Several months of planning are coming to a full head now, as the Victoria Electronic Music Festival (VEMF) is set to go off in one (!) day's time.

I joined on with the management team after volunteering for the festival last year, and have been taking care of all oversight in the realm of the interactive portion of the festival. I've been really happy with some of the results that we've been able to turn around, and less excited about other things. But hey, that's always the way these things go.

With Bruce's help, I've managed to confirm a dance workshop this year, which is something that I'm ridiculously excited about. The workshop itself is not likely to be groundbreaking, as Serra (the instructor) and I have discussed and she plans to focus mostly on basic grooving and moving. Although this initially may sound boring to many people, I would argue that this is the single most important aspect that any aspiring dancer can learn. Being able to just sit and groove to any particular type of music is invaluable, and it provides you the blank canvas upon which you can then improvise the rest of your moves.

The thing that excites me most about this workshop, however, is that for TEN whole years now, I've bemoaned the fact that our little corner of the province is nearly a wasteland when it comes to resources for urban dancing. Graham and I have been pursuing dancing (obviously solely as a hobby) for that entire time, and it's been incredibly frustrating for me to have no particular arena that I could turn to for expertise and direction. I say me specifically because Graham takes a much more intuitive approach, and seems to be able to thrive without the direction that I, the more technical learner, require.

In addition to the new aspects of our interactive segment, we've got new sponsors, more venues, more music, and generally just a bigger and better festival than we've had before.

Working on the management team has been an incredible process for me. As some of my friends know, I work as a Project Manager in my "real life", and so the opportunity to put into practice many of the skills that I've cultivated in my career has been a very enriching experience. Part of this process has encouraged me and increased my belief that an ability to effectively manage people and processes is a quality that can transcend a given field (someone good at managing software projects can move into managing other types of projects - once they've acquired the important domain knowledge, obviously).

The management team that we've put together for this year has been stellar, and there is almost nothing I find more rewarding that working with intelligent, talented, and capable people. I feel that we are a very dynamic group, and working with people like this makes for an incredible opportunity to learn, provided you're open to that potential. I've been picking up new approaches to a wide variety of problems, and learned how to deal with personality types that I would be much less likely to encounter at work. On top of all of that, I've been given (somewhat haphazardly) the opportunity to do some client and sponsorship interaction and to pursue action items that lie outside of my role as it was initially defined. Interesting piece of insight about myself - I don't completely hate marketing and corresponding with potential sponsors, as I thought I would. I just wouldn't want to do it for my full-time job.

This year has certainly been a year of transition for our group as we've moved through this process, and I've been gathering a large number of ideas that I think can take our process to the next level as we continue to move forward. It's the nature of the beast that whenever you first come onto a project, you bring with you a load of fresh ways of looking at things, and the necessity that you cannot implement most of those things, as you are doing everything you can just to maintain the status quo. Now that I have gone through one iteration of the project, I'm confident that I will be able to add much more from here on out.

So, enough about my own learning process and experience. If you're reading this, come and say hi to me when you see me at the festival on Saturday and Sunday. Being busy is not an excuse. I know that a number of my friends have a passing interest in dancing, so whatever you do, at least come on down and check out the dance workshop on Saturday from 4pm to 5pm. Serra and her dance crew will be doing their own freestyle demonstration after the workshop from 6pm to 7pm, showcasing some of their bboying prowess, and that's going to be pretty great too. Bare minimum - come on down and enjoy some beer in our beer garden and listen to some FAT BEATS.

For more details, go to our website here: www.vemf.ca. See you all there!