Edinburgh Festivals & 4iP: Call to action on making the world's biggest arts festival feel a little smaller

[Ewan McIntosh]

The Edinburgh Festivals

Edinburgh is the world's festival capital, presenting a fun, unforgettable mix of cultural experiences in an iconic city. Together, the Festivals sell over 3 million tickets, across 40,000 individual performances in over 300 venues. The Festivals are world-famous, and their appeal is manifold, but too many folk find it hard to bump into the culture under their nose.

What's the challenge?

The Festivals want to do more to simplify the experience; aid navigation to and through the Festivals; make the most of their content - put simply, to make the world's largest arts festival feel a little smaller.

What are we looking for?

1. We need apps, web and mobile services and platforms that make the Festivals' experiences
* easier to discover, navigate, search, filter (pre-arrival and on-location)
* easier to book the stuff you want
* easier to book the stuff you don't know you want, but we know you'll like
* easier to build up into multiple bookings with friends
* greener (such as e-flyers that allow more than paper ever could and help reduce print waste)

2. We need to provide better access to existing and future user-generated digital video and audio content (to drive people to experience the live)

3. We need to create or better harness existing innovative digital platforms and APIs for "Festival word-of-mouth".

4. We want ideas that will develop and grow beyond the Edinburgh Festivals themselves.

What are Festivals Edinburgh providing?

* access to its programmes data and metadata (via a feed, see the draft database schema [doc]) * possible access to other Festivals produced web content (eg video, UGC) as outlined in the web development brief [pdf].
* placement on and/or integration with official website, the comprehensive listings and joint-ticketing portal for the Edinburgh Festivals (currently in development, and where appropriate)
* and therefore, traffic from its websites, as advertised in the national and international media
* placement on/links to individual festival websites, where appropriate
* promotion through joint festival PR, print and other communications

How is it funded?

4iP, a partnership between Channel 4 and its regional partners, will fund ideas that meet both the demands of these Festivals and have applications beyond the Edinburgh Festivals. We will be seeking ideas that meet 4's purposes and values. Festivals Edinburgh may also part-fund projects that clearly meet its marketing objectives. Applications can come from any UK-based independent company. We have no maximum or minimum budget in mind for this call to action: we're looking for the best ideas that help people discover the arts.

How long have I got and how's it going to be paid for?

You have until April 16th to submit your ideas through the normal 4iP submissions system. Ideas will be considered as they come in by your regional Digital Commissioner and, after this first pass, the Festivals Edinburgh's Marketing Director, and processed as quickly as possible on an ongoing basis throughout this period in the same way as other 4iP ideas. All ideas submitted as part of this call to action should, in their header, begin with "Edinburgh Festivals:... " (Existing submissions will be sought out, or you can flag them up with a quick email to me through 38minutes).

Best of luck!

[william perrin]

ok how about a bit more low tech - give each act a pdf to print out for a sign

'if you are writing about me online please use the word #[blank] in your piece then everyone can find it'

and with a simple leaflet explaining what a hash tag is.

And an easel to put the sign on or a can of spray mount or some blutack.

OR in the various official listings, assert a hashtag for each act - that might be the easiest way to start. it will also provoke some interesting comic material

[Martin Owen]

I am doing a talk at the Edinburgh Interactive Fest bit. on audio gaming ( mainly in a location context). There are rich possibilities in demo-ing. I agree the need for REST.

[Jon Mountjoy]

Their goals are excellent: "simplify the experience; aid navigation;make most of content". Surely the starting point of all of this is a publicly accessible API. Innovation happens elsewhere. Give people the data and the APIs, let them play. They'll see innovation in return, and routes to their content and events that they never imagined.

Perhaps that's their intention? If so, the database schema is a good first step, however it's way too low (and late?). They should be providing a REST API to their data set right now. And not just an API to the event data, but to the ticketing agency too. Enable other folk to build sites that purchase tickets.

You can easily imagine hundreds of possible scenarios, from iPhone applications navigating what's on now/next to dedicated widgets on the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre website selling tickets. But they have to provide the tools that enable this. It feels like they're slowly moving in this direction, but the database schema is really just the starting point - a lot more is needed.

[Martin Reynolds]

Really useful comments. Marc; hear what you're saying about ticketing, which is in the main why much of our focus is around search/filter/UGC/recommendations rather than integration with shopping baskets. That said, the Fringe has procured a tried and tested system for this year (Red 61's VIA ticketing system) so you should see improvements this year at individual festival level, and the festivals together are working on a combined shopping basket project over the next 12 months, using Ticketswitch: a middleware solution that currently serves up all of the West End's and Broadway's disparate ticketing system data to portal websites. William, integrating "try before you buy" clips, iTunes style, into search or the purchase process is a great idea, and we hope to deliver a first iteration of that for this summer on edinburghfestivals.tv. Thanks for the comments.

[Ewan McIntosh]

With something like 7000 shows it might be a tad problematic to get all to clear it, though I'm sure many acts already have something of their performance up by the time they play. Might be worth thinking about how we tag things together, get the word out.

[william perrin]

interesting- at a more simple level though is there interest in making sure that every single act is up on youtube (or similar) so that people can decide for themselves by watching the act. Either the acts can be given the skills to do this themselves or the audience could be encouraged to do so - big signs saying that filming is permitted and encouraged.

or would that take some of the random fun out of the festival ?

[Stuart Cosgrove]

Gretaopportunity. Becasue Edinburgh is the biggest and most expansive Festival in the world from Book to Comedy, Film to Opera it by its nature attracts disagreement and intr-festival politics. Witness the on-going Comedy Wars at Edinburgh.

4iP is only on the side of creative engagement and will act as a 'neutral country' - think Switzerland with slightly less money.

[Marc Tanenbaum]

Exceptionally exciting opportunity. Gets me thinking of all the possibilities of blog aggregation, folksonomic tagging systems, localised event searching, mobile ticket sales (think iPhone 3.0 in-app purchase), audioboo reporting, etc. That said, last year the Festival website was nigh-on unusable: couldn't handle the traffic, terrible searchability and dropped secure purchases. It does make one wonder whether they're quite ready to go brave new world until they've mastered basic dot-com-era functionality.

Be that as it may, I wish anyone applying for this the best of luck. Awesome potential here.