Monthly Report from the "working world"

Monthly report

I've been here for over a month now. I've had a living-in period and now feel I know my job and my coworkers.

My job: about 95% of my time is spent on the Sevilla conference, and the other 5% goes to the odd jobs I receive in my inbox or tasks for an upcoming Local Renewables Conference in Freiburg in June, for which I will probably become quite active. My main responsibility has been to support the program officers, who are collectively responsible for designing and organising forty sessions, each requiring speakers to be considered, selected, and invited; rejected speakers are often invited to present posters, and speakers who decline must be replaced. My job is to draft the invitation letters and registration forms, combining database information, a form letter, and a lot of CTRL-C and CTRL-V. The drafts are then looked over by the responsible officer, combined with other documents to create the invitation package, and are sent off. It's a bit tedious for everyone involved. Once the sessions have more than half of their speakers confirmed, they may be released on the website, which involves a final English and general check (also my responsibility), creation and upload of a PDF. My fellow interns, for their part, process the participants' applications, the completed
registration forms from speakers, update the website, the program information, track down people who have or have not paid, etc. The program officers maintain contacts with speakers, decide who receives fee waivers, fix problems, coordinate with partners, and try and get all of their sessions as final as possible, as soon as possible.

It's a lot of work. Much of it is repetitive. I am constantly astounded by how much work there is to do; I often leave my desk with a stack of tasks still lingering in my inbox, glaring reproachfully at me as I refuse to spend a tenth hour in a row working on them.

But it's coming together. The registration of participants, at first a trickle, is now a steady stream and threatens to become a deluge as speakers register and as people make final decisions on attendance. We have borrowed one person from another team to keep up and may acquire another intern.

The organisation still runs smoothly, as far as I can tell, with training for new staff, team meetings, secretariat meetings, extracurricular activities in the form of going-away parties, frequent communication and people who are willing to answer a question. I would be interested in learning a bit of what the other teams do, but that would first happen after the conference if at all.

Some of the skills I have learned and the tools I have worked with:
- website content management systems: I am now a familiar user with typo3 content management system. It allows mere mortals to create and edit webpages without knowing one iota of HTML and with a very small chance of screwing everything up. It’s actually ingenious how the whole thing works, and I am constantly learning new tips and interesting tools. I hope to one day be able to set up my own typo3 system but that is currently considerably beyond my skillset.
- Database: how to manage, in the case of our maindaba, some 30,000 and in the case of our conference daba, some 700 contacts in minutely complicated fashion, interlinked in ways I can’t even begin to comprehend. One (sometimes three or four, but still) press of the button and you may have one of fifteen different outputs, forms, letters, whatnot, all customized to the desired record. Mostly what I learn is how to get around the program quirks, for example that one particular form may only be used by one individual at a time so we have to coordinate among six individuals who gets to use the—Murphy, ye be praised for your wisdom—registration form at a time.
- Multitasking: on my desk is a list of things I have to do, specific tasks for ongoing projects (‘fix formatting on session XX’ or ‘update pages XX, YY, and ZZ on website A’). My inbox is full of little tasks from random people (ranging from ‘please proofread this grant proposal’ or ‘please prepare 20 invitations’ or ‘please pick something up from the printer and bring it to me’ to ‘do you have any ideas about XX?’). Some are creative, some are tedious, and trying to figure out others’ and set my priorities—and combine these priorities with my estimate of how long each task will take—keeps me on my toes. Multitasker that I am, I tend to keep several long-term projects going (update a session description or fix formatting on 30 webpages) which I intersperse with anything urgent, anything that doesn’t take long or, if I’ve just been fixing formatting for an hour, anything else. But my computer isn’t the fastest and doesn’t always keep up with my six applications.
- Good and not-so-good ways to run a meeting or training session: the fact that there are meetings and trainings speaks well for the organisation and its communication, and in general, they are run well—such that, in the case where they aren’t run well, I get annoyed. A well-run meeting has an agenda, it is moderated by someone in a useful manner, it addresses the points that need to be addressed in the manner in which they need to be addressed, it keeps some people from talking to long and, hopefully, leaves you in a better place in regards to your tasks or the projects than you were in before.
- Balancing communication and initiative: taking initiative hasn’t really been a problem, it’s just sometimes my good idea conflicts with the needs of the project—throwing things away too soon, or making a decision regarding formatting or procedure. However, asking if it’s ’ok’ to do everything only hinders the project and irritates the coworkers, so I have to decide in the best interests of the project or task, try and make sure the involved people are aware, take criticism where it is due and be willing to fix mistakes—and there haven’t been many.

And among all the hectic and frenzy of planning colleagues are coming and going; many are on six-month or year-long contracts and move on at the end of their allotted time, receive jobs in other countries or are looking for them. The aspect which impresses me the most is the internationalism of the office: most people are not Germans, and their next job may be in a completely different country. The telephone rings
and is answered in either English or German, but the conversation may take place in any one of five or six languages, and the ICLEI staff person speaking may switch among them. If someone calls and does not speak a particular language, there is about a 90% chance that someone else in the room speaks it, English, Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Russian, Swedish… And I ask how they learned these languages: living
and working in different countries. They have studied things like international relations, diplomacy, development management, environmental sciences, ecology, biology, international business management, politics, economics. It inspires me, both regarding courses of study and choice of location. After I have finished my bachelor I need to learn French, and probably Spanish as well, if I want to be competitive in this field. So I hope to do a several-month internship somewhere where they speak French, preferably Paris or Brussels, though if I got a chance to go to Kigali or somewhere I would take it even if that means learning funny French, and then I will probably need to go for a Masters' somewhere. And after that? The
world is my playground.