History Book of BEST

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Saugestad. Together they started the adventure of LBG Trondheim!

As one of the founding LBGs, Trondheim was very active from the beginning. It also helped that Ida became the first international president of BEST at the 1st General Assembly in

Berlin in 1989. In connection with the International Student Festival in Trondheim (ISFiT), we organised the 3rd GA in 1990 and our first summer course in 1991, “High Speed Marine

Vehicles”. Our LBG has arranged a summer course yearly ever since with a huge success! We are constantly looking for new challenges and in 2008 we organized a winter course in additiontoourannualsummercourseandthisyearwe’llbehavingourfirstLocalEngineering

Competition (LEC).

In addition to the annual summer course we have organised several Regional Meetings (RM’s), two Short Intensive Trainings (SIT), four WorkShops, a trainer’s camp (TRAP) and a TrainShop during our 20 years as an LBG. A total of five international presidents have been from LBG Trondheim, but in the recent years our LBG has not been that active on the international level.

We are now a great big, loving family of 23 members and are hoping we will be able to stay this way and continue to develop. By having all these members we are able to do so much more and our potential as an LBG is higher than ever before! So watch out, you haven’t seen the last of LBG Trondheim yet!

Story of LBG Turin

As BEST Turin is one of the groups that founded BEST in 1989, it is not an easy task to summarize so many years of experiences, events and good times.

We can start by saying that even before 1989 BEST Torino was already active. In fact, in 1988 it was one of our members, Giuseppe Margriote, the one who proposed the letter “B” to enhance the original idea of an “EST” Organisation, giving birth to what we all know today as “BEST”.

BEST Torino legal statute was approved in 1991 and since then it’s been on a continuous and successful road full of the BEST spirit!!! We’ve had 6 members present in 6 BEST international boards. BEST Torino hosted 2 General Meetings: GA in 1994 and the first PM in 1998. In 1996 BEST Torino became “nurse” of BEST Milano. Our first summer course was organized in 1992 and from 2002 courses have been organized on a yearly basis. In

2005 the first edition of the mythical Alpine JAM took place, and now it’s a tradition in which hundreds of BESTies take part every year in the scenario of the Alps.

2007 is a double-checked year in our calendar as it was the peak of BEST Torino activity. We organized the first no-fee JAM in coordination with the winter Universiade, reaching there

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something bigger by themselves, the first summer course was held. Without the wisdom and experience that has been collected ever since, this first course turned out to be a lot about improvising, and cooking... and in the end the organizers had learned a lot about how to plan the budget more wisely for following years. The course was another important milestone for the members of the Uppsala group. After becoming a full member in GA 2000 in Budapest, LBG Uppsala organized a summer course every year, overcoming problems with a continuous lack of human resources. The courses were mostly focusing on renewable energies, a subject that is still in these days making Uppsala’s courses among the most popular. More than once, our LBG has been number 1 on the list of number of applications received.

Eventually the group grew a little bigger and became a separate legal entity, independent from the student union. This made certain management and accounting activities easier to perform. The group had now started to arrange cultural exchanges. In year 2003 LBG

Uppsala organised its first RM and a few years later, a Board meeting (in 2005). Getting closer to present time, membership has now soared, as more and more Swedish students have discovered the beauty and charm of BEST spirit. A peculiar feature of this LBG is that, unlike some other LBGs, it predominantly consists of local Swedish students.

At JBT 2008 an old tradition started to receive some new attention, when BESTies from Uppsala thought it started to feel a bit old to be thought of as the LBG of a city with a funny name (that you can make funny songs out of) decided to do something different. The Uppsala dance was already there, as a part of the Uppsala engineer students’ identity, all it needed was some devoted dancers of the LBG to bring it with them to internal events and start sharing this “modern traditional” dance, which was lately dubbed as “Uppsala dance”. It reached its pinnacle in GA 2009, Budapest, where Nordic BESTies trained by LBG Uppsala rocked the Speakers’ corner. And so the golden green hoodies rocked on, and on, and on...

and they all lived happily ever after.

Story of LBG Valladolid

In 1993, a Hungarian Erasmus student decided to move to Spain and bring to Valladolid not only lots bottles of Palinka but also his BEST spirit. As a result, a small group of students organised an unofficial Spring Course. Few months later, Valladolid decided not to live on the wrong side of the law anymore and became Baby member in GA 1994-Timisoara. Even the so-called Los Mosqueteros (The Musketeers) joined the association for such a good purpose.

Thanks to those initial efforts, others made by lots of students later and our Nurse LBG Barcelona, LBG Valladolid became Full Member in GA 1996-Tallin.

The association started growing, organizing all kind of BEST internal and external events and taking new challenges like the first edition in 1999 of its well-known job fair, FiBEST.

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courses, 7 Cultural Exchanges, 2 WorkShops, Regional Meeting, Presidents Meeting, the first

Summer Jam and many Motivation Weekends, these are just some of the events what we organized and what made us stronger and more open-minded.

Now we have 25 enthusiastic members (mostly girls) and it doesn’t matter what will happen,

WE WORK HARD, PARTY HARD!

Story of LBG Vienna

The story of BEST in Vienna is as old as BEST: some people from Vienna participated at BEST’s first general assembly (GA) in Berlin in 1989. They liked the atmosphere and volunteered to organise the next meeting in Vienna. So the second GA of BEST took place in Vienna 29th of October - 3rd of November 1989. There the first statutes of BEST were written and the idea of summer courses was born. There were discussions about whether BEST should be political and representative or not; it was decided that BEST would be a nonpolitical and non-representative organization, a decision the student union Vienna University of Technology didn’t agree with, and therefore left the General Assembly and decided not to join BEST. This meant that there was no BEST in Vienna until...

...in 2001 two BESTies, Thomas from Copenhagen and Mattias from Lund, came to Vienna to study here as Erasmus students. They promoted BEST and got some Vienna students interested. That led to the first meeting of BEST Vienna on 13th of January 2002. People were enthusiastic about the idea of BEST and so BEST Vienna got started in 2002: we elected our first board, created our very own logo and officially registered BEST Vienna as an organisation in Austria and we became BEST Observer on the GA in France.

In 2003, on GA Gabcikovo we became a baby member of BEST which enabled us to organise our first external event: The International BEST Symposium (now called “BEST Symposium on Education”) held in September 2003. Due to its success we were elected full member of BEST on GA Oresund in 2004. Since then we are an active group: we organised nine external events for students from all over Europe, including five academic events, two hiking courses and two skiing courses in the Austrian Alps, and also nine internal events where BEST members including ourselves have worked on developing our organisation. We also have done a lot of local events to promote BEST amongst Viennese students - and let them have a little fun plus get them interested in tasting Europe.

BEST Vienna traditions

Burning Manner

The most traditional party on each BEST event is the international evening where we

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`star` in the native language

Yildiz stopped crying, and began to observe the group. Day by day that group was bringing something new to home everyday. The baby began to grow up and started to learn new stuff. Days and more days had passed. One day, they took the baby to Tallinn... Some of them were saying `uu, I am not sure about you, but we will see if you can speak or not`...

Yildiz learned that being a baby was about `the ability of speaking` and it was the time to show its skills. A man put Yildiz in a new, very big square in front of 78 grown-ups, which they were calling it as a `plenary`. They watched it for an hour, and finally the baby was able to speak. The first thing he spoke was the code name of the wizard group: BEST.

Yildiz had become a real baby at that time. It was 7th of May, 2008.

Story of LBG Zagreb

LBG Zagreb comes into being with the beginning of the year 1998, as an act of enthusiasm of students of Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of

Zagreb. In the year 1999, due to a further initiative taken, BEST Zagreb becomes officially established as an organization. The story starts back in 1998, when a group of students from Zagreb take part in GA held in Cluj-Napoca and Zagreb earns itself an Observer membership status.

In months that follow, LBG Zagreb gets the opportunity to present its plans for growth of local group, thanks to Ivan Petrovic and his participation as a guest on Ljubljana SC in Summer 1998, as well as next year on GA in Lisbon. This is when it becomes a Baby Member, nursed by LBG Ljubljana. In June 1999, Zagreb gathers Founding Assembly and gets officially registered as student union under the name “Bratstvo Europskih Studenata Tehnologije - Zagreb”. Later that year, LBG Zagreb successfully launches its first project that takes form of a WorkShop.

Having been recognized as a highly motivated and ambitious team, LBG Zagreb obtains a full membership of BEST during the GA in Sweden in 2000. Same year in August the first

Summer Course “B-connected (New Technologies in Telecommunications)” is organized. Over the years, the organization keeps on growing, both in terms of a number of projects carried out and a list of members. With 44 active members today, LBG Zagreb also counts more then 120 alumni, all of them together contributing to realization of 47 projects in total.

Among them, Zagreb is particularly proud to be known as the very first organizer of BACo, back in 2005, as well as adding a new dimension to Jamboree by accepting all the applicants to that event in year 2002 by which turning it into a Jamboree we know today.

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Regions

The World is flat!

And so was the structure of BEST in the beginning. We had the LBGs on the one plane, independent and working according to some written rules that they didn’t understand so much, and the International Management on the other plane, trying to make strategies and develop LBGs without having much knowledge of their real needs.

These 2 planes, although ideally should have been joint, were almost parallel. This is a conclusion that was reached in a Discussion Group in PM 2000.

They also concluded that the 2 planes need each other to survive. The international level cannot exist without LBGs, and the LBGs need the international coordination to promote and sustain their events. Therefore, even though the 2 planes have complementary goals, conflicts of interests should be avoided.

Most of these conflicts were the result of short-term problems that were preventing the acceptance of long-term ideas and projects. And this was because of poor communication. LBGs did not understand these long-term ideas, because it was communicated just in GMs, and just to one LBG member. And any continuity in discussions was deemed to die, as every GM you would get another LBG delegate.

Spreading this kind of information to the LBGs proved to be too much work for the Committees, so the board stepped in.

Splitting Europe

In 2001, the board divided Europe amongst themselves. Each of them took a certain region under their wing, where they would keep close contact with the LBGs, make sure local and international goals match, and communicate things in time so that people can process the information.

This division, however, was not clear and communicated publicly, nor was the same from one year to the next. Actually this flexibility of regions is still kept, as there is a fear of creating a third plane (or level) within BEST, or even having regional “opinions” in GMs. Of course, since all your fears have to come true, some LBGs started thinking it might be a good idea to have one board per region.

The boardies, however, were not the only ones splitting Europe. TIGro was doing it too. In about the same period (2001 - 2003) they created the Main Trainers. These were trainers that were communicating with their own set of LBGs regarding training needs in those regions.

During the Board Winter Meeting 2003 this overlapping of the regional boardie and the main trainer was spotted and corrected. A clear division of responsibilities was made, and the

Regional Meetings would now be prepared in cooperation by the two.