International Sketchnote Camp 2023 in Leiden: Key to Discover New Horizons - S13/E05

Sketchnote Army Podcast

In this episode, Lai Chee Chiu and Ferry Timp — two members of the organizing committee of ISC23NL in Leiden, The Netherlands — talk to us about the event that will hold September 1-3, 2023.

Hear details about the full organizing team and a bit of the history of ISC. Learn how they decided on Leiden for the event’s location.

Get a sneak peek of what to expect, what to do, and places to visit in Leiden. Prepare yourself for a festival vibe in this year's ISC!

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who are Ferry Timp and Lai Chee?
• Origin Story - ISC23 Leiden organizers
• Why Leiden?
• What's exciting about ISC23NL?
• What's exciting about the city?
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Where to find more about ISC23NL
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• International Sketchnote Camp Website
• International Sketchnote Camp on Instagram
• International Sketchnote Camp on LinkedIn
• Sketchnote Army Slack Channel Check out the #isc23nl channel!

Tips

1. Carry along the right shoes because you'll need them for a walk around the city. There will be guided walks facilitated by the tourist bureau.
2. Museum visits with the support from Leiden Convention Bureau.
3. Canal boat trips.
4. Bike riding around the town.
5. Lots of pubs, restaurant, theaters, and small band performances.

Credits

Producer: Alec Pulianas
Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer
Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with my friends Lai Chee and Ferry Timp. How are you guys doing?

Lai Chee Chiu: We're good, thank you. And you?

MR: Doing well. Ferry doesn't know what to say. He's too—

Ferry Timp: No. I was trying not to speak, the both of us at the same time, but I'm okay too. Thanks, Mike.

MR: You're so welcome. The reason we have Lai Chee and Ferry on the call is they are some of the organizing team, there's more team than just them, organizing the International Sketch Note camp happening in Leiden in September of this year. We're super excited. I am attending the event. My flight is purchased, my hotel is booked. I'm excited to get back to the Netherlands. I think I was there in 2014 in Amsterdam and really had a great time, so, I'm excited to come back.

And we thought it would be helpful on this episode to talk a little bit about the International Sketch Note camp. We can talk a little bit about history. Specifically, we'll talk mostly about Leiden and how the team was formed, why they decided to choose Leiden as the city, some of the benefits of Leiden, the things that they're excited about, and maybe some tips. I think we understand Ferry's got some tips around places to see if you are in the city.

FT: I have the shirt already, so.

MR: He's got the shirt, he's ready to go. For those who are listening, he's got a beautiful Leiden football team sweatshirt that he's wearing, representing the city. Let's get into it. Let's first start with—people may remember Lai Chee from a previous episode where she was focused on, but we may not know who Ferry is. Let's start with Ferry and then we'll go to Lai Chee, and tell us who you are and what you guys do.

FT: Okay. Well, I'm Ferry from the Netherlands. I'm educated as a certified public accountant. I've worked for 12 years at PWC in the Netherlands. And after that, I decided that it was time for me for a next step so I started to work for the City of Leiden as an internal auditor, and I did that for seven years. Why did I end up at ISC and stuff like that?

That's because in 2018, it was, I guess, I was looking for this powerful tool to communicate all my findings, because yeah, auditors are good at one thing, it's writing reports that no one can read. All these difficult sentences. I was really looking for how can I do this differently.

I tried to find some nice images on Google, but if you find one, basically, something is missing in it. Then I discovered this amazing tool, and it was holding a pencil, start drawing again. It was really helpful in making simple and clear images of key messages.

What I found out was that it was really nice to see how the other parties, like I was in the council, and they were trying to read my reports, but when I came back with just drawings, they were enthusiastic. They got immediately what I meant and it was very nice. That's why when I started with drawing and I never stopped.

MR: Really great.

FT: Just to keep it short because I don't do short very well.

MR: Well, it's good to hear an accountant who's excited about using visualization.

FT: Exactly.

MR: The longer I'm doing this, I see more and more variety of people doing this work, which is exciting to me because when you do the principles and you put them out there, you don't know who's going to pick it up. You just assume for me, other designers just make sense. But beyond that, maybe teachers, but now I've got physicists and accountants and business people, and all kinds of other people, because I think we're visual creatures.

I think it really helps. It provides another way to look at something, especially if the stuff you're doing is really important. If people are blowing off your reports and not really understanding them, they're losing value that they could gain so that's, you're helping communicate those ideas.

FT: Exactly.

MR: How about you, Lai Chee?

LCC: I have a background in drawing, but I didn't do anything after school. At some point, I was looking for a team event and we figured out that I was drawing for business and pizza and beer. That was the perfect team event. That's what we did. And that was around 2016, I believe. And then we didn't do anything about it till I came across the de tekenende actors from the de betekenaar, where Ferry works at this moment.

And I met Ferry there because we were taking the online course and joined the community together. We've been talking and drawing together ever since. He started to draw for work, and I started to draw for work. I'm currently a freelancer and drawing is a communication tool for me.

I'm not a graphic recorder. I do graphic facilitation, but not recording. And it's just a way of taking notes. That's what we call sketch notes.

MR: Exactly. Exactly. Well, that's really great. I wondered what the connection was between the two of you, and now it makes so much sense.

LCC: We go a long way back now. Yeah.

FT: We go a long way back, yeah.

MR: That's pretty cool.

LCC: But we also did face-to-face courses together.

FT: Yeah. It was visual facilitation, four-day course.

LCC: Yeah, visual facilitation.

MR: Super nice. Tell me now a little bit more about the remainder of the team. I think there's three or four other people, I can't remember the number. You have a pretty relatively large group for an organizing team, which is great because you spread the load. I know the French team was a larger team. And I think that really helped them compared to, I think the first team in Hamburg was four.

And then Luis had a partner that he worked with in Portugal. His advantage is that was his business, running workshops. He had that advantage. But if you're a team of people and you can spread it out across a lot that helps. Tell us about the other team members.

FT: Shall I do it, Lai Chee?

LCC: Yeah, sure.

FT: Okay. We are in total with seven people, so besides us, it's five more. To start with there are two members that were originally the initiators of ISC23.

Those are Claudia Unseld and Henk Wijnands. They started to look for others to join. I believe that Vincent Kober, he was the third one because he also attended last year in Poland, the ISC.

He had asked for something like, "Is there a program, or how do you start such a thing and organizing?" He had asked Chris Wilson this question, like, "Is there something you can hand over?" And he was like, "No, there isn't." But the fact that he asked was for Chris, something nice to tell to Claudia, like, "Okay, Vincent is also looking for maybe the possibility of organizing."

After that, I believe Lai Chee who also was there, was asked to participate. And Corine Matser, my colleague from De Betekenaar, she was also there in Poland. Then there was a group of five, and they thought, "Well, that's not enough. We need a couple more."

And then Ingrid Nouwens, she's in the south of the Netherlands and New Henk already. So, Henk asked her. Corine came to me and said, "Ferry, we have this great idea, just a small project. Do you join us?" And I said, "Well, of course, I'll join. And then we had this team of seven. I don't know what you want me to tell more. I could go on for hours about that.

MR: Well, I think it's good to state the names of the other team members. Everyone's working together. Again, I think that's great that you have a large team. It probably makes communication more challenging. Anytime a team gets larger, that just is a natural challenge, you can't avoid it. But the benefits are that you can spread the load which is really important for a big event like this.

It's good to hear other names. Thank you everyone on the team for what you're doing because I know it's a lot of work. I've spoken to lots of these teams, and I know how much work it is. Maybe let's shift a little bit toward how did you decide? Was it Henk and Claudia, who made that first move? How did this all come about?

And secondly, how did you choose Leiden? Because there's lots of cities in the Netherlands. Amsterdam being one, although probably expensive. Talk to us a little bit about that too. What led you to Leiden? Maybe we'll talk a little—let's let Lai Chee take this one.

LCC: We all look in our own neighborhoods, and because Ferry worked in Leiden, he knew Leiden pretty well so he came up with Leiden but I, of course, was with them and who came along. Claudia and Vincent don't live in the Netherlands. Those are the cities that we choose from. And then of course, we looked at the cost, but also what happens when we don't sell the tickets, so till when can we cancel, those conditions.

The PLNT in Leiden was so enthusiastic, and they really, really convinced us, and the price was good and also the services and the whole team is thinking with us. There was just actually a no-brainer too—it was quite simple, right?

FT: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

MR: It sounds like Amsterdam really never was an option. Is that mainly because of cost? I mean, you get the advantage. The beautiful thing about Leiden, from my perspective, looking from the outside, is it's just a train ride from Amsterdam. So, I can fly into Amsterdam, I can get good rates on my flights, and then simply hop on a train or whatever, and then make my way to the Southwest, and here I am. To get the benefits of Amsterdam without the chaos of Amsterdam, maybe, I don't know, or the pricing.

FT: Yeah, I guess that's—

LCC: But it's also practical that you have someone who knows the city very well.

MR: Yes. Yes.

LCC: Of course, we've been in Amsterdam, but we know our own city the best.

FT: I get lost in Amsterdam.

LCC: Yeah, me too.

MR: Well, that's good to know. And I think that's an interesting pattern as well. Thinking all the way back to Hamburg. Not all the team members were from Hamburg. I think they had two who were local. Who knew the city, they knew they could talk to venues, they knew the place. They found this really cool place that was reasonable. All those things had to line up. Same thing with in Portugal, Luis knew places that he could go.

Same thing with Paris. Many of the members on that team were with BNP Paribas. They found out that everybody's on holidays in France in August. We have this beautiful meeting center we can get access to. Again, I think that's really important. Is there someone there locally who—'cause there's also logistical things, right?

Like, who's gonna order the bread to show up at three o'clock? Or who's gonna make sure the coffee is there or the whatever. I'm sure there's all these questions, and having somebody local who knows the city and knows people there, it's really important. So that's good to hear.

Maybe what we could talk about now, and I'll point this one at Ferry and then Lai Chee, is what has you excited about this version of the ISC in Leiden? What's the thing or things that you're most excited looking forward to? Is there some part of it that you're excited about? We'll start with Ferry and then we'll go to Lai Chee after that.

FT: Cool. It's cool. What's not to be enthusiastic about at the moment? Because at the beginning when you start organizing this, then it's all like these things, like, okay, are we a team? And the second question is, do we want to go for this? Do we have dates that we're aiming at? After that it's like, can we do it? Can we find a venue? Can we find a caterer? How does the budget look like? Do you think we can do it?

Those are all very important questions, but it's also like, yeah, it's tough to get there and it's also I think, the most boring thing. Right now we are on this train. We have all these ideas about how do we want to organize it. You see at our backgrounds if you're not just listening to us, but see us on the screens, on YouTube, then you can see like we want to go for this festival vibe.

And I think that's something really cool because for me, ISC, I've never been there. I was planning on twice. The first time that I wanted to be part of it was the online version in Brussels, but then life happened. The last time, I was all set up to participate and something happened. I don't want to talk about it right now, but yeah, that's what happens. For me, it's like really to meet all these like-minded people, to learn together, to be inspired, to get new ideas. That's what I like about it.

This year in our team, we are all really an enthusiastic about what can we do next to it. Because a lot of us have attended to previous editions and they're very enthusiastic about what you guys did there. But then it was also like, "Okay, can we do a next step? How can we make the connection more or professionalize a little bit?" I think Lai Chee is going to mention something about that later on.

For me, this festival thing, to do it slightly different. To ask Mike Rohde to come to it and to let us present him as a rockstar. And now we have a second rockstar, Ben Crothers is going over to the Netherlands. That's so nice. And just to get the excitement about this and all these ideas that start to pop up, because it's in Leiden, it's in the Netherlands.

We want to go outside when we're there because Leiden is a rich city with a lot of ancient buildings. There's an old castle on a hill in the middle of that old ancient city center, so let's go out. But then again, it's the Netherlands, because, you know it's September, it could rain. So like, festival vibe maybe have some ponchos over and pimp your poncho workshops. I don't know, we go crazy like that.

But in the end, it's not all just about having fun, it's about connection, it's about learning new things. Also, the rockstars we get, we want to see if we can deepen more on the field of visual thinking, working with a pencil, sketchnoting. That's for me. Lai Chee.

LCC: One thing that we all had in common is how can we go to the next level. Many of us are already couple of years. Even if you are a newbie, you watch some videos or things. You have an idea what this is about. But what we all felt a little bit is that often people think it's some sort of a hobby that we have, and don't even realize that we have really jobs next to it.

Some of us are accountants or consultants or teachers or whatever. And if you bring a group together like that, then you have massive brain power. So why don't we use it and why don't we see how can we help each other? I know a couple of people, Ferry knows a couple of people, or you probably know a lot of people, but do we also know who can complement us?

So, if I need someone or certain skill, I know what Ferry is capable of so if I miss that skill, I know I can come to him. There are so many sketch noters. I don't know what the talent is for people. So, we came up with a theme. So that's the past, the present, and the future that will go through the whole event but also nourish and flourish.

Even if you're a newbie, so what do you need to nourish your skill and what is the future? Especially with the AI and all the technology coming up, so what does that mean for our things and how can we embrace it? This is also why our theme is also key to discover new horizons because the world is changing and it's changing very, very fast. What does that mean for us? Not only for sketch noters but also all the occupations and professions we have. That's a little bit what we are trying to do. So, the past, present, and the future.

MR: I really like this idea. I would describe it as a holistic festival. So, you're not just doing one thing, like a narrow thing just for professionals. If you're not professional, don't come. Like, it's not that. It's, we have a professional thing. If you're doing it for fun thing, we're expanding your thinking. We're having you think about the future, we're not forgetting the past, like all these things, we're having fun. That's exciting. That makes me wanna come even more. That it's gonna be a fun event.

LCC: I hope so.

MR: Being part of it, right? Honestly, you think about what we've been through with the pandemic where we've had to go online, you need to think about events, like if you're doing an in-person event, you need to think about it in that way, that it has to be multi-dimensional. It has to have multiple angles that will attract someone.

As with many of these events, you might be really excited about one part of it and totally get into that and maybe you're not as interested in say the professional thing, I don't know. Or maybe you're really interested in the professional thing and you don't wanna do some other thing. You've got that option.

I tell people you know, in many of the past events, all I did was just sit around and talk to people for the whole time. I never went to a class. I would do my keynote and I would just sit around and I finally get to talk to Ferry. I finally get to sit down and talk with Lai Chee. I finally get to sit down and talk with whoever, right?

That was my whole time was just—and I loved it. It was great just talking with people the whole time, understanding them, seeing what they're doing. That was a great result for me. And then hanging out with people at the end at nighttime or whatever.

Some of my best memories from the past events were not only the event, but then we would go wandering around Hamburg or something, and looking for a place to eat and having fun as a group. I think a lot of it even is just providing the environment in which things could happen.

It's almost like being a gardener in some ways. Like if you prepare really good ground, you can grow anything you want to. That sounds a lot like what you're preparing from my perspective, which is a really exciting.

LCC: Yeah, exactly. That's the whole festival feeling, so you're not stuck to one lecture or whatever. So you have to move. That's the whole point.

MR: Yeah. This is really great. We've talked a little bit about what's exciting about it. We talked about the history and how it came about. Talk a little bit about the city itself. You sort of hinted at this before. What is a city like? What I know about the city is it's a university city, I believe. It's southwest of Amsterdam, so it's a train ride or I guess a taxi ride if you had to go to Amsterdam.

FT: Yeah, train and taxi.

MR: What else can you tell us about the city? Sounds like it's old. I'll stop there and get some—

FT: Yeah, it is old. Yeah, it's old.

MR: Which is cool.

FT: That's where it starts. Leiden, it is a city. It is a truly Dutch city. We have canals that you also find in Amsterdam, the famous canals. Also, the buildings next to the canals, like the different kind of houses that you'd like to see the staircase, the shaped roofs. Yeah, exactly.

Leiden is everything that Amsterdam has, but just a little bit smaller. A lot smaller, I guess. It's like really this typical Dutch vibe. If you live abroad and you think of Holland, you always see pictures of us wearing wooden shoes and living next to or in a windmill. But a windmill is also there in Leiden.

If you step out of the train station, you walk towards the city and you look to your left, there's a windmill. So, if you're a tourist, you want to see that. Leiden has it all. The fun thing is, like you said, it's very close to a lot of large cities in the Netherlands. It's located at, I think it's slightly more than just 50 minutes from Schiphol airport. It's where you arrive. It's one-stop with the train. It's really easy like that.

Amsterdam is close, and on the other side, if you go a little bit to the south, there's the Hague and Rotterdam. Those are all also very large cities in the Netherlands. Leiden, it's like ancient. There's a lot of culture. There's an endless list of museums. That's also nice. We can fill in the whole program of the festival also by visiting several museums with a lot of topics that we could choose. So that's nice.

As you mentioned, it has a large university, and it is the oldest university we have in the Netherlands. It was the first one. I think it was the Spanish possessor that started this university. And it has a rich history, of course, but it's also, therefore, Leiden is a city of students.

There's a lot happening. If you want to grab a beer somewhere or eat something, there are a lot of clubs. There are a lot of restaurants next to the canal. There's choice enough for everyone to blend in, to get a really good taste of the Netherlands, but also being among young people. That's also very nice.

Also, Leiden has one of the biggest bioscience parts in Europe that's also there. Science technology is also richly there. A lot of the great national and international companies are situated there. It's also an international town, so they are used to people walking around in the city during daylight talking French or English.

It's also not just a city that's like, "Oh, oh, is that a foreigner." No. You hear English a lot on the street. That's very nice. This culture thing, I can go on forever, as you have noticed. It's also the city where [unintelligible 24:35] was born. If you have painters and look at his paintings, it's a lot of inspiration from that side.

Okay, last thing is, Albert Einstein lived there. Not his whole life, but he visited, I think it was—I wrote it down because I thought, let's try to give you some factual data thing. He came first to Leiden in 1911. He was so enthusiastic about Leiden that from 1920, every year he lived one month totally in Leiden because he loved it so much, and he worked on the university there.

There was a fun fact that when he needed some rest and some time off, he visited the Observatory of Leiden. Leiden has its own observatory. You can just reach the stars and go outside. Is this enough about Leiden? Or do you want more?

MR: That's great. It sounds like anytime I hear a university city or college town, that always has big advantages. Austin, Texas is one of those. University of Oxford is there. If you ever go to Austin there's lots of options for eating and drinking and activity, and it's usually pretty reasonable because students have to pay for it so the cost is low. You have all the advantages of Amsterdam without all the hassles of Amsterdam.

FT: Exactly.

MR: Not that there's a lot of—I mean, when I was in Amsterdam, I had a great time, but it is big to navigate. I think I rode a bus to an event and it took a little bit of a ride across the city. Probably in Leiden, I would just walk there because it's not so big.

FT: Yeah. That the biggest advantage of Leiden. You don't need to worry about, "Oh, can I get a taxi cab from my hotel to the venue at PLNT where we are hosting this? It's at walking distance. Almost everything is at walking distance.

And also, if you stay a little bit longer, you come over a day earlier, maybe it's also a bus ride away from the beach. Leiden at sea, it's not the name. It's Katwijik aan Zee but they call it Leiden at the beach in Leiden. This is also nice if you want to go out, you're just a bus ride away from the beach.

MR: Lots of options and lots of variety of—

FT: Lots of options. Yeah.

MR: It fits everybody.

FT: Come over for two weeks and you'll enjoy yourself.

LCC: Exactly.

MR: For a holiday. Make it a holiday. Well, that's really great. I'm excited to see what you have planned. I didn't mention before the idea of pushing it further. I'm a push-it-further kind of guy myself. Always experimenting and trying new things. So, when you say that, that really attracts my thinking, that means we can do some new things.

I think a lot of times—and I like reason experimentation is we have so much opportunity and flexibility and capability available to us that we don't use it. We just do the same thing over and over again, and there's opportunities to do really cool new things if we just give it a try.

Especially, I think there, it's like, "Well, what if I fail?" Well, so what? The experiment didn't work. You learn something and you'll do it a different way next time. I think hearing that is pretty exciting to hear that there will be some things pushing the boundaries a little bit, and we can have some fun.

Thank you for sharing this sense of things. I'm gonna go back to Ferry one more time. And this is for those who are coming to Leiden. We asked Ferry if he could give us what would be three things you should make sure that you should do when you're in Leiden. You can go more than that, but three is only required.

FT: Okay. Well, first thing, of course, you need to come to ISC. But that one doesn't count, because that's too easy.

MR: That's assumed.

FT: That's assumed. I think first thing that you need to do is take along the right shoes because you need to go for a walk. There's this nice park around the canals. It's all the way surrounding the ancient city. You can walk really like in a circle. It's new since, I guess for two, three, maybe four years or now. It's a really nice walk around town.

We also make sure that we will arrange with the tourist bureau because they also have guided walks. We will provide all the participants with those tips. But this is really nice to walk around visit the castle on the hill, like I already mentioned, is you have a great view of Leiden on the rooftops and see that. I think that's the first thing.

There's also this really cool, but small I think it was some sort of museum, but like on Rembrandt vaan Rijn. You can do also things like that. I think for us, sketch noting, and if you want to draw something, but really like, get inspired from his kind of style, that's also something really nice.

I can mention all the museums, but pick one. There are multiple museums, so we will make sure—we have support from it's called Leiden Convention Bureau. They have created a landing page, especially for us, for our participants. So, if you click on it, and the link is on our website so everybody can see. There's a rich amount of museums with tips. You could go here, and this museum is about this and stuff.

You could go on a canal boat trip for some people who like to just really sit down, have a glass of drink, and just without having to walk, you could just see a lot of the city. And of course, you're in the Netherlands, and we all ride bikes. So, we have possibilities to ride bikes explore the city like that. So that's also an option.

Of course, when you've done all that, there are multiple, like pubs, restaurants. There's a theater, I don't know. They have also a small like theater where bands—it's not the large bands and large musicians, but yeah. Also, international acts, that could also be a possibility. I'm more than three, right?

MR: That's okay.

FT: What I'm trying to say is like the festival vibe you have on ISC, you could easily take it with you if we close down, like say at the end of Saturday, take it with you, and go into the city and we'll have more fun like that.

Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, I think this has been helpful. Tickets as we record this, are about to go on sale. We don't know what sales will look like by the time this releases. We encourage you to go take a look and find out for yourself if this is encouraging and exciting to you.

We suspect there's people who've already booked their tickets who are listening to this to get a more of a feel for the organizing team and the thought behind it and those kinds of things. So, whoever you are, we would love to have you in Leiden in September.

FT: Definitely.

MR: Any final thoughts from either of you before we wrap up and point people at the website so they can have a look at tickets and details? Maybe I'll start with Lai. Lai Chee, do you have any final thoughts, any encouragement for someone who maybe is considering it?

MR: No. I mean, I'm not really objective. I am super, super excited. Last year in Poland, I was already excited because it's not only the event, but you also meet all those people you just only know online. We are gonna meet you for the first time. I know you are all ready for four years or something, but this is the first time I'm gonna see you live.

That's the other thing. What we also will try to do is to make connections in the before phase. Before we go to the event that we know each other a little bit better than when we actually will meet. So, just come.

FT: Yeah. Exactly. I think that's a good point, because for me, that's also, it's like the most fun thing is it's a live event and we can do that again. We haven't been able to do it a couple of years. Last time in Poland it was already happening again. I think that's nice.

Like Lai Chee mentioned, I think it was our idea as well to like it starts in September, but what if we do a before phase? What if we ask Mike Rohde if we can use Sketchnote Army Slack to meet upfront online, do some stuff. We have really fun things planned out. Maybe some sketch note or no, it wasn't the sketch note. Try to make a picture together if living close and post them online like that. So the community building will start up front.

I think that's really nice. This festival fight, we try to take it creatively. Sometimes we brainstorm and we get all the crazy ideas. What's the most fun part of part about organizing this, you could go crazy and think of all those things. And then, of course, it's not just two of us because we go crazy a lot, but then we have the others that say, "Okay, let's get real. Let's get real. Okay, this is not going to happen because it's too complicated. But I like this and how about this."

That's also nice. Everybody should go because it's like a mini break. It's a holiday, a mini holiday break and it's investing in you and in your skills and growing as a professional and expanding your community with all these cool people, like-minded visual people, your visual friends, I guess.

LCC: Exactly. Exactly. Nourish and flourish. Those are the two words you have to remember for this event. Nourish and flourish.

FT: They're not on our posters, but those are key values that we try every time to incorporate in our program. If we decide like, okay, do we want this for a workshop? Then we all say to each other, okay, does it contribute to nourishing or flourishing our community, our guests, our participants?

MR: Those two words are great because it focuses on improving yourself and then improving the world when you flourish. That sounds really fun. Well, thank you both so much for being on the show and sharing all your excitement. I can feel it coming through the wires. If someone is interested in checking out the event and seeing if tickets are still available, what would be the place to go for them? Is there a URL that you would recommend? Or maybe should they go to social media location first, and that we'll direct them to the site?

FT: Yeah, we have a website. It's www.sketchcamp2023.nl. This is the website that we've launched. I believe if you go to the website, sketchnotcamp.com that was what the team used last year. There's also a link that directs you to our website. For the socials, we are on two social platforms. We are on Instagram and we are on LinkedIn. We are not on Twitter at the moment for this year, but we've posted there also a message that "Okay, this year we're not there, but we'll hand over the Twitter account to the organizing team of next year."

MR: Good. We'll, of course, put links to those things so you can just look in the show notes and click away wherever you're at. That'll be the easiest way to jump in and check things out. We'll make sure that's taken care of. Well, thank you two for being on the show. It's really good to hear your excitement again. Especially, Ferry with so much experience being in the city itself makes me wanna visit.

It's like the way I am with Milwaukee when people tell me they want to come here. I can spend an hour telling them all the great things and where they should go and what they should do. I feel that same thing from you. And then Lai Chee, I feel the excitement for you around the programming and the experience as well, right?

LCC: Yeah.

MR: Being from another city, you can appreciate all the benefits. Probably, the last thing I would say is don't discount the value of relationships. That you might come for the programming, but the relationships—like some of my most treasured friends I've met at ISCs and was an opportunity, and led to in some cases work opportunities or support opportunities where they gave me advice or help me out with something. Networks are valuable and you should always build them before you need them. So, this is your opportunity to build your network. That would be my pitch.

FT: Amen.

LCC: Yes.

MR: Well, that wraps another episode of the "Sketch Note Army Podcast". Until the next episode, this is Mike and Lai Chee, and Ferry Timp signing off for now. See you soon.