The Jagiellonian Club has joined the organization of this year’s Krynica Forum. What was the deciding factor in your involvement?
Paweł Musiałek, president of the Jagiellonian Club: We were present at the Krynica Forum last year and the cooperation was so good that when we received the proposal to take responsibility for the program issues, we did not hesitate, because we see great potential in this event. We prepared a program concept that was 100% accepted by the main organizer. It also turned out that the points we paid special attention to are consistent with the points that the Kościuszko Institute (the main organizer of the Krynica Forum – ed.) wanted to focus on.
What points are these?
Firstly, we feel that the phenomenon of “panelosis” is creeping onto the Polish congress map. We observe a tendency to approach debates in a secondary way. The most important thing at conferences has always been the opportunity to meet people in person, whom we do not have the opportunity to meet on a daily basis, and this is a natural feature of congresses; but we decided that we cannot neglect panels. We decided that we would put special effort into improving the quality of debates, if only so that panelists and participants who come to Krynica would simply want to come back in the following years. Working on the substantive program of this year’s edition of Krynica Forum was a craft, not a factory job. In the case of each panel, we tried to take into account different perspectives and invite speakers to the discussion who would “fit” well together in the sense that an interesting chemistry would develop between them.
We want to achieve quality both through the right selection of guests and the right number of panel participants. We try to avoid a situation in which eight speakers take the floor during a 45-minute panel. This is already a kind of meme in the conference environment. Each participant in the debate has only a few minutes to speak, which is why the statements – instead of leading to a discussion – turn into a system of making statements, where interaction is minimal. We decided on a different model – narrower, but deeper. We limited the number of participants and extended the duration of the panels. We care about interactions and about the fact that threads that are interesting or problematic can be deepened. The point is for people listening to the discussion to feel that they have learned something new.
To emphasize the dynamic dimension of the panels, we also encourage the main speakers to prepare a main thesis at the beginning of the debate. This can introduce some freshness, and the thesis presented at the beginning of the panel will immediately direct the entire discussion. To sum up, we would like to play with many theoretically small elements, which, when gathered together, we hope will create the effect of qualitative transformation.
Another new thing is opening the conference to the so-called normals. How do you intend to achieve this?
Often, conferences forget about real people, participants not related to any industry. We created a special ticket offer for such participants, and at the program stage we very carefully researched the topics of each panel, in terms of what interests people, not just experts.
What interests people?
More and more often, these are threads concerning the broadly understood economy, geopolitics and security. Here, in fact, you don’t need to have a detailed expertise, because it is enough to look at the list of the most popular channels on YouTube. These are channels with a very wide reach, built precisely on geopolitical threads. They were gaining popularity even before the war in Ukraine, and the outbreak of the armed conflict naturally caused people to start asking themselves questions they had not asked before. And for such people – who live the subject of security – we have created panels with the participation of experts whom these people know, like, respect and watch on a daily basis. As part of the novelty, we decided to confront the world of classic think tanks, which have always been invited and respected – with the world of experts who have only just entered the media sphere and enjoy great popularity.
What topics will predominate during the conference?
Security will be at the center of this year’s Krynica Forum. We use security in all cases, but today we need to look at this challenge broadly, not just in the military dimension. We want to add less intuitive and less exploited aspects to this. That is why we want to ask, for example, what the events in the East mean for large projects in Poland, such as CPK or nuclear power. We want to talk about how war affects business and local governments, because today the challenge of security also affects individual local government units. And finally, we will look at strictly social issues: for example, how should Poles prepare for war and what kind of war should they prepare for? How to respond to challenges that are not only military, but also hybrid? We will talk about all this this year in Krynica.
We have also built other events around the program. We will organize a press box, to which we have invited journalists from nationwide editorial offices. Several books will also be premiered in Krynica. We hope that everyone will find something interesting for themselves at the Forum.
