"Event Organizing and Comradeship" Guide Is Out

Fixing the Chair, Changing the World: "Event Organizing and Comradeship" Guide Is Out

The shuttle does not leave on time, the session starts an hour late, and there is no projector in the hall where the presentation is supposed to happen.

And always the same sentence: "We're amateurs — this is as good as it gets."

Knowledge Commons' new guide reckons with that sentence: if we cannot organize among ourselves, how will we change the world?

Dear Young Comrades,

You have sat in a hall at the opening of a congress, a panel, a conference, watched the clock, and waited. Fifteen minutes, half an hour, sometimes an hour. "The speaker is on the way," "the room isn't full yet," "the shuttle ran late." Then the session begins and no one mentions that half hour; because this is normal. Then it turns out there is no projector in the hall where the presentation is supposed to happen; someone brings a television from home, and you cannot read it from the back row. Chairs are still scattered from the previous session, there are cups on the floor, and two steps away an empty trash bin stands unused. While the speaker is on stage, people chat in the back rows and talk on the phone at the door. And at the end of the day someone says, in good faith: "We're amateurs — this is as good as it gets."

The guide we publish today, "Event Organizing and Comradeship — Being Organized, Taking Care," was written to reckon with that sentence. Sixty-seven pages, more than two hundred and sixty checklist items, a minute-by-minute plan for a three-day congress, a thirteen-point code of conduct, and task cards meant to be photocopied. As PDF, EPUB, and Markdown, under a CC BY-SA licence, together with the source files. In this piece I will say why the guide was written, what it argues, and what it asks of you.

Part One: Anatomy of the "We're Amateurs" Sentence

The guide's thesis is a single sentence: the ability to organize among ourselves is the precondition of any claim to change the world.

This is not a moral lesson. If a movement that wants to transform society cannot start a session on time in a hall of two hundred people, it has told those two hundred people this: your time does not matter to us. When a hall waits half an hour, what is lost is not half an hour but two hundred people's combined hundred hours. And those hundred hours are not distributed equally: a half-hour delay costs most to the woman participant who has to pick up her child from daycare, the worker who has to make the evening shift, the student who does not want to miss the last bus. Those who can wait comfortably are usually those with the most time to spare. Delay pushes the most precarious participant out first.

The "we're amateurs" sentence has two errors. First, it reverses the meaning of amateurism: an amateur, in the word's root, is someone who does a job for love of it; amateurism is not neglecting the work but doing it for love rather than for wages. Second, it theorizes carelessness: by saying "that's how time works with us," "this is our meeting culture," it presents an organizing deficit as a cultural trait, even a virtue. Yet the history of the workers' movement says the opposite: the strike starts on the hour, the picket is handed over on the hour, the march sets out on the hour. Discipline is not something capital imposes on the worker; it is a power the worker organizes against capital.

The guide lists four causes behind delay, and none of them is "culture": the work has no owner ("the organizing committee will handle it," meaning no one); time is not defined as a real constraint (two adjacent sessions on paper, zero minutes between them); late starts have no visible cost; and delay is mistaken for courtesy. Starting on time is courtesy to those who are there; waiting is courtesy to those who are not.

Part Two: How the World Does This

While writing this guide we looked at the written documents of the world's largest volunteer-run events; all of them are amateur, and none of them says "this is as good as it gets."

Germany's Chaos Communication Congress hosts tens of thousands of participants with volunteers alone. Open-source software called "Engelsystem" lists thousands of shifts; volunteers choose their own shift, attend a short briefing for some roles first, and call a hub named "Heaven" when something goes wrong (volunteer guide). The rule is simple: arrive at your shift "rested, sober, and fed"; in return there is hot food, a rest area, and thanks. Volunteer labor is measured, distributed, and reciprocated.

Brussels' FOSDEM runs hundreds of sessions across dozens of rooms with university volunteers; every room manager has a written handbook updated each year: when the room is full, put a "full" sign on the door, stay at the door, make sure the microphone is on.

The World Social Forum, born in Porto Alegre, works by the "self-managed activity" principle in its Charter of Principles: the centre sets the space, the calendar, and the principles; the organization running each workshop takes on its own chair, timekeeper, and order.

Wikimania and PyCon back their codes of conduct with two procedure documents: reporting steps for participants, intervention steps for staff; people who receive reports are trained, and their names appear on badges.

Local socialist organizations in the United States write the speaking queue down with a "stack keeper"; under a "progressive stack" principle they prioritize those who have not yet spoken and groups that usually get less floor time; under a "step up / step back" principle those who speak a lot step themselves back.

Five principles follow from these five examples, and they are the spine of the guide: every task should have an owner, participation should be a mutual pledge, rules should be written, procedure should protect everyone's rights, and experience should be written down.

Part Three: What Is in the Guide?

General checklist. Five phases: months before, weeks before, the day before, the day of the event, and after. Suspending other uses of the venue, a separate projector and spare for every room, room capacity and a "full" sign, advance notice of the "the shuttle does not wait" principle, volunteer shifts that do not exceed four hours, earthquake and fire evacuation plans, green–red badges for personal-data consent under Turkey's KVKK, sign language and childcare. With the principle that every row gets a name and a date opposite it.

Digital infrastructure. Today half of a congress happens on a screen, and when the screen is unplanned it becomes a new field of carelessness. The guide treats separately the rules for website and social media (accounts belong to the organization, access sits with two people, a written crisis protocol, a scenario ready for access blocks), the online application calendar (from D–150 to D–2; deadlines are not extended), a schedule app that works offline on the phone and notification rules (a reminder fifteen minutes before a session, at most six general notifications a day), a two-minute anonymous survey after every session and a protocol that comments are forwarded privately only to the relevant speaker, mobile voting at the closing forum, and personal-data security. For all of this there are open-source tools you can install on your own server: pretalx, pretix, Engelsystem, EventFahrplan, LimeSurvey, Decidim.

Sample blueprint. Three days (Thursday–Saturday), three rooms, four session slots a day, a shuttle leaving the city at 07:30 and returning at 19:00. A minute-by-minute daily timetable, a program grid of thirty parallel sessions, a role table for a twenty-five-person volunteer team, an equipment list per room, a shuttle plan, and dated checklists from D–150 to D+30. The plan also names its most critical link: starting at 09:00 requires people already in the hall at 07:45; and those people cannot arrive on the shuttle.

Code of conduct. Thirteen points, short enough to print in the program booklet. Time is a common good; the hall belongs to everyone; phones are silent; we leave things as we found them; speakers keep to their time; the speaking queue protects everyone's rights; a safe space for all; debate hard, tone gentle; image, audio, and social media (no targeting and no doxxing); personal data and law-enforcement requests; solidarity and access ("no one is left outside because of money, disability, language, or a child"); emergencies; and the thirteenth point: amateurism is not carelessness.

Appendices. Session chair and timekeeper card, room manager card, responsibility table, incident-report template, speaker briefing letter, digital-infrastructure checklist, survey template, notification texts. One-page documents to photocopy and put in a volunteer's hand.

Two Cultures: What We Are Used To, What We Aim For

What we are used to	What we aim for
"The organizing committee will handle it"	A name and a date opposite every row
We start when the hall is full	Whatever the clock says; the session opens even if the hall is half empty
The shuttle waits for latecomers	The shuttle leaves on time; an alternative for latecomers has been announced in advance
A projector is found "somehow"	Device, screen, cable, and spare for every room have been tested the day before
No one speaks up when a speaker overruns	The timekeeper shows a card; the chair cuts in gently
Cleaning is "staff work"	Everyone straightens the chair they sat in and puts trash in the bin
When trouble arises, "we'll sort it among ourselves"	A reporting team, contact details, and a privacy guarantee are printed in the booklet
Applications sit in one email inbox	An online system, a written calendar, automatic confirmation, a reasoned decision letter
The session ends; the speaker never learns what people thought	The survey is filled in two minutes; comments go privately to the speaker
The volunteer is on their feet for three days	Shifts of at most four hours; food and rest are clear
The event ends and is forgotten	An incident report is written; the checklist is updated
"We're amateurs — this is as good as it gets"	"We're amateurs; that is why we do better"

Part Four: Comradeship Is a Form of Order

The word "comradeship" is not in the guide's title by accident. Comradeship is not agreeing on the same ideas; it is carrying one another's load while walking the same road. The volunteer who sends the shuttle off on time at half past seven in the morning, the volunteer who tests the projector at half past eight, the participant who straightens the chairs after the session, the speaker who finishes when time is up, the listener who fills out the survey in two minutes on the way out: all of them are carrying one another's load. Order is the most everyday, most concrete form of comradeship. Care is the name of the respect shown to a comrade.

This too must be said plainly: they sell us disorder as "freedom," discipline as "oppression," lateness as "ease." Yet disorder is the order of the strongest: whoever is loudest speaks, whoever has the most time waits, whoever is well connected takes the floor. Our order is the reverse. Queue, duration, task card, survey, green–red badge: all of it is so that the quietest person can also take the floor, and the most precarious person can also stay in the hall.

Concrete Tasks

For organizing committees. At the first meeting for your next event, open Part II of the guide, write a name and a date opposite every row, and keep the table in a document open to everyone. When the event ends, write the incident report in Appendix D and put it on the first agenda of the next committee. The guide's single thesis is this: experience accumulates not in individuals' memories but in the community's written memory.
For unions, chambers, and associations. Adapt the code of conduct in Part V to your own statutes and events; name two people who will receive reports and give them a short training. "We'll sort it among ourselves" is not a mechanism; it is leaving the harmed person alone.
For computing workers. The guide's digital-infrastructure section can be built with open-source tools: pretalx, pretix, Engelsystem, LimeSurvey; for a wider list see awesome-conferences. Installing these tools on a server for your own organization's event is a few evenings' work and one of the most concrete contributions you can give a collective. A small script that separates survey comments by speaker and forwards them privately will be the next production in this series.
For participants. At the next event, arrive on time, silence your phone, straighten your chair, side with the timekeeper rather than the speaker who overruns, and fill out the survey on your way out. None of these is a small task; they are a three-day rehearsal of the world we want to build.
For Knowledge Commons. This guide is version 1.0.5; a living document. Send us the snags you hit at your own events, the items you added, the task cards you adapted; let the next version be updated with your experience.

Dear Young Comrades,

If three hundred people are seated on time in a hall, three hundred people trust one another. If the shuttle leaves at 07:30, someone at that hour of the morning has believed another's word. If a speaker falls silent of their own will at the fifteenth minute, they believe in something larger than their own voice. If a young volunteer takes responsibility for a room for the first time and an older volunteer stands silently as backup beside them, one generation is entrusting another.

Carrying science into the street, organizing labor, changing the world — these are large tasks. Fixing a chair is a small task. But those who carry the large task are those who know how to do the small one. Whoever cannot establish order in their own hall cannot establish it anywhere else; whoever can establish order in their own hall walks from that hall out into the world.

The future is not a place we find ready-made; it is a place we build together, on time, with care. For better futures, together.

Being organized is taking care.

Download the Guide

Event Organizing and Comradeship — Being Organized, Taking Care. Knowledge Commons, Version 1.0.5, September 2026. CC BY-SA 4.0.

All our guides on one page: Guides. Production scripts and the cover file are shared under the same licence; you can reproduce them under your own collective's name.