As a juggler, I wanted to do something back to the community to stimulate juggling in the Netherlands and raise the current juggling level of the youth. That’s why I took the initiative to organise the Dutch Juggling Convention (NJF) in my home town Meerssen. I saw it as a perfect location with a big hall, easy reachable by public transport and a close by camping. I had experience with organising the Winter Juggling Convention with around 150 jugglers, but that is organised at the same place every year. This convention has around 400 juggler with a new location which means informing a lot of new people and finding the best possibilities. I spend hundreds of hours organising this convention and gained a lot of experience. Because it is too hard to reflect on the total, I separated my 5 biggest responsibilities and reflected on each of them separately.
How we worked was that we had a meeting once every month in which we discussed the different options and divided the tasks. We noticed that we only did our work the day before the meeting so we started to use the task manager website Trello. On Trello you could put a task and someone could put their name coupled to that task in order to show that they wanted to complete this. These tasks could be placed in either the field: To Do, Doing, or Done. In this way we could keep track of each other progress in between the meetings. This way of working made everything very clear and no tasks were neglected. I definitely are going to use this website more for bigger projects with a lot of separate tasks in order to remain this overview.
The organisation consisted of 2 jugglers (including me) and 3 non-jugglers. At the beginning it was hard to explain how a normal juggle convention would run and what the expectations of the jugglers are. We had lost a lot of time on this but in the end it was good to reflect if the current way of organising the convention is the best. We worked not very effective because we discussed every detail, but this resulted that every detail was organised in the best way possible. Normally the organisations of previous years don’t discuss this much but had a more clear task division. We had the time to do this which I preferred, because you validate all your ideas and get direct feedback.
"The best organised Dutch Juggling Convention I’ve ever been to"
Ad Vlaar, De Circuswinkel (15th NJF)
"Everything is perfectly organised down to the last detail"
Ruud Luijten, Circus-expert (5th NJF)
"I’m definitely going to use some of your ideas!"
Jolien Ouwehand, Head-organisation European Juggling Convention 2016
