Abbie Hoffman on the CTDB

It's been a crazily delightful week over at the CTDB.

A couple days ago, we opened up usernames to 45 new users, and several folks have been really cooking. You may know them. With their help, we've identified and fixed about ten workflow bugs, and we've tried to do so proactively - often fixing the issue before the user reported a bug at all.

That's largely thanks to one of the key new features of the CTDB: contribution tracking by user, which we invite you to participate in. One of the star updaters has been Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, company manager for Mary-Arrchie Theater Company, who has very nearly entered in the entire production history of Mary-Arrchie. Going back to 1986, that's 58 productions, and a great many performers, playwrights, directors, and designers, which he's still ticking away.

Included in those productions are the wildly inclusive and experimental Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins Festivals, which just celebrated their twentieth nearly-annual run. As most storefront theaters in Chicago know, each Abbie Hoffman Festival contains dozens of short-form plays and productions from dozens of theater companies. And the CTDB is ready to handle ALL that history.

So, today's call to action: Has your company ever participated in the Abbie Hoffman Festival? Write us for a user account and enter your production into the Abbie Hoffman festival history. And, if you're really feeling eager, maybe update a bit of your own company and personal history as well? We'd love to have you join the party.

New Features: Tapping the Energy of the Group

Two important notches off the road map this month.

On December 8, we tackled the problem of capturing the convoluted data of repertory festivals, using the models of The Side Project's Cut to the Quick Short Works Festival and the Goodman's Eugene O'Neill Festival. Both festivals basically act as a big melting pot for artists, combining directors, playwrights, performers and designers in dozens of teams that create unique one-act experiences and a more general community-driven whole.

We wanted to be able to look at each festival as both a whole and as the sum of its parts. That meant separating festivals into three kinds of production records:

1) The One Act, or "child" production. We've been wanting to capture one-acts for a while now, as they form an important part of a playwright's development - just as one act festivals form an important part of a performer's and directors development. Each one act acts exactly like a normal production record - there's a play, there are artists, there's a show.

2) The Evening / Program. Many festivals organize their shows into themed evenings or programs to provide patrons with a more curated form of choice and variety. In the case of Cut to the Quick, we have three evenings in the festival that each contain a number of child one-acts: Splinters and Shrapnel, which are war-themed works, Static/Cling which centers around the family, and Splayed Verbiage, which features a deeper grab bag of hyper-short works.

3) The Festival. This parent record can either consolidate a number of plays as a single artistic unit, as in the Eugene O'Neill Fest, or it can consolidate a series of programs.

Each "Parent" record consolidates ALL the director, performer and design production credits from its children, and provides a quick view of the plays contained within that festival or evening. So you can look at the whole picture, or look at each one act granularly.

Best of all, there's a quick-edit link to add a new one-act or evening to a festival that pre-fills a copy of the data from the festival into the new record - that makes updating the information for each festival play a snap.

UPDATE: Check out Tony's work on cataloging Halcyon's Alcyone Theater Festival - this year and next year!

Dan and I have a bit of a soft spot for theater festivals... they're powered by a bigger community and they require a unique blend of organization and organic chaos to create their unique kind of energy and excitement. So don't miss Cut to the Quick which wraps up on Dec. 21st and be sure to catch the O'Neill Fest at the Goodman, opening Jan. 7th.

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Along those lines, we launched yesterday two important pieces of Web 2.0 technology that we hope will fuel our online community of CTDB contributors. Our contributions and users sections now give credit where credit is due - each edit to the database is now tracked in a permanent audit history. This allows us to provide some necessary protection against internet vandals by creating a e-paper trail of changes and linking those changes to a user account. In the (we hope) unlikely event that a disreputable party begins taking credit for founding Steppenwolf, the entire community of contributors will quickly be able to track down the culprits and restore the changes.

More important than user accountability however, record auditing allows us to draw attention to the contributions of some pretty dedicated volunteers - such as CTDB powerhouse Laura Ciresi of Trailing Spouse Blues. Since we began auditing database records at the beginning of December, Laura has been steadily updating the entire production history of several theater companies, including Steppenwolf, Naked Eye, and her home Infamous Commonwealth. She may have even helped you get listed for one of your credits.

But you don't have to take our word for it any more. You can see Laura's work - and others - as it happens, and thank our users yourself!

New Feature: Aliases, Adaptations, and Related Venues, Oh MY!

There have been a ton of updates in the past week to the Chicago Theater Database. Most of the updates have only been apparent to our beta users on the site, as we continue our push to opening up the user interface to the public.

So we're much closer to letting you in to the database to make sure that your information and history is included.

Today's update is a little bit more flashy for those of you just browsing the site. To demonstrate, let me draw your attention to old Will Shakespeare's CTDB page..

That's right: PLAYS have ADAPTATIONS, and all the productions that derive from his work are listed on his page. This new data drilldown feature allows Plays to have Adaptions, Artists to have Aliases, and Venues to have related Venues (like a studio theater).

We were collecting this data before, but now you can see it in action. On each of the master records, you'll see an aggregation of the relevant information from all of the master records' children

Next up: we'll be extending drilldown to Productions, allowing for greater ease in collecting more granular and flexible data on One-Acts and Festivals -- so a Festival will have many "child" productions, and they can either share or have independant production teams.

Drilldown has a huge potential power in aggregating data... what would you like to see? How would you like to see the data organized, and what questions would you ask from the database if you had the chance?

New Feature: The Count

Now, the CTDB counts for you.  Specifically:

Artists now have a count of writing credits, and production credits which they are sorted by by default. (Good 'ol Will is the most prolific playwright represented, followed up closely by Jeremy Menekseoglu from Dream Theatre).
Companies now have a count of productions. (New Millenium and Steep are leading the count, primarily since they're companies with a great amount of history loaded into the database thus far.)
Venues now have a count of productions. (The Side Project, Steep, and Chicago Dramatists lead the way in terms of busiest venues currently...)
Plays now have a count of productions. (and uh oh, the scottish play is the most produced play recently)

The count is revealing some other interesting information about the existing information in the database (which is primarily information from the 2007 - 2009 seasons).  Check it out!

P.S. Today's update also includes some organizational improvements to editing forms for you contributors out there.

New Feature: How to Contact Chicago Theater Companies

Are you a Director in Chicago?

Are you a Playwright in Chicago?

Are you a Performer in Chicago?

The CTDB happily announces a new feature this morning: a list of companies that accept your submissions, how to contact them, and, as always, links to more detail about each company's history and mission.

How would you use this feature?

What's Next?

Where are we? We’ve uploaded just a massive amount of data from the season preview survey, and we’re working on building the functionality which will allow you (yes, you!) to pull apart that information, and find what you need to make the most out of the coming months. We’ve also spent some time cleaning up that data, and building out a few things on the database side (aka the “backend”) to deal with complex stuff like festivals and evenings of one-acts, or agreements with Actor’s Equity.

While we're slowly working toward our long-term goal of user-level editing access and record ownership, there's quite a bit of work to do before then. So while we can't democratize the gathering of information quite yet, our near-term goal is to make the information we are gathering searchable, sortable, reportable and generally usable.

The next step is to broaden the userbase - to start getting companies more involved. And we want to build on the database’s potential as a central location for folks producing theatre in Chicago. So we're looking for volunteers to help with a couple of big projects.

Project 1: The Company Men (and Women)

Over the past several months, a number of Google Alerts-using representatives of Chicago companies have found the CTDB and have been very enthusiastic about the project. All of them were eager to get updated information into the system – but we were limited in our ability to help them.

This is where you would come in.

We’re looking for 10 or so Company Men/Women who can take on individual companies that want to get information into the CTDB. All the initial requests would come through me, and I’d work my way down the list, putting the inquiring minds in touch you and your teammates. Your job would be to get the information from them, and enter it in to the database. Along the way, you’d help answer any questions, help us get some basic information we need to make sure the CTDB is useful to everyone, and some feedback on what features and functions people want, and how they’d like to be able to use the information we’re collecting. In return, you’ll get access to the CTDB the opportunity to really help shape the development of this powerful new tool. And, you’ll get to work with folks from the huge variety of Chicago theatres, which is a pretty big networking opportunity.

Company Men/Women have to agree to a couple of basic things – first, that you’ll use your access to the CTDB responsibly. The database is in a fairly early stage, and is still very bug-prone – we need you to treat it nicely. Secondly, while we certainly understand the appeal of getting all your own (or your friends’) show credits up, we want to know that you’ll spend most of the time on the system helping us develop it for everyone’s benefit. Third, we want to be responsive, so you should be willing to commit to a 48 hour turnaround for getting in touch with the company once you’ve agreed to the assignment, and a week turnaround for getting the information up online. And lastly – we want you to be an active part of the development process: we hope you’ll let us know when something’s not working right, or something could be improved. We’re not doing this for just ourselves, we want to hear what you think.

The commitment level for Company Men/Women is pretty flexible – while we have no idea what the response from companies will be, I’ll always ask before assigning a project – but you should probably have regular access to a computer. And while Nick’s constantly working to improve the usability, inputting information is still a multi-step process – so you should probably also have a tolerance for less-than-gorgeous user interfaces.

Project 2: The Space Collectors

One of the woefully underdeveloped aspects of the site is our Venue information – we envision it as a one-stop resource for designers and production manager-types who are looking for a place to put up a show. Conversely, it’s an incredibly convenient place for rental venues to show what they have to offer. Beyond that, it has value as a catalogue of the diversity of our theatre spaces.

We have some idea of what could live here – things like floor plans and light plots, or inventories of house equipment. But we have a sense that there’s more out there. The Space Collectors would help us build out this section – we need to know what you need to know – and work with us to develop the framework for the information. Then you would help us go out and get the information. The benefits are largely the same as above - access to the system, a hand in the creation of an important resource for the community - but this project could be a great opportunity for freelance designers or directors to get to know the scores of places theatre gets done. You'll get firsthand knowledge and contacts at places you've always wanted to work in or spaces you never knew existed.

Again, many of the same expectations from above apply here - be careful with our system, be committed to building the project, be responsive - but the task itself is a little more open-ended. We're looking for folks who can help form a team to tackle this section of the site - however that can best be achieved.

Interested? Drop us a line!

Imports Galore!

As mentioned over at Theater for the Future, we have been furiously building and importing the results of the massive PerformInk Season Survey - including the data collected that PerformInk didn't have room to print in the survey itself.

Be sure to check out Dan's eye-opening preliminary analysis from the survey, and today you can poke around our latest imports.

1) 550 announced plays & productions for this season (including those with TBA dates!)

2) Current company contact information from all 180+ companies that completed the survey, including who, what, where, and how to submit your headshot, play, or director's proposal to the company of your choice

3) Tonight, we've added about 200 new artists and 350 Company memberships to the database.  

Feedback from this week about those using the database has been amazing, including a mention from Kerry Reid and the giggling blogger Rob Kozlowski, as well as many folks who are providing feedback via email.  Thanks for using the site, you wonderful people!

By the way...  You may notice a few errors like duplicate entries still lingering a bit after the import... we're going through company by company to clean those dupes up, but in the meantime let us know here on the blog or via our forum if you notice areas of great factual discrepancy.  We're still working furiously to get the user signup and interface out of beta, but until that time you'll need to get your corrections to our team of diligent fact-checkers and inputters.   Given the sheer volume of data that is out there, we will continue to prioritize and chug along on our development roadmap - but don't be afraid to keep that feedback and your potential uses for the site coming!