OREGON COUNTRY FAIR
Booth Construction and Maintenance Manual
2004
The main document (below) is an implementation of a "smart building code" that uses The Fair's red-tag booth inspection process to power the transition of our collection of funky non-conforming structures into structures that gracefully conform to The Fair's Land Use Management Plan (The LUMP).

The Fair is located in a "frequently flooded area" near the Fern Ridge Reservoir and much of the site is inundated on an annual basis. Controlling erosion and eliminating off-site liability for floating objects that originate on the Fair's property present serious challenges and the Fair's long-standing red-tag process has been adapted to address these issues, as well as the structural problems the Fair's inspections have always addressed. The Fair controls erosion on the site by encouraging a vegetative mat to cover the ground, preventing erosion of exposed soil. This requires that sun-light reach the ground. The picture at the right clearly shows how a "temporary" structure can allow vegetation to regrow in the months post fair and prevent erosion. 		Look closely; this booth is what we hope YOUR booth looks like in mid-June next year.
Drainfield Issues and Explanations
click here to Jumpt to a page devoted to digging and drainfield issues		Much of the Fair's property is an archaeologically significant zone and many specific areas of the site have been designated as "no-dig zones". This means that no ground disturbing activity is permitted without review and permission. This does NOT mean that permission is difficult to obtain; staff is available to expedite your excavation needs. Print this page for more specific information regarding OCF Drainfield Issues, Drawings and Drainfield Inventory Form - ready to print. 35 KB - contains a pretty clear explanation and a schematic drawing that I hope you can read. Pick up a clearer drawing at the construction desk when you arrive on site.

DOWNLOAD OCF BOOTH CONSTRUCTION AND REPAIR MANUAL

Do not doubleclick the images of leaves in fall unless you have a fast connection to the internet - instead, select the image and then download the source that it links to - (that process is a menu choice called called "Save target file as " in Explorer, and "Save Link as" in Netscape) to your local machine, then open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader and print from there.

It is all black and white and grayscale, and should print fine on either a Mac or a PC. I created these files in Word2k and then printed them to Acrobat 4.0, so any recent version of Acrobat Reader can open and print them. Try a small file that prints just 1 page first, just to be sure. Most pages contain both text and graphics.
Construction Permit Application
click here to download Application		OCF Booth Construction Permit Application - ready to print. 341 KB - contains a pretty detailed set of plans for a portable booth, drawn by Ed Criss.
The Fair's Booth Construction and Repair Manual provides the roadmaps for maintaining and designing booths for use at the Fair.
Think of it like a building code.
End of the Fair Checklist for BoothReps
click here to download Checklist		End of the Fair Required Actions Checklist for Booth Reps - ready to print. Only 22 KB - One page
Booth Manual Cover
click here to download cover		Cover for Booth Construction and Maintenance Manual 2004 that should be ready to print. Only 62 KB
The Booth Manual
click here to download OCF Booth Construction manual		The Booth Construction and Maintenance Manual, in PDF format that also should be ready to print.

The manual is a 3.43 MB file in PDF format and prints 52 pages. (July 5th version is currently posted) Next version will be formatted as a clickbook for 2-sided printing with facing page headers and footers.
Alternately these files are all stored in the www.breskin.com/ocf directory - click there to open it and download from there. If you have difficulties call me at (360) 385 3771 before the fair or come to construction and ask for "Red Tag Joe".
Helping the booth reps resolve the issues that had led to the Fair's "red tags" so the red tags could removed from their booths is a fantastic opportunity to get everyone on the same page. Red Tags are posted by The Fair during the pre-fair build-up to indicate structural defects, and before the Booth can be occupied these structural defects must be remedied and the red tags removed by the Fair.

Getting booths ready for red-tag removal is a fascinating adventure, with literally hundreds of things happening at once, and last year I learned a great deal about "flow" and about the need to keep both feet firmly planted in the present if one hopes to accomplish anything. I eventually began to recognize a pattern emerging in my interactions with people who had booth problems to solve: it really seemed like every second that we spent re-hashing the past got both of us just that many seconds out of sync with everything else that was going on, and that these re-hashes were not really even therapeutic for the people wanting to go back into the past - because there were no solutions to be found in the past - the solutions to the problems that we were going to solve in the immediate future were only to be found in the immediacy of the moment we were sharing.



Last year I collected another image gallery of Mavica shots from pre-fair: but more focused - meaning that all the images have an intent or agenda - it contains lots of booth construction details.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.

These may seem like rather esoteric technical documents if you don't have a booth at the Country Fair. But they are essential, must-read documents if you do.

Here are a few more important documents and websites related to the Fair:
Andy Strickland's Caretaker's JournalAndy Strickland's Caretaker's Journal - Best description of the 'Real' aspects of the Country Fair I know how to share.
site images from pre-fair June 1999A rough gallery of images from pre-fair one spring (1999) shot for Grace Tara who could not be there.
booth construction images from pre-fair July 2001Another VERY rough gallery of booth construction images from pre-fair 2001. I never intended the public to look at these upsidedown and sideways images, and I will clean this mess up as soon as I get back...
The OFFICIAL Oregon Country Fair website.The OFFICIAL Oregon Country Fair website.
This year's Country Fair Entertainment Schedules.
OrcaLab banner ... half a mile of painted fabric panels all made by school kidsThe OrcaLab bus and banner got to the be part of Country Fair 2000. Hope they get to come back some day.
And every so often I write something about my experiences at the Fair and what I have learned, and I post it to my Online Journals website. Several of these articles are linked below, at the very bottom of this page, and offered to you as winter-time reading.

The following links provide stories directly related to the Oregon Country Fair:

  Shiny Rock Management This one comes in the wake of this year's Oregon Country Fair. Where there is an awful lot of Shiny Rock Management.

  Question Number One. This is a song from Oregon Country Fair that never quite found it's way to completion, about how people in bureaucracies fail to communicate.

  LEDs as enabling technology, Part 1. This is about a project I did at Oregon Country Fair nearly a decade ago, making cheap strings of LEDs for high efficiency path lighting. From 1995

  LEDs as enabling technology. Part 2. This compiles our August 2004 experiences making low-voltage LED light installations for the Festival of the Forest by recycling strings of cheap readily-available 120 VAC LED Christmas Tree lights and even retrofitting even cheaper (free?) 120 VAC incandescent Christmas Tree light strings with LEDs. Includes lots of detailed instructions (written for non-techie's headed to Burningman) that were missing in the earlier writing.

  Life in an inverted Bureaucracy. Imagine a world where everyone's job was to say YES to innovation. Where the answer to a question like "Why do women have to wait in line to pee? Men don't - they have urinals. Why can't we have women's urinals at the Fair?" was met with an answer like "That's a REALLY GOOD question and I think I know some people who can make it happen next year ..."
Consultancy. Think of me as affordable executive level temporary talent. Hand off your most troubling project.|I have decided that anything that I have not used for over a year must have become unneccessary. hence I have I have opened a Divest-Store so that I can divest.|This page provides a fairly up to date set of links to projects I am working on, or have worked on lately.|I am a generalist. My Resume shows that I am an expert in many fields and walk comfortably through the walls that separate many traditional knowledge guilds.|My Music - MP3 and RA streams. Live recordings of original music.
Updated 11/18/2003