History Book of BEST

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Last time the website was redesigned was in January 2008. This time, the WebTeam worked hard and fulfilled their goal: merging of all BEST systems in the public website was a success then, BAS, BCC and BEST Teachers’ Area worked properly, making possible to promote only one website at all our stakeholders.

Article written by Mirela Andriescu based on the wiki written by Dani Buxerres and Nico

Deblauwe

CreativiTeam Working Group

This WG aimed at improving the WIND (Where Ideas Never Die) initiative, how to manage ideas and discussions happening on WIND mailing list and how to increase creativity. The initiative was good but only few members joined the team. Even if Creativiteam mailing list is not active anymore, the ideas keep popping up and the BEST spirit never dies!

Description of CreativiTeam mailing list

Guide Project

This project is a virtual working group meant to guide all the students of our universities through the cities of Europe. The outcomes off all the work was suppose to be a Complete Travelling Guide for European Students. This way, BEST could help not only BESTies but every student that needed the info. This couldn’t be done without the help of many members that thought of the content, Information Technology Committee (ITC) to create an interface for the guide and the LBGs to implement it for their city and complete all of the fields. Using this facility means there is only one guide for the whole Europe!

The project evolved during the years and the fields were updated; now they contain information about money issues, weather, hostels, places to have fun, means of transport and any information needed to enjoy the town. From time to time, the LBGs update the information so it is always accurate.

Article written by Mirela Andriescu

Chapter 5:

BEST Organisation

COMMITTEES of BEST

Information Technology Committee (ITC)

Communication and IT in the pre-ITC era

The communication was initially done through fax and they had sessions on GA which meant plenty of papers. Then short emails appeared. In the beginning the e-mail communication was very weird because people had little and restricted access. Grenoble was more or less a centre and everyone was sending applications for Vivaldi. The first program was written in C and everyone inserted the application in the computer for two days and then they got some results. In 1996 (SPOC & BTNC) the first committees appear with the idea to have an on-line network. ITC started with a need of informational system (messenger pigeons were tired).

Forming of the committee and its pioneers

The IT Committee was formed at BEST’s 15th GA in Belgium and its framework was adopted oneyearlater,attheRomanianGA.Itstasksaretomaintainanddevelopthetechnicalfacilities that BEST needs. The following persons have been actively involved in the first activities of the committee: Cristian Bogdan (Cristi), Paolo Cravero (Jumpinghologram), Thomas Laroche (Toto), Evangelos Sakkopulos (Vangelis), Marta Sabau (Dog). This committee is referred to as both technical committee and ITC.

History of IT infrastructure

In 1997 a technical revolution happened with an EVS - Electronic Voting System. The Internet domain started, a version in Lotus Notes started by a French girl, but it wasn’t used in production and the base for ITC - more like a technical use. Somewhere between 1998 and 1999 a new server started to work - name was Anna. The machine is still in the BEST office in Tallinn (offline). The machine ran DNS servers and mailing-lists.

Zoltan bought the server Malaka (Stockholm) four days before GA 2000 and it’s running at the moment. The HDD crashed in 2002 during the mandate to 2003 (Priit’s mandate). The server ran Lotus Notes with the first PA (or the second official implementation). Sometime in the last part of 2003, Tallinn was bought without any official decision from the board. Tequila was bought, fortunately, one month before the crash on Malaka.

History of technologies

Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes was first technology used by BEST. Notes based systems allow the maintenance of several databases, both discussion and archives, with a customizable access rights list. Moreover a dual interface is possible: the same database can be accessed both via a Lotus

Notes client and a Web browser, without losing flexibility and features. Unfortunately the

Web interface of Lotus Notes systems cannot be completely customized; therefore we have

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to stick to its “empty”, self-generated, Web pages. On the other hand, while access rights can be set in a very precise way even for every single registered person, the spirit is not to restrict people from putting in / seeing data.

Makumba

Sometime around ‘99 the first version of Makumba appeared (it was called Meta-Data and later Macumba) with implementation in PA and Johnny. Around 2000 helpdesk was done using PHP and Makumba started to be used in 2001 in the PA. Idea of Makumba is that all code would be implemented with one programming language which is easy to learn and use. Makumba is implemented as JSP tag lib. There was a joke about a French fighter pilot crashing his plane in the jungle. The natives found him and gave him the choice “Macumba or death”. He bravely chose death, so they gave him “Macumba till death”.

Karamba

Dare to imagine: One single username and password to remember for the whole system

(including Johnny, Minerva, archives, address book); each member sees what he/she is most interested in (committee members see their committee-related stuff, LBG members see info about his/her LBG, see who else is online at the moment, each sees his own calendar (with marked common events) and to-do list, all emails sent to him/her trough best.eu.org mail servers. In 2000 Stefan Beabler, Thomas Laroche, Cristian Bogdan brought idea of Karamba, as a dream of perfect informational system. Karamba would be the new private area of BEST. Currently it is patched up of several systems, using different tools, offering different reliability and interface. In the first stage all currently used systems will be integrated into a common database, enabling us to share the information among these, avoiding redundancy and conflicting data and ease the access via uniform interface to all of it.

Web applications

Private Area

The Private Area is the tool that every new member of BEST wants to use. Its history dates from 1995 when members of the Technical Committee prepared some static pages that evolved in 1998 into Lotus Notes components. Starting from the list of active members of BEST all around Europe, in GA 1998 the Information Technology Strategy Group, presented a proposal consisting in gathering all of this information in a database. Information related to

BEST members (such as names, e-mail, passwords, study information etc. etc.) was defined and structured. After GA 1998, a registration page was available for all BEST members that allowed them to apply to internal events. Until PM 1998 BEST had a functional mail exchanger. All of these systems had basis in Lotus Notes. Because Lotus Notes wasn’t totally under control, pages were implemented in Java/SQL, merging all the systems (Johnny,

Minerva, Archives, address book) into one. The new PA was launched in November 2002.

Chapter 5:

BEST Organisation

ITC Meeting Patras, 2002

Johnny / BAS

BEST Application System, also known as BAS, is the newer name of Johnny, the online application that enabled students to apply to our events online through the internet. The name started being used after PM 2004, where there was a proposal to change its name to its current one, so it represents better what it is, and is also easier for people to understand and remember it. Since BAS was the continuation of Johnny, all its features were kept the same; only thing that changed was the name (in fact, in the Makumba Data Definitions, the system is still called Johnny. It wasn’t changed due to re-factoring difficulties).

Minerva / BCC

The first idea of Minerva was born prior to the GA 1997, when the organizers were thinking of several ways of fundraising. They were thinking of creating a forum on the internet where students and companies could meet. Because of the few time left, the GA organizers couldn’t implement their idea until the GA. Companies were pleased about the new approach. For BEST, this was a new way of collaboration with the companies... In 1998, a girl from

Bucharest finished implementing Minerva with Lotus Notes as her diploma project. The idea was good, but because Lotus Notes was not a language designed to supplement this features, the ITC members decided to drop the project in that format and turn to newer and user friendly technologies (Java and SQL) which let them do a better Web layout, and fully control the technology. In 2004 Minerva gets a new name: BEST Career Centre.

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Public website

The public website is the compilation of pages that provide information to the public about our organization. This information can be either about our activities, or services, or internal news, like elections or decisions made. Having said all these, the Public Website is a very useful tool to spread the information about BEST into the public. The first public website of

BEST appeared in 1995.

MarkeTeam (mT)

As all good stories get born in an unconventional way, this story is not an exception. This one came to life at London Luton airport while waiting for a flight to Istanbul, written on a piece of paper with an unsteady hand.

It all started in 1999 when Mitja Pirc became coordinator of the working group. It was the last year of the previous century when this new brilliant idea got born. At GA 1998 Lisbon, Mitja and Sten Ausburg started a group to begin developing marketing strategy for BEST. However, it seems that BEST was not prepared for such a big step forward yet, so markeTeam was limited to working on promotion materials. Still, at that time it was a huge step forward as the working group was created. They had a few meetings during 19992000 in Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Lisbon and Chania to work on different projects like BEST toolbox, logo redesign, promotion materials, ect...

Adler Looks Jorge from LBG Lisbon revealed the origin of the infoBox and toolbox:

“The toolBox and infoBox idea were discussed in Lisbon workshop’99. While Nicolas Chauveau worked on the infoBox, I worked on the toolBox. With the feedback of Anna Hakansson and Frederik Habils I collected the content and coded the website which was presented at PM 2000. With more feedback the complete version was presented and distributed in a CD at the next GA - GA2001 Ljubljana. It was a great challenge to get all the elements together and many collaborated.”

Time passed by and Yiannis Zevgolis took over a group, which was already turning into a “CMT under trial period”. At GA 2000 in Sweden, the “worm” concept was presented for the first time. You may wonder, “The worm, what the flower?” Well, this was the first effort to change the BEST logo which had been there already for some time. At that time it became obvious for marketing people in BEST that the logo we had until then was not really accomplishing to its role , it was complicated, its message was not thoroughly clear and , what is probably the worst, the logos were different among LBGs. Of course, there were many BESTies with strong sentimentality towards the old one and unfortunately the brand new CMT, still at trial period and totally unprepared to face LBGs, didn’t manage to push the idea through.

Well, as every group has its identity, mT needed a logo to represent theirs. It couldn’t be

Chapter 5:

BEST Organisation

any different for a CMT, whose purpose is to take care of the image of BEST. markeTeam logo happened to be drawn on a napkin somewhere in February/March 2000 during a designer’s meeting in Ljubljana by Amand Gril. It was scanned, transferred to a computer and eventually adopted as the logo of our team.

GA Ljubljana arrived and Nicolas Chauveau became the coordinator of a freshly voted official

CMT, markeTeam. This moment was also a little bit stressing for Yiannis. Couple of hours before the ending ceremony he was informed that there is a tradition of all coordinators conveying a gift to the new coordinator. So, he had to come up with something and he had to do it fast. He went to his condo, opened his suitcase, trying to come up with something. The only thing he found that could fit the purpose was a pair of blue suspenders. Second option would have been a pair of used socks, or underwear. Nicolas would not have been too happy about those! So, Yiannis wrote his name upon a pair of suspenders and eventually, during that night, gave them to Nicolas. Since then every new coordinator gets those suspenders with the names of previous coordinators on.

Time went by and Stjepan Pavlek became the next coordinator. Thanks to him the “rainbow warriors” concept popped up. Since then markeTeam got an image of a funky and kinky CMT. We make sure to share a lot of affection with other CMT members. Pink is also a much desired colour for markeTeam member’s outfits. At this time the committee had realized that making a new image for the whole organization takes more than just presenting a new design solution developed by designers’ team. More effort was put into training BEST members regarding marketing matters. markeTeam started to prepare for the first marketing trainshop for LBGs.

MarkeTeam members in GA 2004 with BEST 15 year anniversary map

In the period of 2003-2004 Tarvi Olli started with the goal to establish the Common Image of

BEST. First step was to give BESTies PR & marketing training; PRIME (PR and Image Event, hosted by LBG Riga) trainshop was organised. Not only it broadened BESTies` knowledge, but it also gave a boost to the development of the committee itself. By the fall of 2003 the committee grew to 60 people with about 20 very active members. The Common Image was a broad idea and needed time to develop, however it was worth the effort. Materials started to look similar round corner design elements started to appear and definition of how to use the logo and official dark-green colour was voted on. BEST IRE was updated, outdated Graphical Profile from GA2000 was replaced by a new document describing the elements of logo, use of local symbol in the logo and the dark-green was voted to be part of the logo.

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MarkeTeam members in GA 2004 with BEST 15 year anniversary map

The year for Gregou (Gregoire Toussaint) started with a mandate from LBGs to start developing the image of BEST. After working on it for about one more year, just before GA

2005, markeTeam came up with complete set of common design elements that LBGs can/ should use in all materials: the Shields. It’s important to mention here Martin Varvas (Mumu), who played a huge catalyst role since 2004 till 2007 mainly as designer and conceptionist. That’s the time when shields and derivatives were made public.

At GA 2005 Chania, the next coordinator - Harry (Harilaos Vasiliadis) - became famous for his specific attitude. He had an idea joke with the LBGs in a bit weird way. He had a 5 minute long presentation and as he knew that his speech would take 4 minutes only, he decided to use that 1 minute for fun: he sat on a chair next to the table in the middle of the plenary with an orange CMT hat and a glass of frappe coffee, pretending to sleep lazily with 200 LBG eyes staring at him impatiently. After 55 seconds he stood up and said “... and that’s what I’ll be doing all year!” Afterwards, he explained it was joke and started presenting himself, but anyhow it seemed to have had an impact on how many red and yellow votes he got - Moral of the story: Don’t joke with the LBGs!

When Harilaos Vasiliadis took charge of the CMT another a big chapter of changes started. MarkeTeam and webTeam were merged and made a giant committee with around 80 members and many projects, some of them huge and important, like the Annual Report, and some smaller but still essential, like leaflets. Mumu was head of Corporate Identity. Katy Vanbrabant and Gregou were pushing the AR, trying to make it on time for the first time. Sylwia Besz was the HR back then and did a really good job with changing working structure of the committee. The structural change, making webTeam a “project” of the CMT

Chapter 5:

BEST Organisation

rather than a separate group, had some impact and caused conflicts. This change led to renaming the CMT, since GA 2005 the official name was PRteam. That’s also when the CMT coordinators were not board members anymore. Website redesign had started again and finished much later with a huge input from Marian Buhnici. That was also when the first market analysis was made by Harilaos to see how many students were interested in Career services (it was the time when CaSCo was closed).

The next one to lead the team was Marian Buhnici. Since his summer meeting the committee started to think more about what is actually PR and what is marketing. Since then every new markeTeam coordinator can expect the question “What is the difference between

PR and marketing?” at GA after his/her speech. The name of the CMT changed back to markeTeam and the committee started making steps towards becoming marketing and not just promotion committee. The first step from all of them was starting Market Research project (led by Wolfgang Vollenhofer). Another very important project for BEST that got started from this Summer Meeting at 2006 was the Visual Identity project (led by Christian

Banik). Even though it wasn’t officially the project of markeTeam it was mainly carried out by markeTeam members.

In 2007 Kluska (Katarzyna Sieklucka) was voted as the next coordinator. At that time Market

Research became one of the biggest projects in BEST. Overall in March 2008, after the interviewing process finished, markeTeam analysed gathered data. Also, Visual Identity project continued (this time with new leader: Marian Buhnici) and finally after 7 years of different attempts, at Presidents Meeting 2007 the Visual Identity of BEST was finally approved. Since then markeTeam have worked on its implementation in all promotional materials that have been produced. Kluska’s time had also lots of input to the traditions of the markeTeam. At beKNOWN3 Lexu (Alexandru Albu) and Marian brought the two unquestionable super hits to markeTeam the “gay bar” and “what what in the butt”. Since then, if you don’t understand something you always need to ask “what what?” There was also a new concept of a party introduced, called Mi Scusi. This is one of those non-existing CMT parties where everybody comes out extremely happy. And if you wonder where our beloved Pupi comes from, that’s beKNOWN3 invention as well.

Then, we reached to 2008-2009 period, where Diana Wosik became the coordinator. Annual

Reports on time finally, after a few years of timing problems - can be probably regarded as the biggest achievement. During this year Marketing Strategy (led by Mart Partna) has been developed as a project following the Market Research and aiming to take the promotion of

BEST and its services to the next level. As this was a year when BEST celebrated its 20th anniversary, some materials were made for this occasion and this is also when the history book idea popped up. BEST got the official YouTube channel and the official logo registration process started. As for some fun stuff, thanks to Annual Action Report of Kluska where she put a photo promoting BEST pins and lanyards, Diana’s boobs went famous over BEST with a name of “markeTits”.

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At the time of writing this story, Diana’s successor, and being a girl, a markeTits owner, can be already announced. It’s Teele Kundla, the gay bar party inventor, however for sure she will bring much more into the bright future of markeTeam.

External Events Committee (EEC)

External Events Committee (EEC) was the result of merging two other existing groups: Season Program Optimising Committee (also known as SPOC) and the Competition Working

Group (CWG). You have read about them in the previous pages, so you know the first dates back from 1996 and General Assembly Tallinn and the latter from 2002 and Presidents’ Meeting Bucharest.

In the General Assembly 2005 in Greece, CWG declared, in their half annual action report, the will to establish a strong and effectively working committee together with SPOC, as they have been dealing with BECs that can be counted together with the courses for the 3-course rule and 8-season rule. It was the beginning of the merging process of SPOC and Competition Working Group, by approving the framework of the new External Events

Committee. After a transition period, the committee and the working group were officially merged from the 01st of July 2005 on.

During the months after merging, EEC had one summer meeting (SM) in Timisoara which was very important as it intended to define working methods and a new structure for the new committee, since the current team came from the merging of 2 previous teams: SPOC and CWG. After this meeting, the framework of EEC was presented in PM 05 Ljubljana which includes the objectives of EEC. In a brief description, these objectives can be put in order as:

•Development of the issues of the complementary education that BEST is providing for students from BEST universities;

•Management of the Vivaldi procedure, including co-ordination of Vivaldi seasons

(Spring, Summer, Winter) and taking care of the tools used in Vivaldi procedure;

•Assurance and improvement of the quality of Vivaldi events;

•Providing support to LBGs organising an external event (courses, leisure events, engineering competitions, etc.).

This long history reveals that EEC and its ancients have always been the essential parts of BEST’s structure by means of the decisions, proposals and developments they put into practice. EEC does its work with the general responsibilities and heritage that got from the ex-teams: the continuous improvement, coordination and quality assurance of the BEST Programme of Complementary Education. These responsibilities will continue, even if the name and the framework of the committee change, but the main idea and the essential structure stay the same as well.

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EEC Summer Meeting Timisoara, 2005

EEC has kept the same objectives since 2005, but has always strived to find better ways to do it, mainly through innovative projects and processes that help developing external events in numerous ways. We will present them now, for you to get to know most of them:

The Vivaldi Seasons

In 1992 we started off with a single one: Summer Season. A few years later, it was decided to spread events to other periods of the year and Spring, Autumn and Winter Season which were implemented in 1998. Autumn Season was discontinued afterwards, but it had an impressive return from 2007 on and now we have four seasons, to cover all year: Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring. Each Season has a Coordinator to take care of it and support all events? Main Organisers in order to offer the best experiences to our students.

Vivaldi Handbook

The Vivaldi Handbook started with the beginning of our courses and has continuously been updated with new rules and guidelines proposed in GMs and approved by LBGs. Any BEST member (and mainly event organisers) can download it as a digital file, but we also offer them the chance to see it in EEC webpage in PA.

It is now in its current 3rd version, after an historical moment back in PM Valladolid 2007: it was then that we decided to split the Vivaldi Handbook into two volumes, one with the rules and one with guidelines. The purpose of this change was to make it more user-friendly and easier to consult.

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