The ESSENCE group is meeting for a TPM in Baden-Baden. This is our sixth TPM.

Report by Jörn Nettingsmeier

The meeting is co-located with the “Meistertage” at our partner EurAka Baden-Baden, an annual symposium for event supervisors focused on tracking changes in technology, economic and educational conditions, and the evolving legal and industry standards frameworks we operate in.

Thanks to our colleague Desiree Luidold of EurAka (who cannot attend due to her organising duties at the Meistertage), our hosting partner has provided us with the seminar room 2.8 equipped with a projector and even some catering for a pleasant work atmosphere, for which the delegates are very grateful.

Project administration

We kick off with a short status report. Both WG1 and 2 are done in terms of content, but some editing work remains to be done: quite a few qualification programs in the WG1 report do not yet conform to the standardized format or are missing minor datapoints, and the WG2 results need to be collated into a written report from the extensive slide set created by Klaas and Bas and used at multiplier events so far. Moreover, the results speadsheet needs to be cleaned of sensitive personal data (specifically, contacts of people who wished to be kept updated) before it can be shared.

Still no news about CUE, our Dutch colleagues are in contact with the organisers.

Work on result 3 is progressing well, but we are still struggling with a final form and data structure to accommodate the slightly divergent goals of all partners.

Editing work

We make good progress on the Austrian qualification programs and bring them into alignment with the standard structure. Next, we take a few hours to study the Swiss “Tontechniker mit eidgenössischem Fachausweis” and the Swedish “Sound engineer specializing in live sound”. We decide against including the latter, as it is currently in the application stage for public funding in Sweden and as such not technically in existence now. Also, the machine translation leaves many open questions, particularly about the meaning of acronyms and unfamiliar concepts. We shall however monitor its progress and take inspiration from its concepts.

Using the second day to tackle the Swiss offering, we find it described well and easy to analyse, so we can quickly extract the most important information from it.

Social and educational aspects

After the admin and work sessions, we participate in the “Meistertage” with insightful lectures and presentations from leading industry specialists, and enjoy many great hallway talks and networking opportunities.

In between the lectures and the evening social event at EurAka, we enjoy a personal guided tour through the facilities of Louis-Lepoix-Schule, a vocational school for stagecrafts and related occupations including sound and lighting.