Not one page of the Playbook was written by a company. It was written by INSEADers, for the INSEADers coming after them. This is an alumni-to-student project and always has been.
Around nine in ten of the words here trace back to one thing: the INSEAD Alumni Crowdsourcing Campaign, in which alumni and current members sat down and answered long, open questions about arriving, living, studying, recruiting and staying well. Some of it arrived as a survey response at midnight. Some as a long forwarded message in a group chat, with map pins attached. Some as a spreadsheet with nearly two hundred rows and a column headed "buy in France". All of it was a gift, and all of it is here because somebody decided the next intake should not have to work it out alone.
Nobody was paid to contribute. These are the sources the Playbook, the Housing module and the Market are actually built out of.
Roughly ninety per cent of what you read here. Members of the MIM and MBA who had just lived through arrival, housing, recruiting and the whole strange, compressed year, and could still remember exactly which part was hardest. They gave us real rents, real monthly budgets, the name of the bakery, and the mistake they most wished someone had warned them about.
The things people wrote for one friend and then let us give to everybody. A micro guide to Fontainebleau, restaurant by restaurant. A packing spreadsheet with a pack-or-buy column that reframed a whole article. The most generous kind of contribution, because nobody was ever asked for them.
The people who moved country for somebody else's degree, and told us honestly what nobody had prepared them for. Two pages exist because of them, and they are among the most read.
The Playbook was built to be evergreen, and it is never finished. It is updated as things change, and the corrections come from you: a place has closed, a rule has changed, a price is wrong, a whole article is missing. Send it to playbook@allsead.com and it goes in.
We set out to name everyone. We could not do it fairly. Some asked not to be named, some we would have missed, and drawing a line between a long survey response and a five-minute answer that changed a whole page turned out to be impossible and slightly insulting to both. So there is no list here. The credit goes, in full and without ranking, to the INSEAD alumni community that built this for the people coming after them.
If you contributed and would like to be named after all, or you would like a contribution removed, write to playbook@allsead.com and we will do it the same week.
Allsead was built by alumni and it is funded by alumni. It charges members nothing, it carries no advertising, and it does not sell anything about you to anyone. That is not a launch offer. It is the point of the thing.
It also means we should be straight with you about the trade. This is not run by a company with a support department. It is run by people doing it alongside their jobs, on money they put in themselves. Occasionally something will break, an answer will take a day, or a page will be out of date because the person who knew has graduated. When that happens, tell us and we will fix it.
Allsead is free for every INSEADer and will stay free for as long as we can carry the load. If it ever grows past what alumni funding can support, we will say so here, in plain language, before anything changes. The platform exists to serve the community, and a community platform that starts quietly charging its community has stopped being one.
None of it takes long, and all of it matters more than it looks.
A page is out of date, a place has closed, a rule has changed, a landlord was good or was not. Two minutes of your time saves the next person a bad week. playbook@allsead.com
Your flat, your bike, your kettle, your desk lamp. Housing and the Market exist so the outgoing intake can pass things to the incoming one instead of a skip.
On Social, or in your inbox from a student who found you on LinkedIn. Twenty minutes you will forget by Friday, and they may not forget for a decade.