The Opinion Festival has, as one of its aims, to create an atmosphere that is good for open discussion, but how much do we actually want, or need this? Is this kind of debate a peacetime luxury, in a time when it often feels like war, or at least some bigger conflict, is pending?

During the aftermath of the recent referendum that saw Britain vote to leave the European Union, there was a lot of discussion about the different choices faced by the UK and the rest of Europe in the future. The vote, which took most of the political elite by surprise and was greeted with a sense of joy by some and impending doom by others, threw individuals and political parties into a period of extended soul-searching, from which they have not yet emerged.

What was particularly interesting was what it meant for the future of debate. We take it for granted today that we will be given time and space to discuss openly solutions to problems. However there is a growing feeling that the way in which we conduct debate is changing. The Donald Trump campaign in the United States, the refugee crisis in Europe, and discussions on how many displaced people Estonia will take, have all been conducted in an increasingly bellicose manner. The manner of debate seems to be similar to that shown in this video (apologies for linking to an RT post, but it shows what I mean).

This all begs the question, although many of us like to philosophise about the best way of organising ourselves, does this mean that modern culture and government can do so? We have seen, with the acceptance of political “spin” as a necessary tool for most governments, distrust in elites rise. This appears to be at least part of the reason for the rise of Trump, and for Brexit. It’s created a situation where it doesn’t take many points in a conversation on something like Twitter, for example, for one side or both sides to start exhibiting anger.

Essentially, a Twitter conversation in 2016 goes like this:

• Person One: I’m being deliberately provocative, but I’m obviously right, because the person in [this link] agrees with me.
• Person Two: Really? I don’t agree with all of what you just said. Here is another [link] that I feel proves my argument is right.
• Person One: What gives you the right to argue against my point? Check your privilege. You must be a misogynist, or a conservative, or most likely both.
• Person Two: I have every right to exist in this world, but you are the whole reason why the global system is going down the toilet. And you’re ugly.

What are the benefits of Paide being the festival site?

Firstly, we are located in the centre of Estonia so that it’s easily accessible for everyone. Another big advantage is that the town is small and compact. At first, the festival took place only in Vallimägi, which holds many people. Now we have also expanded to the centre, which is actually only a few steps away from Vallimägi. Various themed areas, accommodation places and an opportunity to get to know the town − they’re all close at hand.

Paide already has several years of experience of hosting the Festival. What are the important things to remember when hosting an event this big?

The most important thing is the community and making sure of a smooth cooperation. With these things, you could organise the Opinion Festival anywhere. Any undertaking of this size always relies on people. Therefore, it’s really great that there are so many volunteers who are trying their hardest and are willing to give one hundred per cent regardless of their family and work obligations to make this festival happen. Many of the volunteers are actually from here and every year after the festival they all come together and start planning the next year at once.

What are the festival’s benefits to your town?

The fact that the festival takes place in Paide is a really big gift for us, no kidding. Many people hadn’t been to Paide before or they didn’t have a reason to come here, but thanks to the Opinion Festival lots of people have now discovered our town. Even during those couple of days, it’s good to see young families taking an interest in the abandoned houses of the old town and saying that this place has the right atmosphere that they need to settle down.

Of course, another great thing is that local companies − namely restaurants and shops − earn more money during this weekend than maybe for the entire year.

The festival is also a starting point to many great ideas, many of which have been brought to life right here in Paide or in Järvamaa. For example, last year we had an idea to establish Paide’s own city theatre. We have found some young people from the drama school and they are trying to figure out how to start, what the theatre is going to be like, what the benefits would be for the community; how it would educate kids and so on. We commenced a huge project last year. Paide’s city theatre will be established in 2017 and it will start work in 2018.

Have you had any unexpected obstacles or surprises along the way?

There are always minor bumps on the road, that’s inevitable. It could be anything related to electric power, internet connection, garbage collection or whatever. But everything can be solved. Luckily, we haven’t had any major mishaps and each year we get smarter.

What is different this year?

For example, I know that last year we had some problems with getting access to Vallimägi for disabled people, but this is definitely being organised better this year.

Do you have any wise words for other towns and cities to motivate them to be as brave as you and organise big events like this one?

You have to think big. You can’t be afraid of impossible ideas, you have to put your faith in them and give people a chance to act. It will repay you a hundredfold!

Why do you recommend people to come to the Opinion Festival this summer?

This is a difficult question because I have taken part every year and I wouldn’t even know otherwise. It’s not easy to point out something specific because I believe that there’s something for everyone.

The festival has evolved so fast and it is downright terrifying, in a good way, to think about the future. There are so many discussion stages that there can never be a moment when you don’t have anything interesting to listen to.

Discussing important subjects in the open air creates new ideas and may make you see some things in a different light. Nobody can possibly think all the time, so from time to time you can just ponder on your own or spend quality time with other people.

The positive emotions of the festival last for a long time and once you’ve run out of those, you can start looking forward to the next edition!

Interviewed by Maarja-Liis Mölder.
Translated to English by Piret Raudsepp.

Note: this is not Muki who preferred to remain unphotographed. Photo: Kärt Vajakas

When I set foot in the official ‘pooch park’ of the festival, I found two festival volunteers ready to attend to dogs wanting to rest from the hustle and bustle of the festival… but no dogs. Where were all the dogs? At the festival, of course! I spoke to Muki (or well, his owner), a charismatic but camera-shy creature attending both days of the festival. As Muki prefers the company of people to other dogs, he chose to experience the festival proper all through the two days. Muki is not the only one too excited about the festival to take a breather – the dogs participating in the festival are often present at the discussions themselves or strolling around the tiny lanes and paths around Vallimägi and town centre.

What kinds of dogs have found their way to the festival, and what are they looking for?*

The Dedicated Fan

 If you can’t already tell by the stern look, this dog means serious business, and is here to soak up on all the discussions have to offer. I spotted their motley fluffy coat at several discussions about start-ups. While thinking big thoughts, is sure to impress everyone around – but they are too focused to notice that they are making a fuss.

The First-Timer

The First-Timer is very excited to be at the Arvamusfestival, and though it is their first time here, they are certain to return again next year… and the one after the next, and the one after that. In fact, they are so excited about everything happening that they hardly make it to any discussions. Because there is so much to explore, so much to grasp, so many friends to see, to even think about standing still! And they love every bit of it.

The Chill Dog

They love the ambience in Paide and make good use of the hammocks dotted around the festival area. This is also a great way to mingle with friends old and new, and soak up the discussions from a reclined position and with a relaxed mind. Let ideas drift through you and truly feel the festival.

The Adventure Seeker

Although there are well over 200 discussions taking place at the festival, they seem to have attended a good quarter of them. And the morning yoga. And the Black Poodle party last night (but that one mainly to see why it was named after poodles when smaller dogs are obviously the better breed). There is no way to explain it: some dogs simply manage to do everything.

The Hipster

Alright, this goat is technically not a dog, but they like to be the face of ‘different’, even among the fourlegged kind attending the festival. They represent the new directions the festival is taking. Just like the festival welcomes a true mix of people, the animal scene shows just how colourful and vibrant the Arvamusfestival 2015 is.

*Please note that these are the mere speculations of the author of the piece, and do not represent the personalities of the individual dogs depicted .

To make it, and you, feel even more glorious, here are three reasons why Paide is the place to be this morning:

1. Chance to take a moment.

This is a festival that is in constant movement as new areas and home cafés spring up while old areas feel transformed with every new discussion. To allow for peaceful thoughts to happen, yoga at 7:30 in the Mäeala (or the Hill Area) offered participants a chance to wake up with the Sun Salutation and slowly stretch their body into high spirits. For those of us who were not such early birds, the Festival offered Minutes of Silence, a trip into your body and breathing through exercises at mindfulness. Keeping that feeling of calm with us as we entered another day of exciting thoughts, we followed the mantra from one participant: ‘I am going to have a brilliant day’.

2. New friends from unexpected places.

Although there are no inhabitable houses on the Paide Vallimägi, that does not mean there is a shortage of residents eager to meet you here from the moment you found yourself at the festival area this morning. There is a family of storks keeping an eager lookout atop some old ruins just next to the café area. Do not fear their watchful gaze and take pleasure in their comforting local presence. You can also make new (human) friends from 11:00 to 13:00 at the Mäeala (Hill Area) which transforms into the ‘Meeting Place.’

3. Awesome talks straight from the morning.

As the festival means business (that is, opinion business), we were off to a passionate and thoughtful start with the MEP discussion about the European Union’s policy towards Russia, contemplating the possibility of co-operation with Russia. Other discussions welcomed eager participants from 10:00 onwards, to think about topics of all shapes and sizes, from measuring the pulse and blood pressure of active citizenship in the Voluntary Sector Growth area to contemplating the meaning and level of digital poisoning in the Digital Education area.

The Festival of Opinion Culture has dedicated several themes and discussion areas to technological innovation, with several of these taking a long hard look at the wider socioeconomic effects of start-ups on other industries, jobs and regulations. The phrasing of two such discussions, ‘What’s the Use of Start-Ups to Estonia? in the Enterprise Area and ‘Are Apps Devouring Estonian Small Businesses?’ in the Postimees Area, both bring negative, or at least sceptical, viewpoints to the spotlight. For a country that promotes itself with a photo of a young woman surfing the internet while sitting on a haystack, this could be a healthy signal that we are getting away from a blind admiration of tech specs and savvy marketing slogans to actually engaging with the close connection between our tech scene and society.

In the Enterprise Area, the focus was on the viability of start-ups for Estonian enterprise culture at large. What is a start-up – and why does it need or want to be called one? Are start-ups solving problems that call for urgent attention, or are they too infatuated by their own ideas and make up problems to suit their needs, as suggested by one of the participants, Margus Uudam? Scepticism aside, one take-away from the discussion was that start-ups are delicate creatures, masterminded and developed by ambitious people, but they do not necessarily need to make a profit to be useful for Estonian economy.

Although named even more provocatively than the previous offering, the overall consensus at the discussion in the Postimees Area was equally positive, bringing the discussion back again and again to ‘customer experience.’ This seemed to be less from a love of marketing jargon than a genuine belief that apps have revolutionised traditional industries such as transport and hospitality in the name of consumer comfort and availability. As Kadri Hansalu from Postimees noted, ‘But at the end of the day, someone must bring about such change in any case.’

However, the newly adopted creed of start-ups, that ‘customer is king’, was not given such an easy pass by all involved. Are start-ups like Uber and Booking.com middlemen that take income and control away from actual service providers, increasingly reliant on customer ratings rather than accredited regulators? Do they merely make service less controlled and safe? Then there is the issue of market specificity – Verni Loodma, representing Hotell London in Tartu, suggested that ever-powerful apps such as Booking.com are often far removed from the many markets they operate in, particularly in the case of small countries like Estonia. Not knowing the market context can in turn lead to factual errors in the app’s descriptions and comparative methods that may harm the popularity of a given hotel. Service providers are left stranded as the process of getting things fixed is often unacceptably slow.

Having said that, the pressure to get better reviews can be conducive to becoming better at what you do, raising the bar for the industry in general. One thought that echoed throughout the discussion was that a ratings culture works to empower ordinary customers, an update perhaps long overdue.

Enn Metsar from Uber emphasised how important scale is for start-ups: to create a great app, one needs resources and a global market to support further development. In a similar vein, Tõnu Runnel from voog.com summed this up with a jocoserious statement: ‘You can’t make an app in the same way as a chicken hatches an egg.’ And if innovation wants to happen and customers support it, society will need to follow and regulate it in hindsight.

This realisation guided the discussion as Kadri Hansalu emphasised that ‘innovation is in our blood.’ Generation Y is more attuned to the necessity and reality of change, which makes the streamlined but often more personalised customer experience offered by apps appear as a natural and positive development. While Verni Loodma remained convinced that certain customers will always prefer the comforts of a hotel to new app-enabled services such as Airbnb, the effect of a generational difference on how we like – and more importantly, will like – certain services remained largely unexplored.

Are innovation and their stronghold of supporters simply waiting for all the nay-sayers to catch up? As Tõnu Runnel strikingly put it, while certain popular start-ups may feel like the future now, they will inevitably change and fade with time: ‘Monopolies spring up, grow, and die.’ So, even as we think if we should embrace or fear the start-ups of today, whether as individuals or governments, innovation and change are ongoing and will all the same take us to unexpected places.

With a speaking area for every taste, the Arvamus Festival has thrown up some interesting debates, on every part of Estonian public (and private) life. The discussion on the need for a Russian-language TV channel in Estonia continues to be heard, and I attended the debate run by Keskerakond (the Centre Party), which held a discussion of its representatives’ views on the matter.

With questions often heated, as they regularly are when it comes to Estonian politics, it was interesting to see the public being given an open forum on which to question elected politicians, and even more interesting to see how they responded. Other political parties have been holding parallel debates, including the Reform Party, the IRL and the Social Democrats, making this a fully-rounded political debate.

2. A Chance for a Charm Offensive

Estonia’s first dedicated public Russian-language television channel, begins full service in September with 20 hours a week of factual and entertainment programming. Its representatives, such as channel head Darja Saar, were answering questions from all-comers about what it meant for Estonia, and why the station had been set up.

The positive PR campaign for the service, which will produce original programming in Estonia bringing news content, along with items such as a drama series, was led by Saar and Communications Manager Anastasia Dratsova. As the Arvamus Festival is a meeting-point for all those who like to consider issues, regardless of their background or interest, it makes it the perfect place for such a charm offensive.

3. Connecting with the Heart

“It’s the heart of Estonia.” I was told this about ten times by people I questioned about what was so special about Paide. The town, which hosts the Arvamus Festival up on Vallimägi, is loved by all visitors, especially on a blazing-hot summer’s day. There seems to be a special atmosphere of togetherness hereDSCF1669, which makes it so much easier to relax, unwind and enjoy calm deliberation of the issues not just of the mind, but also of the heart.

It’s also a place where the best of Estonian culture comes to play. Tallinn’s best jazz club, Philly Joe’s, which often hosts artists of the calibre of Liisi Koikson, Holger Marjamaa and Laura and Joel Remmel, has brought a selection of great musicians to the festival. They lit up lunchtime with their smooth brand of virtuoso playing.

4. Connecting with the Stomach

While listening to the music from Philly Joe’s, I sampled some of the excellent food on offer around the central courtyard of the Arvamus Festival grounds. Tallinn’s Kohvik Inspiratsioon, a vegetarian cafe of some repute, brought its cooks and service staff to Arvamus, and I ordered the veggie burger, purely for reasons of taste-testing, you understand.

The wholemeal bread used to wrap the burger was crusty and sturdy, even with a sizeable cut of cucumber and tomato inside. The burger was of course healthy, especially as it did not contain any dressing – the burger being made from a very tangy beetroot mix that more than provided enough flavour.

Inspiratsioon did indeed provide inspiration to continue my hunting of great events, though it still left an old-fashioned carnivore like me craving a juicy hamburger. It must be said, though, that the veggie burger, made with love, represents great value at €4.

5. Much More than Just Politics

Someone said before the festival, explaining why he would not be attending, “it’s just politics, though, isn’t it?” Er, no. The hundreds of events and talks cover everything from Estonian food, to why Estonia does not yet have an internationally-recognised crime novelist.

The search for the Estonian export star who could be a new Steig Larsson continues, but at the stage sponsored by Rahva Raamat, keen readers were given the chance to recline in the most comfortable bean-bags you can imagine, and listen to talented authors such as Indrek Hargla discuss their work, and the future of Estonian literature.

Meanwhile, students from Estonian high schools all over the country taking part in the Our New Media Generation project in association with the Ministry of Education and the website etnoweb.ee were given the chance to go out, gain some experience and confidence, and do some reporting from the festival.

The festival has been bustling since the early hours of the morning, when the finishing touches were put to the 40 themed discussion areas to make them as colourful and conducive to great thoughts and discussions as possible. By now, the hills of Vallimägi have become alive with participants, big and small, local and from other parts of Estonia, human and four-legged. Thoughts have been echoing in the valleys of Paide since the first, packed discussion at the Oru area began at 11:00 which discussed the ‘state of the country’ and broadcast live on Radio 2. A full day of discussions, from the morals of AI to immigration in Estonia, has commenced.

The Festival of Opinion Culture is also a place where the appearance of the festival follows from the innovative and creative spirit of the discussions themselves. You can ponder about education while sitting on haystack seats at the Village of Community Schools area, or let yourself be enveloped under the cool shade of the honey-comb roof at the Urban Space area, made completely out of fully recycled cardboard boxes. Or, if you need to take a moment to let the thoughts from your latest discussion whirl around in your mind, there are crazy quilts and hammocks dotted around the festival, always ready to welcome you. As the best thoughts come with good food, the festival’s café area is full of delicious smells and flavours, from gourmet burgers to rhubarb ice cream and lemonade.

Let thoughts, opinions and ideas fly for the next two days in all possible directions, into your minds, hearts and future ventures. Let the festival begin!

Photo credit: Sven Tupits (Fotogeen.com)