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.

Tell us if festivalslab has been any good

This summer sees the end of the first two years of the festivalslab project and we’re in reflective mood.  We’ve got plenty of material on what might have been done better (!) so we’d really like your help to help us think about what we’ve achieved and what we might have stimulated.

So if there’s anyone out there reading this (and our google analytics means we know you’re out there!), if you’ve ever wanted to do us a favour in exchange of everything we’ve shared then please just write in the comments, email it on lab@festivalsedinburgh.com or tweet to @festivalslab your reponse to the simple question…

What has festivalslab and its various projects done for me? 

That’s all.

And thank you.

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?

Exciting news for Culture Hack Scotland

At the end of last week Creative Scotland announced the shape of their Cultural Economy Programme for the next few years.  There are four key components of the programme, one of which is Digital Developments.  Full details of the Digital Developments programme will be announced in early 2012 but we’re delighted to say that one of the three main elements therein is based on and inspired on the work done this year through Culture Hack Scotland.

So alongside activities curated and produced by Ambition Scotland and NESTA there will be a new shiny thing called Sync – a national two-year programme all about prototyping in the space where culture, technology and design meet.

Culture Hack Scotland in 2011 was hosted by the Edinburgh Festivals and it is now terrific to see how work and approaches developed here through festivalslab will be expanded to a national scale to support the cultural innovation agenda throughout Scotland.

Sync will be managed by the production team behind #chs11 and full details of the programme of activities which will go alongside the landmark annual Culture Hack Scotland events will all be announced in the New Year.

So if you would like to find out more please join the CHS mailing list or follow @syncHQ on twitter to be the first to know

[And you can download a full overview of the Cultural Economy programme of which Digital Developments is only one of four parts here]