• 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

• [?] Date ?
• Starlab started a non-profit for proto-FoAM
• FoAM is a starlab spin-off
• Maja helped design the mission of this spin-off, but they did not wanted her to be on the board
• 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
  • The members were
    • Maja, Lina and Nik
      • They spent their 6 first months without being paid as core members

• 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)

• [?] October 2001
• 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
• 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
• 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

• Other FoAM studios based their statutes on FoAM Brussels statutes, but adapting to local situation

• 2001-2005
  • 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

• 2006-2009
  • FoAM became an artlab
    • Which is a funding-driven organization
  • 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 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
      • 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

FoAM v3 Funding-induced structural change (2010 - now)

- A hierarchical structure was imposed by funding in 2010, extension of board + membership)

1. The funders requested
   1. An extension of the board
   2. A larger general assembly
   3. 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)
2. The idea was to map a circle-based flexible and hierarchical structure on the legal one, including the others studios in the structure
   1. The structure intertwined the board and a core team
      1. The board included a member of the core team (Maja)
      2. The core team included all project leaders and a board member (Nik, for oversight)
         1. Its role was overall stewardship of the organization on a daily basis ([?] including other studios ?)
   2. The general assembly was made of
      1. All people working in FoAM ([?] Brussels ? Working as “paid” or as “participating in projects” ?)
      2. New members were involved by co-optation by the general assembly
         1. [?] Did some inclusion created debate ?
      3. Members could also be excluded by the general assembly
         1. They had few self-exclusions from voting members
         2. They also had few exclusions for inactivity
      4. The inclusion of other studios was designed by involving
         1. A member of Brussels in the (board [?] or general assembly ?) of each studio
         2. A member of each studio in the (board [?] or general assembly ?) of Brussels’ studio
      5. But soon, quorum issues appeared, because the distance made it tricky for people to come at each General Assembly
         1. So the statutes were changed so that members from other studios would be non-voting
   3. The main default of this structure still was that the three core board members were responsible for everything and everyone
      1. General Assemblies looked like a farce
   4. Reasons for this structure not working may include
      1. Members not wanting to be involved in governance, but just wanting to get the benefits
         1. Space access, visibility, etc
      2. Most of the people involved were there because they could get something out of FoAM
         1. When “reciprocity time” came, there were a lot of tensions
      3. [?] If you had to iterate, would you select exclusively people wanting to get involved in governance to join aboard ?
      4. Starting from a crisis start up (bankruptcy), the protocols/procedures which were designed initially were difficult to break
         1. It induced good processes to flow money & energy out ([?] how ?)
         2. No “giving back” to the organization was formally structured
            1. [?] How would you structure it now ?
   5. Lessons learned include
      1. Think it from the beginning ([?] How ? Don’t you have to fail to realize it ?)
      2. Be very selective about the people you invite aboard ([?] how ?)
      3. Untill 2012 [?] > very unsustainable practice
         1. Money for project costs (materials + people)
         2. The “core team” was being payed under minimal wage until 2012 !
            1. Rates as low as 1,5 € / hour sometimes !
      4. Share responsibility and benefits of all
         1. If people are on the board and general assembly, then they should be interested in governing the organization

- Core team

1. ([?] TBChecked) This institution is designed to manage FoAM Brussels laboratory on a daily basis
2. This institution was created in 2010
   1. Before 2010, this role was informal
3. Its size stayed in the 4-8 people range
4. The representation of projects was stopped in 2012-2013
5. Centralizing the core team on people running the organization

- Board

1. This institution is designed to be in between FoAM and the external world
2. It started by including FoAM members only, and then some external advisors were added ([?] post-2010 ?)
3. Its size stayed in the range of 6-9 people

- General assembly

1. [?] Did you propose to any project contributor to become a member ?
2. 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

1. The first version of the manual was written at that time
2. When they came back after 3 months
   1. The studio looked trashed, uncared for, people were having arguments
3. Maja and Nik spent the next 3 months with more online presence
4. When coming back from the sabbatical, at the beginning of 2011, things were getting better, but FoAM’s reputation was declining
   1. Many comments of people saying “you cannot let this happen”
5. This is when the Resilients project started in June 2011

- From late 2009 onwards, FoAM Brussels is still running 100% in the “nurturing regime” - almost no “own work”

1. 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
2. Realization by the end of Resilients & PARN that most of the work was still about nurturing
3. The projects always started perfectly
   1. The content was co-designed during a workshop
   2. Clear responsibilities were established
   3. The timing was made clear too
4. But then, it did not work as expected
   1. Maja & Nik felt restricted
      1. They were waiting for people to catch up
      2. They were spending a lot of time explaining things
   2. The partners were “the people who were there”, not the perfect purposed-design crew
      1. It would have been better to work with people who really cared about the topic AND knew how to work on it
      2. It felt like some of the partners did not really had something at stake in the project
      3. 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
   3. These projects were a failure regarding FoAM’s expectation, but were financially successful, EU was very happy about them
      1. All partners were satisfied too

- The audit came ([?] for Grig ?) in 2012, and induced a breaking point

1. One year and half have been spent on the audit ([?] TBChecked)
2. The first report from the auditors was asking 600 k€ back ([?] TBChecked)
3. At the end of the process, they were asking “only” 300 k€ back, but after a lot of work, stress, etc ([?] TBChecked)

- In 2013, the decision was made to actively split nurturing activities and own work

1. Nurturing activities were residencies
2. FoAM’s own research project was “Future Fabulators”
   1. This project worked much better than the previous ones
3. 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

1. The nurturing activity was to train me on the methodology
2. The feedback is to get the results from the workshop

General comments

- Overarching principles of FoAM’s organization

1. Invest in the minimum required for legal compliance
   1. Regarding structure
   2. Regarding funding
   3. Regarding reporting
   4. In order to have the smallest effort for administration needed

- The loop regarding content can be summed up as this

1. Crowdsourcing interests and questions from the members
2. Craft a research program within the core team
3. Feed it back to the network

- Looking back on the relationship with the other studios

1. FoAM Brussels is the Generalists’ studio
2. Other studios focus on specific aspects - usually with a five years delay
3. 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