Folkemødet 2024

Each year since 2011 there has been a three day political festival on the island of Bornholm celebrating the democratic converstation. Anyone who is anyone within knowledge politics and organisational work in Denmark have been present. The event have stages and tents all over the cities Allinge and Sandvig by NGOs, political parties, unions, companies, governments, embassies, other institutions  and even universities, except ITU. Which the Student Council wanted to rectify, so they decided to send 25 students to the island. (Of course researchers and Rector have and had participated in prior events, but there hadn’t been that much commotion about it)

The aim was ensuring that IT students were also part of the democratic conversation and we even had Alexander Sendovitz from the DIM studyline – and member of Board of Studies – participate in a debate about the high demand and lack of IT professionals in the future. 

The trip was, despite being in the middle of the exam period, highly popular and well received. Staff posted about it on LinkedIn and Instagram, as it was the first time that such a big delegation of ITU students were present at Folkemødet. 

The planning of the event happened from february until the end of june.

Practical planning: We hung QR codes posters around campus to get people to sign up. The students had to bring their own tents and were free to do whatever they wanted during Folkemødet but the Student Council did recomend events to ensure that students hung out all together as much as possible. The group of students mostly hung out together and communicated through chat about their recommendations for events. 

We purchased 25 “youth tickets” which gave access to the youth ferry and Camp Ung Agenda area. The way we did it was that the students could sign up and request a preferred travel time either Wednesday or Thursday (which we couldn’t guarantee as the tickets were sold fast) and then the entire delegation returned home on Saturday evening. 

We experienced that buying the tickets together posed some issues as this meant that one person had to be responsible for everyone being onboard the bus and ferry. Also the bus drivers didn’t check our tickets on the way home which resulted in some chaos when some weren’t able to get on the bus from Allinge to the ferry in Rønne and had to get a taxi. 

Another problem with the group tickets was that then in cases of cancellations from students there was much administrative work for the Student Council in finding someone from the waitlist to take the tickets and in the end we had bought three tickets too many because some students cancelled at the last minute. 

Recommendations for the future: The event was highly popular and something which many other universities do. So it could definitely be repeated, but to avoid the administrative work around students cancelling at the last minute it could be an option to instead have students buy their own tickets and then request a refund afterwards from the Student Council on the basis that they actually participated with the Student Council. However this might also result in less students signing up because they are not totally sure that they can join or not. And this does of course also move the administrative work to be during the summer break. 

Project coordinators
Ida Engell Kold
Viktor Shamal Andersen