FoAM v0 - Starlab Cultural Department - (March 2000 - September 2000)
(NOTE: in need of editing and fact-checking)
Members
- The members were
- Maja
- 2 other core members
- One of them, a scientist, moved away after bankruptcy because he needed more stability
- Lina, which stayed until 2011
- She was initially supposed to be here with a temporary contract to get a permit in Europe, and then start her own project
- Employees on a project basis
- Nik arrived just before bankruptcy
FoAM v1 - Starlab non-profit spin-off - (September 2000 - June 2001)
Structure type
- Starlab started a non-profit spin-off for proto-FoAM
Mission / Purpose
- The mission of this spin off was to
- Connect Starlab’s scientific research with art & culture¨
- Put Starlab’s research out in the world
- Explore forms at the frontier between art & technology
- Quickly make an organization in Belgium to receive money for the project (from Flemish government + Ars electronica) (October 2001)
- Create a structure to work with others in the Netherlands (April 2002)
Members
- The members were:
- Maja, Lina and Nik
- They spent their 6 first months without being paid as core members
- Maja helped design the mission of this spin-off, but they did not wanted her to be on the board
FoAM v2 - Non-profit with possible commercial spin-offs - (June 2001 - March 2010)
Structure type
- This structure was designed by FoAM’s crew, in the post-Starlab era
- A non-profit with possible commercial spin-offs
- Non-profit as a playground
- Develop services and products that could generate income
- Feed part of the money back in the non-profit
- The creation of spin-offs was not a core mission, but an economic feedback implementation to get revenue in case one was created
- Creating multiple FoAM studios rather than one big FoAM
- Other FoAM studios based their statutes on FoAM Brussels statutes, but adapting to local situation
Mission / Purpose
- The mission of this organization was:
- Still focused on art & technology
- However, opening to very broad collaborations across disciplines (not only art & technology) in an open way
- Wrapping it up, the new elements brought in in this new form of structure
- Broader than art & technology
- Open source
Members
- Formally, regarding membership
- It started with Nik, Lina, Maja on the board + 1 belgium person in the general assembly
- Strictly minimal legal requirement
- But funders did not like it
- Funding schemes pushed towards a certain kind of governance, even though it was not a legal requirement
- Informally, regarding membership
- Very horizontal way of working
- Everyone involved was invited to be part of the decision-making
- The group came together when it was needed, people not wanting to come did not
- All kind of decisions were taken in these assemblies
- Yearly meetings for organisational planning
- Meetings adressing project design & planning
- Before submitting to funders
- After getting the project, to decide how to work together
- Who would do what ?
- How would money be shared ?
- About 8-10 people were gathering around the table, up to 20 when gathering all the participants of an EU project
- It worked well when things were working, but an implicit power structure (mostly based on legal responsibilities) was revealed as soon as difficulties were showing up
- Maja was involved as implicit facilitor, usually also as money handler, too many hats !
- The core members realized they were exhausted, but without understanding why until 2009
- A lot of experiments ([?] on organizational re-design ? ) have been designed ever since
FoAM v2.1 - (2001-2005)
Activities
- The two main focuses were around
- Responsive environments
- Groworld, a project related to ecological art
- These focuses both started at the same time
- Most of the activities were about these two main focuses, and workshops with invited people
- No residencies at that time
FoAM v2.2 - (2006-2009)
Structure type
- FoAM became an artlab
- Which is a funding-driven organization
Mission / Purpose
- After the LETHA project (presented at the Fuckup night), the focus was re-directed on environmentally/socially sustainable projects
- For instance, luminous green
- Which arose in 2004-2005, but became a project officially afterwards
- The mission was redefined around a broader social/cultural/environmental sustainability vision
- The circles were opened further
- The mission also shifted contentwise
- The world situation was quite optimistic at that time
- Climate change was becoming mainstream
- Multidisciplinarity was being praised for in Davos
- And then, all came back as it was previously !!!
- This led to the “resilients/what if thinking” phase, which started late 2009
- In late 2009, FoAM became a lab for speculative culture
Activities
- The work was distributed between
- Projects
- Sharing knowledge and skills
- Both these aspects ran in parallel for a while, and then, both funding and people involved pushed FoAM’s own projects out
- There were mostly artists wanting their own projects to be supported
- This change was quite imperceptible, and not in the original mission
- At some point, FoAM was just about nurturing, and not any more 50 % own work as it used to be
- Pushed by EU, Flemish government and radical bureaucracy of funding, more and more reporting to do
- Agencies are outsourcing their reporting work on project-managing artist-run structures
- For instance for Grig, an EU project which lasted 3 years from 2006 to 2009
- [? TBChecked] FoAM had to manage 5 times its operational budget
FoAM v3 - Funding-induced structural change - (2010 - 2016)
Structure type
- A hierarchical structure was imposed by funding in 2010, extension of board + membership)
- The funders requested
- An extension of the board
- A larger general assembly
- This change brought extreme excitement and hope, at the idea of finaly sharing benefits AND responsibility across more people (about 20 people involved in all studios)
- The idea was to map a circle-based flexible and hierarchical structure on the legal one, including the others studios in the structure
- The structure intertwined the board and a core team
- The board included a member of the core team (Maja)
- The core team included all project leaders and a board member (Nik, for oversight)
- Its role was overall stewardship of the organization on a daily basis ([?] including other studios ?)
- The general assembly was made of
- All people working in FoAM ([?] Brussels ? Working as “paid” or as “participating in projects” ?)
- New members were involved by co-optation by the general assembly
- [?] Did some inclusion created debate ?
- Members could also be excluded by the general assembly
- They had few self-exclusions from voting members
- They also had few exclusions for inactivity
- The inclusion of other studios was designed by involving
- A member of Brussels in the (board [?] or general assembly ?) of each studio
- A member of each studio in the (board [?] or general assembly ?) of Brussels’ studio
- But soon, quorum issues appeared, because the distance made it tricky for people to come at each General Assembly
- So the statutes were changed so that members from other studios would be non-voting
- The main default of this structure still was that the three core board members were responsible for everything and everyone
- General Assemblies looked like a farce
- Reasons for this structure not working may include
- Members not wanting to be involved in governance, but just wanting to get the benefits
- Space access, visibility, etc
- Most of the people involved were there because they could get something out of FoAM
- When “reciprocity time” came, there were a lot of tensions
- [?] If you had to iterate, would you select exclusively people wanting to get involved in governance to join aboard ?
- Starting from a crisis start up (bankruptcy), the protocols/procedures which were designed initially were difficult to break
- It induced good processes to flow money & energy out ([?] how ?)
- No “giving back” to the organization was formally structured
- [?] How would you structure it now ?
- Lessons learned include
- Think it from the beginning ([?] How ? Don’t you have to fail to realize it ?)
- Be very selective about the people you invite aboard ([?] how ?)
- Untill 2012 [?] > very unsustainable practice
- Money for project costs (materials + people)
- The “core team” was being payed under minimal wage until 2012 !
- Rates as low as 1,5 € / hour sometimes !
- Share responsibility and benefits of all
- If people are on the board and general assembly, then they should be interested in governing the organization
- Core team
- ([?] TBChecked) This institution is designed to manage FoAM Brussels laboratory on a daily basis
- This institution was created in 2010
- Before 2010, this role was informal
- Its size stayed in the 4-8 people range
- The representation of projects was stopped in 2012-2013
- Centralizing the core team on people running the organization
- Board
- This institution is designed to be in between FoAM and the external world
- It started by including FoAM members only, and then some external advisors were added ([?] post-2010 ?)
- Its size stayed in the range of 6-9 people
- General assembly
- [?] Did you propose to any project contributor to become a member ?
- Its sized stayed in the range of 10-20 people
- In 2010, Maja and Nik went away for 6 months sabbatical, because burn-out was showing up
- The first version of the manual was written at that time
- When they came back after 3 months
- The studio looked trashed, uncared for, people were having arguments
- Maja and Nik spent the next 3 months with more online presence
- When coming back from the sabbatical, at the beginning of 2011, things were getting better, but FoAM’s reputation was declining
- Many comments of people saying “you cannot let this happen”
- This is when the Resilients project started in June 2011
Mission/Purpose & Activities
- From late 2009 onwards, FoAM Brussels is still running 100% in the “nurturing regime” - almost no “own work”
- FoAM had its own projects, but was still nurturing other people within the projects, and not working with other skilled people on a “shared” basis
- Realization by the end of Resilients & PARN that most of the work was still about nurturing
- The projects always started perfectly
- The content was co-designed during a workshop
- Clear responsibilities were established
- The timing was made clear too
- But then, it did not work as expected
- Maja & Nik felt restricted
- They were waiting for people to catch up
- They were spending a lot of time explaining things
- The partners were “the people who were there”, not the perfect purposed-design crew
- It would have been better to work with people who really cared about the topic AND knew how to work on it
- It felt like some of the partners did not really had something at stake in the project
- The mistake was maybe to have picked people FoAM had pleasantly worked with in the past, but which were not appropriate for these specific projects
- These projects were a failure regarding FoAM’s expectation, but were financially successful, EU was very happy about them
- All partners were satisfied too
- The audit came (for Grig) in 2012, and induced a breaking point
- One year and half have been spent on the audit (March 2012-August 2013)
- The first report from the auditors was asking ~600 k€ back
- At the end of the process, they were asking “only” 300 k€ back, but after a lot of work, stress, etc
- In 2013, the decision was made to actively split nurturing activities and own work
- Nurturing activities were residencies
- FoAM’s own research project was “Future Fabulators”
- This project worked much better than the previous ones
- It was a “shower moment” from Maja, then shared with everyone else
- A good example of a successful feedback loop from “nurturing activities” is the “Future of Unconditional Basic Income” project
- The nurturing activity was to train me on the methodology
- The feedback is to get the results from the workshop
General comments
- Overarching principles of FoAM’s organization
- Invest in the minimum required for legal compliance
- Regarding structure
- Regarding funding
- Regarding reporting
- In order to have the smallest effort for administration needed
- The loop regarding content can be summed up as this
- Crowdsourcing interests and questions from the members
- Craft a research program within the core team
- Feed it back to the network
- Looking back on the relationship with the other studios
- FoAM Brussels is the Generalists’ studio
- Other studios focus on specific aspects - usually with a five years delay
- This organisation happened that way, not intentional
[?]
- Do you think that a better matching between legal responsibility and decision-making power within the structure would have been better ?
[TODO]
- Look at Maja’s doc sent by email
- It is now saved in the same folder as the text you are currently reading
- Charter (txt)
- Organisational diagram (pdf)
- FoAM blurbs (txt)
- [?] Dates of each blurbs
- There are two other online docs to be read
- FoAM projects
- FoAM mirror (inquiry through foam network)
- Group questions labeled in this doc