Hardball/Amable, Main Organizer at Mekka&Symposium'98 written on 18/apr/1998 by PJ Dynamix / Comic Pirates Related web-site: http://ms.demo.org We always ask ourselves how it might look behind the scenes on those parties. Due to that we've interviewed Hardball/Amable (PC) who obviously was an important person at this party. Hardball was one of the main organizers and we catched him at 16:00 o'clock for a spontaneous interview. He invited us to the organizer area, which was quite and a really good place to start with the interview... [Q]: PJ Dynamix / Comic Pirates [A]: Hardball / Amable [Q]: So, please introduce yourself. [A]: I'm known as Hardball / Amable and 22 years young. [Q]: How many people are organizing the Mekka & Symposium event this year? [A]: In total we're 52 people. Devided into four main-organizer, responsible for the whole event. 12 people are working in the network crew. 12 people work for the security. Some do the cutting of the videos, some organize the competitions and some clean the toilets :) Each of us has own jobs here. [Q]: How many visitors did you count so far? [A]: We're currently having about 750 visitors and around 50 who'd got free entrance. About 800 in total. [Q]: What does this party cost you? [A]: The party entrance fee and prices from sponsors will hopefully turn our financial-leck to zero. Round about 750 people payed DM 50,00 and as we're a non-profit organization we're not going to be rich after this party. [Q]: How about Sponsors? [A]: Creative Laps, SMC (for the network equipment), small local companies (for different giveaways). Main Sponsor is Creative Laps. [Q]: We heard you had a sponsor for a 2Mbit Internet Connection be they refused. What happened? [A]: There was even more than 2Mbit. The German Telekom promised us a 34MBit Uplink. So, we could have used the Backbone for surfing, but the German Telekom changed their structure and the competence changed to another department. We still could have used the uplink, but not the wire. That destroyed our plans. Now we're having a usual ISDN connection to T-Online, which surely isn't the best solution, but we have to live with that. [Q]: How close to the party was the refusal? [A]: Well, we applied an ISDN-line on thursday, connected on friday and works since saturday morning. Everyone here (connected to the network) can use IRC and FTP. [Q]: What works better than usually planned? [A]: The network works better than planned. And the party works better than planned, as there are enough visitors. Not only kids playing games, but people from the demoscene. Some more people wouldn't be bad, but we're still learning. [Q]: What does not work as planned? [A]: The power-suppy broke down several times. We're having three slots per table, but people connect three tables to one slot and then when someone's toasting his toast the whole line breakes down and then the next line, till the whole hall is without power. But since Saturday it works fine. [Q]: And with the competitions and deadline everything's with the timescale? [A]: We're having about three delays and yesterday it was confusing, but noone really matters. When we set the deadline to 18:00 o'clock, people come at 17:55 and ask how much time is left. People can't complain, as we're playing their rules and people play our rules. Right now, we're quite good with the timescale. [Q]: Did people complain? [A]: Yes, one music-track was lost and wasn't played in the competition. It must have been lost here, so the people got really angry. But noone can really complain, as we've removed all critics from last year, in special: toilets, sleep-places and showers. [Q]: Mekka & Symposium have been two different parties before. Why did you join together? [A]: I used to organize a pc-party with about 300 visitors and the rest from the four organizers organized an acorn, amiga, atari, c64 and pc party with about 500 visitors. Both parties were helt in the same building short time after each other. First we had a few problems, but we've finally noticed that we all want to organize a party and that's not bad at all, as now four people are sharing the compentence. [Q]: Last year, there was the siliconvention, which isn't held this year. What do you think? [A]: I wonder where all the people are. The organizers told us there were 250 people and logically they must have showed up here. We don't really care. The siliconvention was the second biggest flop in demoparties ever in germany. Obviously people from siliconvention came here, as you can see siliconvention T-Shirts. One of those said that this party is a flop, but it turned out that he was one of the siliconvention organizers. [Q]: Why is your party held on easter? Don't you think that lot's of people are on vacancy? [A]: You're right, but we think that most peoples easter-goal is to drive here. There's no other date, where you have four days behind each other for a party. I really miss a few faces from last year, but that must have something to do with this years vacancies. There's no negative report from mekka & symposium and I thought more people would return. [Q]: Why are there no day tickets? [A]: There are no day tickets! We can't control the people with day tickets and we can't walk through the lanes and check everyones bracelet. That would be real stress and we intentionally want to concentrate on the party. In our opinion people who really want to enter the party they pay the DM 50,00. Some decided not to pay and drove back home. [Q]: There was an online-reservation for the party, where is it gone? [A]: Yes, we had that, but it died because of inability. The person who masters the domain decided to change the provider and so few hundered emails didn't arrive. (ed: So not everything works as good as planned... :) ) [Q]: Atari can't be seen here! Any reason? [A]: We're having no atari competitions, i don't know the reasons. Personally I think, that we can't bring much for atari. Atari people usually prefer to visit private atari meetings, where only atari people are. So, atari people don't like parties like mekka & symposium. That's not positive or negative, but they can't do anything with this party. It's ok, we must live with that. [Q]: There's also no Acorn competition? [A]: Yes, due to less of interests. For e.g. we're having a win95 demo competition, and we got two entries. For acorn - I guess - we would have got zero. [Q]: About next year? Anything planned? You're going to do this again, don't you? [A]: Yes, sure! We have to seek for a new hall. We can use this hall again, but we're still looking for other (better) alternatives. Furthermore we have to see how our calculation works. Maybe we have to increase the entrance fee again. When we use the same hall with higher fee we have to bring more features. Last year, we had damage on the building for about DM 15.000,00 (sprayer, etc). This year we're not having that damage on the hall, but somehow we do not have a financial-reserve to calculate with or to plan the next years event. We're always starting with zero, which isn't that good. [Q]: Ok, we're done with that. Thanks a lot. [A]: Yes, that was fun. Thanks. We have to say thanks to Hardball, as this was my first interview since four years and as usual there was nothing planned. Anyway, that was fun!