There are a lot of ways to think about Lincoln Calling. It’s a music and arts festival first, of course.

But it’s also like a day (or night) camp. For six nights, roughly the same group of people, friends, strangers, musicians, converge on downtown Lincoln, working on the same activities — venue hopping, catching as many acts as possible, staying out late for a week straight. And at the end, we all have shared experiences and stories to tell.

Lincoln Calling 2014 was very much a scene summit. Go out and see what everyone has been working on the last year. Talk to perennially-returning acts like The Kickback, White Mystery and Sidewalk Chalk again. The festival is a community center, a place to exhibit to each other, and bring outsiders in, we hope.

“Look what we’ve done with our little town,” we might say. “Visit all of our music venues, drink the beer we brewed and listen to the diverse array of music we make. Go watch our friends from out of town who love to play here.”

With all of that in mind, there is the submerged iceberg of Lincoln Calling off stage. There are the people working the door every night, the drinkers, the audience members, the tech people, the musicians hanging around to see their friends play, the impromptu shows and the after-parties.

Contributor Andrew Dickinson spent his week looking for the kind of moments indicative of the ecosystem that teems below Lincoln Calling’s surface. See a little of what he found below.