up weekend workshops etc. Below you will find what I did on daily/weekly basis. You will find many of these tasks also overlapping with the per workshop production plan. You will of course find your own way of managing workshops which you can adapt to your own method.  

Daily tasks

1. In the morning, check the workshop email. 
2. If it’s about cancellation/rebooking, always refer to the ticket terms and conditions. 
3. Advertisements requests don’t have to be replied most of the time, or they can be left to be replied later.
4. Collaboration requests: If the collaboration request is interesting, bring this up in the workshop meeting with Willem & Jans.

Weekly tasks

1. In the beginning of the week: do the finances from the weekend before. Here is how to do this.
2. Workshop schedule check
• Check the workshop schedule in the beginning of the week, and make a planning in your calendar for your what needs to be done before the weekend workshops and when to do it. 
3. Check participation 
• Check three days before the workshop. 
• If the minimum is not reached, cancel the workshop. 
• Minimum can be found on Stager on the main page of the event, under “visitors expected”. The minimum is also stated on the event page in the workshop calendar. 
• Communicate with the tutor how many people are coming to the workshop 3 days before. Send the tutor the assistant’s phone number/email.
• If in doubt whether to cancel or not, call/email the tutor to find out if they are okay with a lower participation
4. Send pre-mail to participants
• Send 2-3 days before the workshop. 
• Pre-mail templates are on Stager mailing templates. 
• If you’re not sure how to do this, find out how on Stager knowledge page.
5. Workshop space set-up
• 1-2 days before the workshop check that the space is clean and set up. 
• Bring the workshop box for the specific workshop down to the room and leave it there for the workshop assistant to set up. Find more baout workshop assistant roles here. 
• Double check the content of corona box in the project room (should include: rubber gloves, hand towels, alcohol spray, health check question list, workshop set up sign, disposable mouth masks, 2x face shields for tutor/assistant (in case they want to use them)).
• Bring the corona kit (red box) to the workshop space. 
• You can use the plastified sign on the corona box to indicate other people using the space to keep it tidy.
6. Check if there are any “special” ticketing cases 
• Check 1-2 days before the workshop
• Do this via the Stager ticket management of the event (e.g. Bon, guest tickets). 
• Inform the assistant about this and let them know that the assistance checklist has different ticket scenarios at the end.
7. Check-in with an assistant - remind them to take the key!! (from the locker with the wooden key chain). Remind them to check that the sliding opens when they call so they can open up for the workshop as they are usually on the weekend. 
8. Make sure collections are up-to-date: here
   
   

Open Aroma Lab

1. Check the Aroma Lab attendance on Wednesday. 
2. Send pre-mails to participants.
3. Send a pre-mail to the Aroma Lab team telling them how many people to expect and if there are any different ticketing senarios. Also tell them if there is something happening at Mediamatic at the same time, e.g. a gentle disco, drinks, a large rental, bloggers bar camp, renovations, etc. 
4. Open Aroma Lab runs itself very independently, Frank check Stager himself and does his own set-up. If he have questions, he will come to you.
   
   

Meet A Maker

1. Check if there are any Meet a Maker events that week. If not, no further action is required.
2. If yes, send the pre-mail to the participants 2-3 days before the session.
3. Email tutor how many participants in which time slots they can expect.
4. You can see here how to make a meet a maker event. 

Meetings

It's important to stay connected with other departments or "islands" as we sometimes call them. Some of these can change depending on the stage of the year. For example, during autumn with Dutch Design Week and Museum Night, some meetings are shorter due to the high production time period. These were the weekly meetings I was having with others:

• Team meeting (1,5 hr) and "wie doet wat" meeting (about how the team is doing) (1 hr) involving all staff members in management position.
• Communication meeting with Communications manager (1 hr)
• Workshop meeting with Events Manager (1 hr)
• Workshop meeting with Directors (Willem & Jans) (1 hr). It's good to prepare this meeting with questions you have or topics you want to discuss. Workshop intern should join these meetings too. 
• Intern check-ins (1-2 hrs/week depending on how many interns are involved with workshops)
• Monthly: Organization meeting (2 hrs). Time reserved to discuss any topics to do with organization.

We wish you lots of luck and we hope you will enjoy this exciting job!

Lots of love,

Anne Lakeman
Iines Råmark
Elise Chalcraft