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lovingbothMonday 20th October - time to work!
The 09:30 opening involves a couple of the organisers getting sweetly tearful - it's been around 18 months of work to get to this point - while thanking everyone involved. Usually, this would be at the end, but having it at the start definitely worked here.
One of the first bits of those 18 months involved Hilde and others doing 'mapping' work finding bi+ activists and organisations everywhere they could. The result was already clear at the start: this has been an astonishing bit of international community building.
One bit of evidence for that is that an 'answers submitted to a website appear as a word cloud' bit shows the 50ish non-organising attendees live in around 25 different countries around Europe / some Central Asian states that are former bits of the Soviet Union1 (I'll just say 'pan-Europe' from now!)
Another word cloud showed there were people who'd moved to the region from as far away as Syria, Palestine, Iran, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and South Africa amongst others.
After a break for coffee / chatting, there are three 90 minute sessions: racial inclusivity / sharing best practices for being included as bi+ / non-binary community. I go for the middle one, largely to see what other countries do about various things. A handful of issues are brought up - biphobia/invisibility in queer communities; funding; safe spaces for bi+ people to have informal gatherings; legislation; international collaboration; and getting started with bi+ - and four of those have smaller discussion groups.
There's a two hour break for lunch. There were sheets for people to pick two things from five or six options. Not everyone has done so and things are served in the hotel's dining space haphazardly: people looked at what the passing staff were carrying and said 'that's what I / someone else on the table wanted'. If you were sitting away from the kitchen entrance you might have to wait a while before any of them got to you. The food throughout was fine, even when it didn't look like you'd expect (the least liquid in a "stew" I can remember) and one lesson from this first lunch was that one option per meal was likely to be enough for me.
In the middle of the lunch slot, people who had part of their costs paid for could claim them. I'd self-funded the flight2 and the accommodation not at the hotel3 but had the conference cost4 covered (thank you!) and that entitled me to €80 for other expenses.5
During a quiet moment in the room used as their office, I chatted with the organisers from the Dutch national bi+ organisation. If I remember rightly, the conference cost about €50k to put on (exclusive of staff time, I think). To give a comparison, that's around ten times the cost of (non-residential) BiCon 2024 and 2025 combined, or just under the cost of (residential and catered) BiCon 2015 that had around eight times as many people. I'd already knew that in some ways this was a gold-plated event - there was an official photographer wandering around! - but paying for a bunch of people's travel and accommodation quickly adds up.
I am jealous of how much money Bi+ Nederland has. Last year, they had an income of just over €600k and had the equivalent of around 4 full-time paid staff in addition to paying well over €100k for freelance work. Amusingly, in turn they are jealous that the €30k or so that Continuity has is ours and we did not have to write any grant applications for it or spend many hours writing reports to funders.
The first afternoon session was a choice between going through the document that's the proposed basis for the new organisation or a session on how Russian hate propaganda shapes attitudes. I was there to do governance stuff, so it was the first of those I did. An initial draft had had two online sessions discussing it, one in August I missed because of being busy and one in September. Amongst the things that have been really good about this process is that you could see the draft changing as a result of the consultation - it has felt like a genuinely collaborative thing - and various bits had changed again by this meeting.
So one example was that the original document said that members could come from a named list of countries. Apart from having the issue that Northern Ireland was listed as being separate to the United Kingdom of Great Britain (sic) in that list for spurious reasons, countries come and go. Oh, and "France" is in the Americas and Pacific as well as the bits you see on a map of Europe. So a geographical definition was suggested. What turned up at the meeting was 'Council of Europe plus four named countries in Central Asia', and there was more debate over the course of the whole meeting on that I'll cover in another post.
The first 90+ minutes of discussion ended just before the main point of controversy, but did establish what one suggestion was actually trying to say! I'd wrongly thought that 'within six months of a normal meeting' meant the six months before it, not the six months after it.6
It was part of when you could have an Extraordinary General Meeting. The argument for having any sort of limit on when this could happen is a budgetary one: having this sort of meeting isn't cheap and takes time to organise. (Just have it online!) But in the end, and I can't remember just when we decided this, the idea of a time limit was just removed rather than putting it to a vote at the end and recommending that people say no to it. If one is needed, it's needed...
After another coffee break, the second session was choice between a 'queer walking tour' of the city lead by a local or me talking about running bi+ events.7 With half the conference off walking, it meant a select audience for me. I learnt stuff from what they said and I hope they learnt from what I said too.
There was dinner at the hotel that was a bit more of a buffet. Having had enough to eat at lunch, I just had some dessert and, after some chats, went back to the flat to catch up on sleep.
Tuesday 21st October - more work!
First off was a small panel talking about the research that's been part of the project, from the mapping work onwards.
The other morning slot was the second of the three polishing sessions, or 'young, queer and away from home' or one on bi+ masculinity. I'd particularly have liked to have gone to the latter - this was a space where masculine-presenting people were a distinct minority.
The posted minutes don't say just how far the second polish got, but it was soon onto the most controversial bit: on a board of up to nine people, how many can have a non-bi+ identity?
The initial draft had suggested having a choice between 'none' and 'no more than 20%'. Unfortunately, the explanation of the latter then suggested you could have two on a board of eight.8 By the time of the meeting, the suggestion was a choice between 'none' and 'a minority'. Unfortunately, the explanation of the latter included the same 'maximum of two on a board of eight or nine' example, but of course three and four respectively are both still minorities. The session decided to propose three options: none, one or two, or any minority, but recommending the third.
Again, one noticeable thing is that although there was disagreement over this, it was all respectful disagreement and there wasn't any shouting. As it's self-declared identity at the point of standing and there's explicit acknowledgement that people would not be kicked off if that changed at any point, I don't think it ultimately matters which one was chosen not least because you / your group or organisation has to be actively doing bi+ work to attend / vote / stand, but I can see why some people don't want a group of gay men taking over yet another organisation and hope this will help prevent that.
I don't think we got as far as the next controversial bit before it was time for lunch.
The first slot in the afternoon was a choice between the third polishing session, this time not as a hybrid session, Christian Klesse on transnational organising, and 'short stories from "Bi".
I wasn't particularly surprised when the polishing hadn't got to the end of the documents by the time the slot finished, so a dedicated handful of us extended it into the second slot, when others went on the reprise of the walking tour or 'from critical bi+ theory to practice'.
There was some time after it finished, so I helped do some "I promise I am not going to change the meaning" edits to improve bits of the grammar9 before the walk to the evening's dinner in an Old Town restaurant.
On the way, the organiser leading the group and I talked about our usual walking speed being rather faster. Google Maps had the walking time as about 25 minutes and that's roughly what it took. (It was a minute or two longer, I think, due to the group being split up when crossing a couple of roads and so the front end waited for the rest to cross.) On the way back alone, it took me 14 minutes...
The meal itself was fine. 'Lithuanian' food translated as things like breaded chicken and chips with a cheese-based sauce for the meat-eaters, and at the start various of the organisers were visibly annoyed that the group was split across several tables with another small group in the room: this wasn't what they expected or had asked for!
The rest of us did not care: people were talking happily with the people they were with. I was at the bottom end of a T-shaped couple of tables that sat something like fourteen people. The six of us at my end chatted and ate away - we couldn't hear what the other end were saying anyway - and it was pleasantly the furthest away from a small band doing Lithuanian folk songs. (They were fine, and very probably were part of the deal with the place, but I just preferred not having them next to our table.)
As an organiser, only you know what could have been at your event. Everyone else is enjoying themselves going, 'A bi+ event! With people!' (And in this case, 'free food and drink!')
Evening chat included about a good hour or so with someone who hadn't gone to the meal as well as being told that I look just like a Swedish actor.
Wednesday 22nd October - finishing off
The first two hours were getting through a series of votes on various sections. All of the recommendations won, but the five where the vote wasn't (almost) unanimous are interesting enough to have a separate post on them. Very impressively all thirty eight votes were got through in the allotted time, helped by the way that there was no discussion or debate on any of them - you were expected to have attended the governance sessions or at least read the proposals in advance.
Then there was an hour closing session, where again there were some tears, lots of thanks, and also a large gold foil 'popper' going off.10
And after a final lunch, that was it. After some more chatting, I went off to a very good modern art gallery while many of the others went to the start of the ILGA Europe conference that was happening on the other side of the Old Town.
Overall
Like I say, this was an astonishing example of international community building. Congratulations to all the organising team.
Having the amount of money they had helped: it meant a bunch of people got flights and/or accommodation and/or conference fees paid. How many, I'm not sure, but my guess would be somewhere between a third and a half.
It's not necessarily a model I'd want to follow, because without large grants 'gold plated' events are not sustainable and this was one of those. It was a catered hotel event - and hotels tend to go 'ker-ching!' when told you want to have a conference there because they're used to businesses that don't really care about the costs. I would never ever ever had considered having an official photographer, for example.11 But this was Bi+ History being made and the results are very good to look at.
It was also the least fluffy bi conference I think I've ever been to, but that's entirely OK: it was clear from the first mention of it that this was a work event much more than a social one, and attendees were picked according to what they could contribute rather than 'anyone and everyone' or 'first come' basis. And that definitely worked.
I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Oh, since more or less finishing this, I see that the two people who led the governance process have published their version. It's great, and I'm not just saying that because there's a flattering picture of me in the middle of it :)
1. I'd thought the reason they're part of ILGA Europe etc is around safety, but it turns out that they'd prefer to be part of 'European' organisations rather than 'pan-Asian' ones.
2. An obscenely low £61, a quid over twice the cost of the train to and from the airport.
3. Just over £370, but mostly because I had eight nights in Vilnius rather than three and at one point, the plan was for L to come too. Staying at the hotel effectively cost €290 in a single room for four nights, so more per night than I paid. There was also the option to share for €40/night.
4. €250, or about £220.
5. In the end, I spent around £95 during my time there.
6. It 'obviously' couldn't have been both: with one normal meeting a year, you'd almost always be within six months of the previous or the next one.
7. This is how we realised the published programme was wrong - when registering, there was a form for signing up for this walk on Monday or Tuesday. I was about to go for Tuesday anyway when one of the people on the desk mentioned that I had no choice because of when my session was scheduled. "No it's not, it's in the first afternoon slot, look..." "Ah."
8. I do wonder if I was the only person to go 'that's 25% non-bi+ identified...' I should also note that I'm presenting this in a slightly different way: the text was around having all or a majority of people being bi+ identified, but this is the way the discussion in the session was actually framed.
9. I tried doing some typing on governance lead Soudah's laptop with a French keyboard but gave up. Having a few of the letters change position wasn't a problem, but what sort of keyboard has a key that has both full stop and semi colon on, but makes you press shift for the one everyone uses the most? :) :) More seriously, given that English was most people's second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth language, the other way I felt a minority there was in my monolingualism.
10. There was a noise warning, but I'd have moved away to avoid the smell if I'd realised what the noise warning was about: the smell of these really irritates my nose. Fortunately, this one wasn't too bad.
11. Even before he was occasionally irritating! Presumably being more used to doing weddings, he wandered around coming into sessions, walking around the room one way or another taking photos from various angles of various people, then leaving and coming back later to repeat that. Had he come to my one, I'd have been very tempted to tell him he had two minutes and that was it. In the end, he went with the first of the walking tours and, as mentioned, the results are great to see.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-11 03:02 pm (UTC)It’s shiny that you get to use your organiser-geeking for like a thing you aren’t going to have to be like (one of) the main organiser(s) for. And that’s like so generally Awesome
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-11 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-13 09:23 pm (UTC)"The French are so fond of long, rambling sentences that when you use a French keyboard, you have to press the shift key to get a full stop – yet the semi-colon is right there." says Sam Taylor in an FT article entitled New word order.
"The letter ù (u-grave) also has its own key, even though it is used in only one word in the entire French language - où, meaning where."