Herding Cats at 120 BPM: Project Managing the Wildcat Festival

Three hours, ten people, and roughly seventeen open questions about the pool situation. That’s a Wildcat planning meeting. It looks like chaos from the outside — and honestly it kind of is — but there’s a structure underneath that makes it work. This year I’ve been trying to make that structure more visible, without killing the thing that makes the room feel alive.

Prairie Fyre

Prairie Fyre was so many things to so many people and it instilled in me a desire to create and build. I’m infinitely grateful toward Miles and the things he’s showed me about how to change an environment and rise to the moment. For all the beauty, there were shortcomings that had to be learned the hard way. And in that way, I am trying to avoid the pitfalls that befell us then to be something better and different for them now.

I am extremely fortunate that when Prairie Fyre went on hiatus that Wildcat took its place in my summer as an event to organize and be a part of. I’ve taken away a lot of insight and have tried to have a gentle touch toward guiding the show. There were instances from Prairie Fyre that evidently were seen as commandeering that I’ve tried to put to rest. Enthusiasm for someone’s vision can overtake the original concept if it isn’t elucidated clearly enough outright.

The Cast

Wildcat isn’t a promoter and a venue. It’s a community of people who build something together every year — sound engineers, visual artists, yoga instructors, game coordinators, a person in a pickle costume in an outlandish situation. Ashley and Cody run the show. I’ve been going to this now long enough to have opinions about how they run, so this year I started trying to import some professional project management habits into the process.

That’s the tightrope. Too much structure and you lose the creative energy that makes Wildcat what it is. Too little and you’re scrambling at midnight on setup day wondering who was supposed to source the mics.

What Today Looked Like

Ten people. One to four PM. OpenProject open on a screen, agenda prepped, good intentions all around.

The wins were real: both weekend lineups locked (Friday runs from Alex Meine through Makr N Eris; Saturday from Passage Shell through Only Forever), stage moving to Tomah Tuesday via Uhaul with setup Wednesday morning, sound logistics mapped end-to-end from Arden Hills pickup to Sunday return. Morning activities have owners now — Kendra and Theo on yoga and sound bath, Shannon tentatively holding morning two. The Bounty Board is happening.

The chaos was also real: Nate’s setup day still not finalized, sober driver overnight slots exist but have no names in them, Valentine needs a mic inventory and nobody knows what’s actually on hand. Pool status: unknown. Slip N Slide status: also unknown. The old business backlog has items that have been circling for at least a year.

I had been looking forward to the meeting to try and get Ashley and Cody’s vision onto a style I learned in my professional career. Work items, tasks, assignments, gantt charts, boring corporate suit speak. But the reality is it’s helpful. Certain things come before other things, certain things have to happen at gated times. Project Management 101.

The PM Lessons I’m Trying to Teach

Every conversation that produces a decision needs a task

This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Creative people are idea-generators — the meeting feels productive because so much is being discussed. But discussed ≠ decided, and decided ≠ delegated. The discipline is: the moment someone says “we should do X,” someone else asks “who owns it and by when?” If you can’t answer that, it’s not a decision, it’s a vibe.

OpenProject has been a useful forcing function here. Every agenda item that moved forward today got a task number. The ones that didn’t — the pool, the Ethos document, the emergency response plan — are still floating. That’s not nothing. Seeing what’s tracked and what isn’t is itself information.

The Bounty Board is better PM design than a volunteer shift grid

Ashley is a genius and deserves accolades for the Bounty Board style of project management. I can do computers and gantt charts, but sometimes people have to WANT to do a task. Having high-value targets that need doing and seeing who wants to handle it lets people choose to rise to the moment for the task that they feel called to.

Owners are not the same as awareness

“Someone should handle the mic count” is not a task. “Valentine owns mic inventory by Tuesday” is. The gap between those two sentences is the gap between it happening and it not happening.

The hardest habit to build in a group of generous, well-intentioned people is asking “who specifically is doing this?” It can feel confrontational — like you’re putting someone on the spot — but it’s actually the opposite. It means you’re taking the thing seriously enough to make sure it gets done. It’s a form of respect for everyone’s time, including the person who’d otherwise inherit the problem at 11 PM on Wednesday.

The backlog is only useful if you actually work it

The old business section of today’s notes has around fifteen unchecked items. Some are small (disco ball). Some matter a lot (emergency response plan, waiver sign-off, writing the Ethos). A backlog isn’t a dumping ground — it’s a commitment that things won’t fall through the cracks. But it only works if the group develops a habit of revisiting it, closing things out, and being honest about what’s been de-prioritized versus what’s genuinely forgotten.

The reality is that life happens and the backlog will never complete. It’s a wishlist and an aspirational dump of things that we should strive to get done or maybe decide it’s not worth the effort due to competing priorities. But that’s what keeps each year different and special (among all the other things)

Chaos is a feature, not a bug — but it needs a container

I, and I think others too, feel strongly in the Wildcat mission and the value that having community and space to experiment and explore brings to their lives. I don’t want to button it up to be a boring festival for profit. But I do want things to run smoothly so that everyone involved can feel that things have been thought out and so it makes it worth it to do it all over again the following year. That’s really the crux of it all for me here. I may be overbearing, but it’s because it means so much to me. I can’t stand to see something happen to it like what happened to Prairie Fyre.

What’s Next

We just keep on truckin’. One month to go.