Festivals Review | Co-founder & Developer | 2011-2012
About Link to heading
Edinburgh hosts the world’s largest art’s festival every year in August - actually a conglomeration of 10+ individually organised festivals.
There are hundreds of things to see every day and picking the good ones is notoriously difficult - so a small cottage industry of publications pops up every year, but the quality of content and reliability is just as variable as the shows.
I saw this chaotic environment as an opportunity to organise some data - so I started working on a review aggregator that scraped reviews from the all the available publications, and presenting a weighted score for each show. I pitched the idea and a proof of concept at a 24h hackathon - Culture Hack - and managed to convince a team to join in the efforts. We won the hackathon with the idea and ended up receiving some cultural funding to build on the idea and get a prototype out to market.
Our first year we launched a number of guerilla marketing campaigns and managed to capture a respectable amount of traffic. The project had a short life however - due to competing obligations from the team and challenges finding meaningful funding to continue building the idea.
Impact Link to heading
- Launched a review metacritic for the worlds largest arts festival
- Generated content on tens of thousands of events
- Wrote web scraping software to automate the high volume content aggregation
Technology
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