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Ideas Challenge News
Dec 6, 2011
Rohan
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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?
It was particularly interesting to see how the issues of accessibility, environment and catering to specific user groups like parents & children were included here.  The top 25 ideas as voted by the public were also awarded prizes and you can see details of these in the press release.

The high volume of ideas means that unfortunately not all of them can be turned into live projects. However we will, with support from the INTERREG programme and the Open Innovation Project, be looking to pilot and build upon the ideas where we can make the most impact.  You will therefore be hearing much more about the outputs of the Ideas Challenge in the coming months as we look to move some ideas into practice.

So while this announcement is an important milestone, is certainly isn’t the end of the Ideas Challenge story since the suggestions and discussions will continue to inform our work as well as influence direct projects based on the suggestions.  Therefore we look forward to sharing more of the story as it emerges but for now, we just want to congratulate the winners and thank EVERYONE who took part.

And finally we’d like to say a special word of thanks to the brilliant Gina Scott and Mary Gordon who ran the Twitter activity for our pop-up account @edfestsideas.

So of the top five ideas as chosen by the judges…which is *your* favourite?
Culture Hack Scotland News
Dec 5, 2011
Rohan
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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]