Accessibility Project brief now live

Given that  the only idea that won both the public and the judges’ vote of the Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge was related to accessibility, we’re delighted to announce that Festivals Edinburgh has just published a tender for a delivery partner to build a user-centred digital service targeted at attendees of the Edinburgh Festivals with accessibility needs.

Full details and the tender brief is available at www.edinburghfestivals.co.uk/jobs

The project has not been fully specified down to the final detail since we want to work together with the delivery partner and a relevant group of users to create the solution that best matches the expertise of the delivery partner and can generate the target outcomes.

Responses for this piece of work have to be in by April 27th so please get in touch if you would like to be considered for this project.  The fee is up to £9k and the project is generously supported by the Open Innovation Project and Interreg.

Ideas Challenge winning ideas announced!

This year saw us run the Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge, a big experiment over the summer and autumn inviting the public to suggest their ideas of how to make the festivals even more amazing.

We received the best part of 300 ideas and also importantly had hundreds of comments as part of the discussion around them which was especially satisfying since allowed us to open our ongoing conversation about festival innovation to a much wider audience.

The full press release is here but here are the highlights.

Our seven esteemed  judges had a really tough job choosing their top 5 for the main prizes and they scored ideas according to quality, impact and feasibility of the ideas and the ones that came out on top were:

• What if listings in the programme had a symbol to show that they were not in an accessible venue?
• What if “Festival Flasks” were available, with refill discounts for users festival-wide therefore saving cups, allowing cheaper drinks and providing marketing opportunities?
• What if there was a mobile app where audiences could leave through a ‘knowledge tag’ outside the show’s venue with a review and suggestions for similar shows?
• What if the Meadows was a camp-site with toilet/cooking facilities, security and low pitch cost for those performers/visitors on low budget?
• What if a content aggregator combined all listings for children’s shows and then made them searchable by age range?

Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge now closed!

The start of November saw the close of the Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge.  Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who took part and shared their 300 ideas and so many votes and interesting comments and discussion.  It was exciting to have such a public conversation about festival innovation and it felt an honour to be part of this community.

We’ve now got a busy job sorting out all the entries and then doing the judging etc so watch this space for news of not only winners but what happens next for the project overall.

Thank you.

Only 3 days left to take part in the Ideas Challenge

http://ideas.edinburghfestivals.co.uk/

The Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge closes on Monday October 31st and so you only have a few days left to submit your idea (or ideas) of how to make the festivals even more amazing and stand a chance to win one of the many rather fine prizes, which are based on either the ideas with the most public votes and those chosen by our esteemed panel of judges.

We’ve already have 275 great ideas and we’d *love* to take it to 300 before the end of the competition so to take part, share your ideas, vote and comment on the ones you like the most and have the chance to win some amazing prizes which include festival tickets, books and  and for the judge-chosen prizes an iPad 2.  #ooh

Full details at http://ideas.edinburghfestivals.co.uk/ and remember, do tell everyone you know that might be interested in it.

What’s your idea?