• Information - We need some information from your groups as soon as possible. Attached you will find a form that we ask you to send by fax or email to JEF Secretariat by Thursday November 30 at the very latest. As you see, we need to know:

1. who is the "Group Leader", that is the person that will act as only interface with the hotels and the staff in Nice and will co-ordinate the group during all movements,
2. who have you chosen as the "Security Responsible", that is the person that will join the security service of the demonstration (s/he will accompany the group, but marching outside of the procession line – see below),
3. if there is at least 1 person willing to join the Staff during the Convention (for the registration procedures, the lunch packages’ distribution, etc).

We need full name and mobile numbers of all these people.

The hotels in Nice demand a list of people who will stay in the hotel in advance. So it is extremely important that you send us an updated list of participants from your group, also by Thursday November 30 at the very latest.

• Material – To make our political message visible and a demonstration a success we need to make it cheerful and colourful. Walking quietly through the streets of Nice is not enough. So, before coming to Nice, prepare as many banners as possible, with political slogans in your language. Be sure that you represent your organisation or your section. Be visible, positive and inventive! Bring flags from your country and your region/city, instruments, masks, make up to paint things on your faces, instruments to make noise, and whatever you can think of. Think about carnival, your local football stadium, a skiing race, etc. We are sure you will find hundreds of ways to be visible and attractive to the media.

• Press - The events in Nice may well be interesting for the press. The demonstration is a very good television event – masses of young people marching for European unity makes good television pictures The Youth Convention and the NGO Forum will include some well-known names. If we can make contact effectively with the press, this is a unique opportunity for JEF and for all the organisations joined in the organisation of the Youth Convention and the Demonstration to multiply the effect of our events and communicate our messages. Much work is being done at the European level but it is essential that national groups contact their national media. Together with this message we are sending you a Media Kit. Please send it to all journalists you and your section are in contact with. Send it to your national television channels and main newspapers (to the attention of the persons that generally write about European issues) and to the press agencies. It should be not too difficult to find the contact details. If you can translate the Media Kit, or at least the presentation, into you own language- great! - otherwise just send it in English as it is, but be sure to send it.

• Arrival time - The Groups coming to Nice are expected to arrive during the afternoon, to participate at the Forum of the Civil Society starting at 5PM on Wednesday December 6 (see the attached programme – the buffet dinner is free, included in our package). If your travel arrangements make this impossible, be sure to arrive by the night of December 6 in any case. Entering the city in the morning of Thursday December 7, and particularly the area of the Youth Convention, will be very complex from the point of view of the traffic’s restrictions.
• Meeting points – Entering the city and finding the hotel may not be easy. To facilitate the busses, we have arranged a Check Point and a Meeting Point. From 12.00 to 20.00 on Wednesday December 6, there will be a Check Point in operation, staffed by MFE (the Italian section of UEF), at the end of the High Way before Nice (take the third exit/entrance, Sortie 54, named "Nice Nord"). There will be a van clearly identifiable with European and federalist flags, parked at the Service Area "La Scoperta", just 1,200 metres before the motorway toll station . The telephone number will be communicated to the Group Leaders in a separate e-mail. You can stop there, and they will tell you if there are last-minute special problems of traffic in entering the city and will show you on the map the best route. They will also call JEF office to announce your arrival. If you are not arriving from 12.00 to 20.00, just call the Nice JEF office say one hour before arriving in Nice to announce you arrival. We will send a JEF person (JEF Envoy) to the Meeting Point to pick you up - the Meeting Point is the square of the Railways Station in Nice. The person will be a French speaker and will lead you to the hotels and help with the checking-in procedure. The few of you who are staying in a hotel outside Nice are going to be contacted separately for more precise information.
• Busses - Busses cannot park in the area of the hotels. The busses will have to leave immediately after you have been loaded off and will have to park in an area far from the centre. Once arrived in the hotel the JEF Envoy will tell you where there is park space available. Take everything needed not to use the bus for the next two days. Particularly, do bring in the hotel all material you hopefully have with you and do not forget anything in the bus that you might need during these days.
• Once in the hotel – Once in the hotel, the Group Leader is expected to give JEF Envoy the fully filled in and signed participants’ list and the list for the hotels. Lacking this, you will not be admitted to the hotel. The Envoy will give each participant a Welcome Kit including: a special issue of The New Federalist, the final program of the events, a map of the city, a voucher for the lunch packages, a voucher for the Party for Europe, and a list of all other useful information you can think of. As we are not receiving in advance the participant’s name we cannot plan the number of males/female in each hotel. If 1-2 rooms in each hotel will turn up to be mixed, we are confident in your flexibility! Dinner is not included. Breakfast will be in the hotel in most cases, or in a café nearby that JEF Envoy will show to the Group Leader.
• Security Meeting – At 9 pm (in a place that the JEF Envoy will communicate to the Group Leader) there will be a staff meeting with all the Group Leaders and the Security Responsibles to review all together the arrangements for the next days, particularly the public demonstration. Please be sure that at least your "Security Responsible" is present.

• Arrival time and registration - On Thursday December 7, the Youth Convention as well as the round tables organised by the European Movement and the Permanent Forum of Civil Society will all take place at the Cinema Pathé, in 31, Avenue Jean Médecin, Nice. Important !!!: there is another Cinema Pathé (Pathé Paris) on the same street, so please check the number and see if you are in the right one. The Convention will start at 9 am sharp. Bearing in mind the number of participants and the registration procedure we are opening the registration procedures at 8.00 am. From most of the hotels it will take roughly 15 minutes to walk to the cinema. If your hotel is not located in the train station area please take more time into consideration, especially as public transport might be quite difficult during the events. Please bring all the material you had prepared for the public demonstration to the cinema as you will have no time neither to get back to the hotels nor to the busses in between the two events.
• Meeting Rooms - The meeting rooms for the Youth Convention are rooms 1 and 3 of Cinema Pathé. Room 1 will be "live", while room 3 will be connected by videoconference. The two rooms contain a total of 850 people of the 1100 that we are expecting. Some Groups have already expressed their interest to participate to the Round Tables of the International European Movement in the same building. Participants who are interested in rather joining one of the different round tables (see program below) are very much welcome to do so.
• The Convention. The latest draft of the program is attached. There is no particular dress code. The meeting will be held in English with one or two French contributions. At the entrance of the meeting rooms you will find a box were you can put questions which come to your mind during the meeting. You will find a form in your welcome package. The Convention will be closed at 1 pm.

• Moving to the Gathering Point – At the end of the Youth Convention, each group should move - as a group, that is to say with those people you arrived with - to Place General de Gaulle, where the public demonstration will start at 2-2.30PM. The way from the cinema to the Place General de Gaulle takes at least 20 minutes. Group Leaders should make all possible to keep the group together and ensure that it is ordered and moving on time to the gathering point of the Public Demonstration. All detailed instructions will be given to the Group Leader. In order to fulfil all security requests and form a proper and impressive manifestation be sure to arrive there at 1 30PM at the very latest.
• Lunch – The distribution of the lunch packages (all of them vegetarian) to the participants of the Youth Convention will take place directly at the Gathering Point of the Demonstration (Place General de Gaulle). You need to show the vouchers included in the Welcome Kit.
• Once at the gathering Point – At the entrance of Place General de Gaulle there will be a point for the distribution of lunch packages (see above) and another for the distribution of material prepared on the European level. There will be various thousands federalist flags (the Green E), big banners, etc, to make sure that almost each person has something. The composition of the procession cannot be random, we need to structure it before starting. The various involved organisations are agreeing on a structure of the procession. This means that once arrived in the Gathering Point, The Group Leader will be showed where his/her group is located and the Group will have to respect its place.
• Security – Police will come with us along all the march. But we have agreed that we will also provide our security service. Each Security Responsible of the group will receive a special sign, to be put on the arm. S/he will march outside the stream of the procession, alongside it, ensuring that there are no infiltration by other people, that our participants behave correctly, that the pace of the march is kept properly, etc. S/he will have to interface with the police if necessary. The Group Leader will also need to keep an eye on the group as a whole from inside.
• Procession and final Speeches - The manifestation will continue for roughly one hour. We will march through a route assigned in the map you have in the Welcome Kit and we will then reach Place General de Gaulle again, where a wide range of political personalities of various countries will deliver public speeches. We expect at least Daniel Cohn-bendit, Alain Lamassoure, Cecilia Malmostrom, Francesco Rutelli, Jo Leinen for UEF and Paolo Vacca for JEF. The event will finish around 4-4.30PM.
• Afterwards – After the end of the demonstration you are basically free to do whatever you want, it makes sense to go back to the hotels with the material. Afterwards you might go to one of the beautiful squares and quarters in Nice to have dinner and get energy for the Party for Europe in the late evening. You will find a long list of proposals in your Welcome Kit.

• The Party for Europe will be … a BIG SURPRISE. We can ensure that it will be the most international party the French Coast has ever seen! Details on what and when will be included in the Welcome Kit.

• Departure of your group depends on the arrangements with your bus company or airline. I any case you will have to leave the hotels before 12 am. Please bear in mind that none of the participating organisations is based in Nice. Therefore any kind of lost or forgotten mobiles, luggage, etc will have to be arranged directly with your hotel. The Hotels are paid directly by JEF-Europe and are invoiced to JEF-Europe. If you have any special request in this sense, please let us know as soon as possible and in any case before arriving in Nice. If any problem of any kind happens in a hotel (for instance something is stolen or destroyed by participants) and JEF-Europe incurs in any cost, we will be forced to deduct it from the travel reimbursements to groups.

• Weather - Unfortunately we can neither foresee nor change the weather in Nice. Still you can count on temperatures well above 10 C, but on the other hand it is raining quite often in this time of the year. Have this especially in mind in the morning leaving to the Youth Convention and the public demonstration afterwards.
• Money - 100 FF = 15,2 Euro. You will need some money, depending on you arrival and departure time for dinners(s) and lunch(es). Nice is not the most expensive place in France but still, especially in discos and clubs, is not really a place for having a great night out for only a few Euros. Count with 50 FF minimum for a pizza and a drink. For a beer you will spend, depending very much on where you go, between 15 and 40 FF. At the same time there are plenty of relatively cheap fast food and snack restaurants, where you can get a big sandwich for a reasonable price (10 – 20 FF) on almost every corner. Furthermore, the beach is more then inviting to have a wonderful evening there with your home-made specialities as far as we manage to arrange the thing with the weather. There are many possibilities to exchange and pick up money. Small shops will not except Credit Cards.
• Safety - Nice is an absolutely save place to go, just bear in mind that we will not be alone in these days. If you behave as you would behave in any bigger city in Europe everything will be fine. Expect and respect that access to parts of the town might be limited in these days due to the Summit Meeting.

• Follow-up - Nice is not over on 8 December. There will be many interesting stories you will have to tell at home. Make pictures, prepare articles for your local press, spread our message to your friends and other organisations. If you have any kind of experience you would like to share with others let us know so that we can forward it to the others. Just be prepared to those who stayed at home and will want to know and see as much as possible about your adventure afterwards.
• Travel reimbursements – Travel reimbursements will be made as soon as we receive in Brussels the original (or an officially certified copy) of the invoice of the bus. The money will be transferred to the bank account that your Group Leader has indicated in the attached form. Considering the "recover time" after Nice and the Christmas Holidays, we expect to be able to make the bank transfer soon in the New Year.

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With these basic guidelines and our very best wishes we hope that you are well equipped for your trip to Nice. Below you will find the programs of the various events and the various attachments mentioned here. Have a great journey and see you very soon,