Live coverage online and off-line of a multi-layered event, including prototyping post-digital possibilities.
www.greenbelt.org.uk/blog/2009/09/while-we-were-here
For several years now over the actual Greenbelt festival weekend we've co-ordinated a variety of projects designed to help spread the word about the festival and share some of its content with a wider constituency. The most striking successes so far have come from flickr, where festival-goers have for several years running uploaded enough photos to make our chosen tag one of the biggest of the post-festival week.
For 2009 that was stepped up a gear with a number of new and newly polished initiatives, including a newspaper!
In the run up to the festival we assisted with the development and distribution of an iPhone application for the festival programme. Despite only launching a week before the event, the application was a huge hit and many festivalgoers said it had changed their experience of the event.
Working alongside Jenny Brown's team who produced a series of fantastic videos documenting the festival and providing exclusive content, we led a team who were focussed on using tools like AudioBoo and Qik to produce informal short-form content and get it out as quickly as possible. At the same time we co-ordinated a small group of bloggers producing content on the festival's own blog and/or on their own. While we'd prototyped several of these approaches before, the 2009 efforts showed a level of comfort with the tools and continued steps towards understanding best practice with them.
The key new initiatives addressed a pair of audiences historically underserved by the festival's online content:
A new festival homepage was rolled out that acted as an aggregator. Rather than seeing out of date pre-festival content when visiting the festival website, visitors not there with us could quickly see the wealth of content that the festival and its followers on twitter were creating.
And for those at the festival, we created a newspaper! Heavily inspired by our friends at the Really Interesting Group, and making use of the skills of designer and developer Matt Patterson, we freed the online content from its single-context existence and printed it out so those at the festival could read it online, take home a physical (some would say post-digital) artifact as a souvenir, and have a handy resource providing links to explore after they left the event. You can find a PDF version to download here or we'd be happy to send you a copy if you're considering a similar project.
It can't be underestimated how much these multi-layered approaches to events, tools for them and outputs from them not only help with the marketing but make events themselves more manageable and more immersive for attendees. With our help Greenbelt is establishing itself at the forefront of exploring the possibilities, and we're looking forward to working with them further to extend and improve its offerings.