History Book of BEST

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BEST Application System (BAS)

BAS, a joint project of ITC and EEC, has started in 1996 with Vivaldi server called Johnny, which had all information about programs and applications stored in a database. Next step was made at the end of 2002, with new log in system which was used for optimization of courses and new validation procedures. From that moment, SPOC (and afterwards EEC) started working closely on development of Johnny. Finally, the name Johnny was changed into BEST Application System (BAS) in PM 2004, in order to ensure better communication with the external world, and that was the last significant decision of SPOC before merging with CWG into EEC.

In 2007, after unification of all BEST informatics systems, students can take advance of many different features, including career related ones. From the external events side, they can apply to events, share important info such as arrival and departure data and many more.

From the LBG side we have constantly developed new features to increase the quality of our events and we now offer the possibility to, through BAS, make materials available for participants, create events, mailing lists, evaluate the course from the organisers, perspective and keep track of the deposit return, along with other useful tools.

BEST Teacher Area (formerly Professors@BAS)

And as we developed BAS for students and BEST members, we also created opportunities to involve teachers more in our events. By creating them a teacher account they have the possibility to make materials available for students, be part of the mailing list if the LBG chooses so and even evaluate the event from their perspective.

Recognition Project

In GA 2000 another significant project was started - recognition of the learning events towards universities. Ever since then, EEC (together with EduCo) has been working on reaching highest number of universities which would recognize our learning events and approve ECTS points for their students. After a long period focusing on developing materials to support this, such as Information Form for all types of academic events and Certificates of

Attendance, we are moving ahead towards the development of relations between universities and LBGs concerning external events, credits, both in issuing and recognising them.

Competitions

Competitions has continued to evolve with EEC, by providing LBGs with has much support has possible in different ways, including handbooks and EEC contacts persons. With the increase of their quality, in PM Valladolid we decided to make Competitions organisation easier and from then on they no longer need to be approved by EEC one month before being public to students. Parallel to this we created a Competition Task Database to encourage the sharing of tasks made by LBGs and to give them a good source of ideas to try and develop.

Chapter 5:

BEST Organisation

In the past years we have also witnessed the development of new levels of Competition, mainly at Local level, conducting to National or Regional Finals. In 2009 these are reach a new level, by taking the best students to the brand new European BEST Engineering

Competition as a grand final.

Quality Project

In 2004 LBGs decided to cancel the application of Greenapple Procedure, as all events were having good quality standards. Three years later, in 2007, EEC created Quality Project with the goal to assess the Quality of events then and later closely monitor the quality evolution. This is done with a proactive attitude in promoting new and better methods to develop external events, including challenges of having higher academic levels and the use of new tools.

Quantity Project (evolution of Flexibility Project)

The former Flexibility Project evolved into quantity Project in 2007, aiming at increasing the number of participants who take part in our events. This goal is achieved by giving LBGs more chances to organise external events, with flexible deadlines, and by encouraging them to have more students in their events.

Support to LBGs

EEC has always worked to better support LBGs organising external events, not only through the development of materials (including handbooks), but also by providing experienced contact persons and always been available to answer LBGs requests. In 2008 we took another step and developed, with TiGro, a new concept of local trainings for one or for a small group of LBGs focusing on external events organisation, having in mind the Vivaldi rules and guidelines but also the specific needs of each LBG.

Financial Committee (finTeam, fT)

Hello European Engineers!

My name is fT (a short for faTty) and I’m finTeams piggy bank.

I’m in charge of

•ensuring the financial stability of BEST International

•taking care of the money all the members of finTeam obtain with their hard work:

o contacting companies

o assuring a constant income of funds

o distributing the resources and supporting fundraising for International Events

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Now you know my task, it’s time for you to hear my memories.

This is the story of where I came from, an amazing adventure in which the initial funComitee turned into our actual finTeam, keeping the fun and the hard work, improving every day, and getting bigger and bigger...

It’s the story of my trip around Europe, surrounded by members of the team, who make sure I’ll never be skiNny :-)

Our travelling starts in Romania, land of Dracula, where I was born between palinka shots and “Doina”. It was the year 1998 and I was visiting Bucharest with some friends, going from pub to pub trying to discover what a “mongolian” was.

On one of this bars I found a crazy group of students dressed up as coins of different countries, dancing to a song that sounded something like “tunak, tunak”. I went to them to ask what was going on “we are from BEST”, they said “and we are on pub crawling!”

I asked more about what this BEST was... they told me it was the BEST friends, the BEST people, the BEST atmosphere, and the BEST parties! They said it had been founded in 1989, and it had worked perfectly since then, supported by the hard work of all the members. But that year they were running out of funds, and things were getting difficult.

This people were so cool, I decided to stay with them for the next night, and the day after...

and suddenly I realised I had become one of them. And as every member, I had to help, work with the rest, and enjoy doing it.

So… this is how I changed from being a normal pig, to a piggy bank. We created a team of people from all over Europe who would make sure the funds would never run out again. FunComitee they called us, because everyone enjoyed our company.

In this team there would be a treasurer, taking care of the numbers, making sure there was a constant income and that money was spent wisely. And a lot of highly motivated people, who contacted companies, suited up, and took me to meetings in all the cities in the continent, where someone would fill me again with some nice hot money.

I was witness to the closing of the first 3 year support contract in 1995 between BEST and

ENSPM (Ecole Nationale Superieure du Petrole et des Moteurs), which assured important funding to BEST.

During these trips we also found some friends in the biggest companies, friends who accepted to collaborate with us yearly, becoming our partners. Together with companies, that I loved more than other we decided to create Support Group, in 1999 in December, the group of BESTies and companies that helped us to became richer! The official meeting took place in London at PricewaterhouseCoopers headquarter. Members of Support Group at the time were P&G, American Management Systems and PWC.

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BEST Organisation

As years passed by, my mates, the other members of the team had to leave, as they finished their careers and started new lives in different places. This left me quite alone... and my job was getting difficult with none to support me.

But with time... as General Assemblies and Meetings passed by, there was always someone left by my side. Always someone with whom I could travel, live, enjoy life, and help maintain BEST stability.

Some years were special, with many members really active and helpful, constantly caring for me, organizing crazy international evenings. This happened for example in the year 1999, in the General Assembly that took place in Lisbon, were many people joined our group and we celebrated it with a great “festa!” And they made me a naughty picture involving a scarf...

but I won’t give more details here about this, just ask!

Same happened in 2000 in Madrid, when many people promised, after a shot of Pachara, to make me fat for ever. It was a bit scary, though... because as they said it I saw some of them drinking “sangria” and cutting “jamon” out of a pig leg... Luckily, I survived.

In May 2002, in the Hague, a great event took place: First Round Table, then known as

Support Group Meeting. The companies that attended were the members of the Support

Group: PWC, AMS and P&G. It is fun to see that the future RTs have the same structure as the first one.

The same year, in the General Assembly that took place in Stockholm, the group was revitalised with new ideas and concepts. Different levels of partnership were conceived, and a mailing list where all BEST members could interact and keep in contact, even if they were separated by miles.

After few successful Support Group meetings cooperation with Support Group was collapsing. But at PM 2001 in Madrid appeared a new idea.Exactly then different levels of cooperation were created.

At GA 2002 in France I was present at great event. It was the next step in cooperation with companies: Second Round Table meeting. This idea became one of the big meals that made my piggy belly faTter. Some companies like me so much, that still, after 7 years, want to work with me: Bombardier, Procter&Gambell and Shell.

The 2002 was supposed to be the year for Support Group to grow up. So, at the same GA Support Group became a Team and started to work immediately when coming back from France.

I loved all our team members so much that decided to make one more event to see them, to work together and, of course, to have craziest parties together. Where could we do this? Of

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course, at the Summer Meeting. Our dear friends, the Masters of job fairs from bonding, hosted the Support Group Team in Baumhaus in Hofgeismar. What a nice time that was (that’s why I like beer since 2002).

The next one was GA 2003 in Bratislava. Uhh! Do you know why that was a happy time for me and all finTeam members and, I am sure, for you too! Because after all our Support Group and company meetings, our work and success we got the new name, which is more similar to my

Financial Team or finTeam. However, the treasurer in company matters is still one of our main activities.

Besides this Financial Team wants to provide support for the fundraising for BEST internal events and provide advice and materials to LBGs. So, at the next Summer Meeting 2003 at Bucharest the idea of fundraising trainshop appeared in order to help LBGs to make their own little piggies bigger and heavier. We called it “be Raise Incomes by Cooperating Honestly with External Resources” or shortly beRICHER. The first one took place in March 2004 in Thesaloniki. Since then we already had 7 beRICHERs and trained about 150 fundraisers.

At international level just in 2003 we had 8 partners (if we count previous years together, a few times more and all companies that were in contact) ohh! You couldn’t even imagine how many letters and numbers were in my little piggy head. That’s why at GA Denmark 2004 finTeam Company database was created and programmed in Makumba to centralizeinfo about companies.

fT Summer Meeting Gdansk August 2005

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BEST Organisation

In the April of the next year my Bank became bigger for 29 000 Euro from European Grant. I never ate so big mounts before!

Now you are ready and its time to tell you one of the most excitement moments in my life.

Even now, when I’m telling you about this after 4 years I fill tears on my cheeks, because at Presidents Meeting in Ljubljana 2005 finTeam became a Committee. Hooray!!!

One day in 2008, I realized that I was too hot so I decided to move Tallinn and enjoy their amazing GA. I was working really hard on behalf of all finteamers and partying even harder. One of those nights, the sex party, I met FReddy that, as you already know, became my

BEST friend and I expect to keep that way. We had lots of fun there in the middle of Vana Tallin’s people that motivated us to keep working in BEST.

We kept working together during all year gaining and keeping our partners, definitely doing really well our job until SM. There, we met the new generation of finteamers willing to help for the cause. There were really great days and we rocked a lot as social responsibles!

There’s no rest for one finteamer so we started working for a wonderful PM in the warm city Bucharest. As you can imagine the flavour of palinka made us gave our best during the event. We still had hangover when he head to our following stop: Cluj-Napoca. We had special moments there but the most important was that FReddy fell in love. He met FRitzi, a really beautiful, sexy and wonderful partner (I’m not a zoophiles pig but I do really appreciate how nice she is) with who shared a lot of love. After the event they got married in an exotic and unknown place in Europe and they live happily.

However, work is work and money was waiting for us so we met again in spring with all finteamers in Warsaw to keep improving. I really think we did and we also enjoyed (even poor FRitzi was quite sad I should say for the curious that he didn’t cheat on her!!!!).

Here finishes, for now, my memories. Maybe I’m still young but I really had an intensive and exciting life. Do you know what the best thing is? An even more brilliant future is waiting for us!!!!! Do you want to know it? Easy, join the team!

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Training Interested Group (TiGro)

“BEST will provide adequate training to its members, in order to ensure they contribute to the association in an effective way and that they develop skills useful in their future professions”

PM 1995 in Trondheim, proposal by Busse Pettersson, VIII Board

The Pioneers

The text of the proposal by Busse can mark the first milestone for history of TIGro (Training

Interested Group). It would anyway take quite some time before this would become a real body of BEST, but it was sign. This text was to become the Statement of Purpose of the committee.

If during 1996 some trainings took place during internal events such as workshop it was only at the GA of 97 that the board would focus on internal education as an organizational need. This led to TRAC (Training Committee) coordinated by Luca Nosetti. This was similar to a discussion group than a committee and it raised very much the awareness about this topic, and a webpage was presented in the PM 97, featuring the name “TIGro”. During PM there was the shift from discussion to action: Krisztian Stancz from Budapest announced the first Trainshop, an actual training event for BESTies. Also the mailing list of TIGro was created during that PM.

After the great success of the 1st Trainshop -that involved both experience BESTies and Company trainermore people joined the mailing list and this lead to a motivated group of people coming to GA 98 willing to establish a training system in BEST.

1998 was might moment for TIGro: during the GA the proposal of establishing TIGro as committee was unanimously accepted, endowing the team with a serious image, and following the GA a BEST webpage and a BEST mailing list were given to the committee; further on, the 1st Jamboree took place, a big gathering for BESTies in which many trainings were delivered; and then during PM the sharing of training materials between TIGro and bonding -our German partnersstarted, it was clear the idea of having a summer camp to educated BESTies to became trainers and finally the first coordinator of TIGro was elected, in the person ofKrisztian

Stancz.

The establishment and the growth

In GA 1999, following a board structure change, Kasia Lech, became the first TIGro coordinator to become a member of the Board of BEST. That summer the first TRAP took place in Krakow and in autumn the second edition of Jamboree, already becoming a tradition, in which the

TRAP graduates delivered trainings. In those years TIGro started to have more events: its own

Summer Meeting like other committees, Trainshop started to take place during the year, it was

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BEST Organisation

TIGro Caravan at GA Ljubljana in 2001

started a system to try to keep track of the training happening around Europe.

In the following years, 2002 and 2003 TIGro went on to be from a young committee to a fully mature body of BEST, and also it improved its image, due to the fact that people remembered the light part such as games, and went on to have a more professional image. More focus was given to train LBG rather than internationally active members, also developing many materials useful for even the young LBG members.

More and more active trainers coming from TRAP were out delivering trainings around, TRAMs

(Trainers Meeting) were taking place to discuss training matters and sometimes also committee related topics, and also a refund policy for trainers travelling to deliver trainings upon request was established.

In this time the cooperation between TIGro and bonding was flourishing: trainers were closely in touch, participating both as trainer and participants to event of both organizations, and during this time many BEST events were organized by bonding groups.

In 2003, after the formalization of the Regions in BEST, the Regional Meetings, (RMs) became a usual appointment for BEST of the same region just before the General Meetings. And a big appointment was especially for TIGro as many training were delivered to BESTies in these events taking place at the same all around Europe.

From 2004 the Trainshops, now all named like “beABLE” or “beRICHER” became a more structured and several edition of the same trainshop –continuously developing the previous editionwere starting to take place year after year. The longest lasting one is the Trainshop on FR whose last edition was the “beRICHER 7”.

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A time of changes

In 2005 the GA approved a major change, in which committee coordinators are no longer part of the board, like it was in the first year of existence of TIGro. Federico “Fred” Pisanu was the first coordinator of TIGro in the structure of the international management that still now working.

In those years, although there was a constant growth of training activity around Europe, the committee was internally divided. TIGro indeed was made by both trainers, who attended

TRAP, and also other members interested in Human Resources and soft-skills but without a thorough background from attending TRAP and a field experience. After two years trying to tackle this issue it was decided to put to an end to this unsustainable situation.

In GA 2007 it was decided to separate the two “souls” dissolving the committee creating two working groups: the new TIGro would gather only trainers and the Knowledge Group (KT) would deal with knowledge management and HR interested people.

The rebirth of the committee

The new TiGro, now named Training Group, kept running all the training events such as

TRAP, Trainshops, thus becoming even more effective without having to deal with other matters. Many experienced trainers –since there was no coordinator at timehelped building the foundations of the new TiGro during the Summer Meeting 07 in Serbia, defining the new framework of the committee, more focused with the training activities compared to other committees one. After a short transition period in GA 08 TiGro became a committee again.

The latest years a big project started in 2005 finally saw the light: the Training Database, keeping track of all the training sessions delivered in BEST since its beginning. At the present day many experienced trainers have over 100 hours of training, but an outstanding performance is the one of Federico “Fred” Pisanu with 600 hours delivered in 5 years.

The recent times saw also the rebirth of the relations with bonding, attending and being trainer in each other events, the number of Trainers Meeting is rising again, and also the number of active trainers thanks to the creation of 4T an event in which BESTies experienced in fields such as FR or marketing are given the skills to deliver training.

This is yet one more step to “provide adequate training to BEST members, in order to ensure they contribute to the association in an effective way, and that they develop skills” useful in their future professions” the very mission of TiGro.

List of TIGro coordinators

•1998/1999 - Krisztian Stancz (Krisz) - Coordinator of TIGro

•1999/2000 - Kasia Lech - VP of the XIIth Board

•2000/2001 - Riinu Lepa - VP of the XIIIth Board

•2001/2002 - Lubomir Ziak (Kubo) - VP of the XIVth Board

•2002/2003 - Irene Escolar - VP of the XVth Board

•2003/2004 - Aneta Blaszczyk - VP of the XVIth Board

•2004/2005 - Angela Scaueru - VP of the XVIIth Board

•2005 - Federico Pisanu (Fred) - Coordinator of TIGro

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•2006 - Ana-Cristina Dumitru (Creatza) - Coordinator of TIGro

•2006/2007 - Herve Tunga (Rv) - Coordinator of TIGro

•2007/2008 - Ligia Martin (Gilly) - Coordinator of TiGro

•2008/2009 - Jasper Van Bourgognie - Coordinator of TiGro

•2009 (current) Peter Kun (Kuni) - Coordinator of TiGro

Made in TIGro: The story of Jamboree

Jamboree! This is probably a word that evokes many memories in almost every single BEST Member. Who hasn’t participated in at least one Jamboree? Currently Jamboree is the largest BEST event for number of participants gathering the whole Europe in room. But how it all started? Well, exactly for this purpose: to get the magic feeling of having the whole Europe in one room! Let’s jump back to 1998, a mighty year for TIGro. Krisz had the idea of this big gathering to show all the BESTies, especially the young ones, the aforementioned feeling and also give the chance for them to know a bit more about BEST through basic trainings and other light activities, like a BEST rally to show the structure of the organization to the newbies. As Krisz was promoting the idea it first took place in Hungary, and all the other active TIGro members helped in the design and the organization of the activities.

The first Jam was “only” 110 participants, back then second only to the GA. Back then it involved mainly the LBGs in that area but quite fast it grew bigger and bigger coming now to include the whole Europe, up to the record-JAM 2005 in Skopje with about 700 participants. Trainers have always been present in numbers at Jamborees taking care of activities, games, trainings, ensuring the BEST motto “work hard, party hard” come true in every edition.

Made in TIGro: The story of RAs

Nowadays the Regional Advisors (RAs) are already a tradition for quite some years in BEST. The LBGs got used to their role and the effectively work with them, as the RAs take care of the state of the LBGs, making sure they are running smoothly; and when the LBGS need help they support them by identifying problems, assessing needs, and developing strategies to improve, learn, and reorganize the local group. Sounds like a trainer’s job? Well you will be not surprised to learn that the ancestors of the RAs were born in TIGro. After the discussions of the TIGro Summer Meeting 2000, it was though of having some “main trainers” for some geographic areas of Europe (no Regions yet, back then!) The main trainer was just an overview of the training activities happening tracking trainers and LBGs trained.

In the TIGro summer meeting of 2004, when Regions and RMs were already established there was an evolution, the RTA (Regional Training Advisor). Their role was becoming more proactive, and fitting pretty much the description above of the RA. All the RTA could have the advantage of having either a trainer of TIGro background and therefore have a set of skills for this task. The next year, the board decided to move this project out of TIGro and led to RAs as they are nowadays.

Made in TIGro: Welcome to the Jungle!

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