6. ASSESSING COSTS AND TARGETS: Some Consequences of a greater than expected interest
One of the surprises of the project was the greater than expected interest, which reflected itself across the Activities, and throughout the life of the project. The project design, and the formulation of workloads, budgets, timings and targets, had all been based on pre-project experience, amplified with optimism, but with those amplifications held in check by the realistic fear that the goals and the budgets might have been placed too high. In many very real ways (and for very many people) the project was a leap of faith, into the unknown.
As exceeded targets, high participant numbers and participant feedback show, by and large these leaps proved founded, and in many cases carried the project and its participants farther than was expected. This additional distance tended to translate into extra time and energy for the project team, as well as costs, adding to the additional underwater paddling described in Section 5 above. This in turn required a degree of pragmatic triage on the part of the team when approaching the project Activities as a whole, selecting the most pressing and the more core elements for immediate attention, and asking the less pressing and less time-critical, such as the plaques and some areas of publicity and publication, to wait in the queue. Although understandable, this queuing is far from ideal, and will need to be addressed as the Archive "Weekend" and project model generally are developed.
This section records some of the areas where participation and demand outstripped expectation.