Project Updates

[Justin Karr]

Folks,

Medium quick update on where we are at.

COMMUNITY DESIGN PROCESS:
We have had two more community design sessions: one each in San
Francisco and the Twin Cities. They were _awesome_. Two surprisingly
different perspectives on some of the problems. Local partners were
instrumental in organizing both. Many, many thanks to Theatre Bay
Area and the Minnesota Theater Alliance. We may do one more this
fall. If you are interested in attending or hosting, please reach out
to me directly. We were favoring another East Coast meeting, but we
are totally open to alternatives.

OVERALL DESIGN:
CRM is in. Big thing we've gotten out of the Community Design
Sessions: ticketing w/o constituent relationship management is a non-
starter. Folks want donor relations and marketing campaign
integration as much as they want cool ticketing features. With the
blessing of the Design Steering Group (see below), we have shifted our
focus slightly to move ATHENA People forward in the development
timeline.

DESIGN STEERING GROUP:
We have organized a Design Steering Group responsible for making
decisions related to design priorities. They decide what makes it into
each release. The design steering committee consists of six member
organizations: Fractured Atlas, Theatre Bay Area, Minnesota Theater
Alliance, the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, Fourth Arts
Block and the Theatre Development Fund. All are committed to the
success of the project even if not all plan to implement ATHENA.

SCHEDULE:
Based mainly on delays in hiring a great team, we have pushed the
ATHENA 1.0 target release back one month to the end of January, 2011.
We plan to bring the three early implementations online at the same
time.

ARTFUL.LY:
Fractured Atlas will be deploying the ATHENA software ourselves as a
service called Artful.ly. One question that keeps coming up is: "is it
a website or software"? ATHENA is software, which will be available
for download (and freely in perpetuity, because it is Open Source).
The services that ATHENA provides (selling tickets, managing
relationships, etc.) will be offered by the organizations that
implement it. In addition to Artful.ly, at least two orgs are planning
to implement ATHENA 1.0: Fourth Arts Block and Theatre Bay Area.

DEVELOPMENT:
Rocking and rolling. See the details over at athena-tix-devel. The 0.1
release of our architecture layer (called Parakeet) was today. Way to
go Gary and team.

WEBSITE:
It is still terrible, I know. We are working to implement something
new. The beta release of OpenAtrium/Drupal we deployed has just
proven too hard to customize or even upgrade from. We are looking at
other Drupal and non-Drupal options.

Justin

[Christopher Pelham]

A.R.T./New York is about to launch some new online ticketing initiative with Theatermania.com. Have you guys been communicating with them at all? Is it too late to entice them to go with your system instead? Or will the theatermania partnership provide marketing benefits that are too good to turn down?

[Adam Huttler]

Thanks for the heads up. We've heard whispers about this, but nothing all
that concrete. A number of commercial ticketing providers are currently
pursuing partnerships (really more like affiliate programs) with regional
service organizations.

ATHENA is taking a slightly different approach, of course. We're
developing regional event/ticketing portals for groups like Theatre Bay
Area that will be run in collaboration with the partner service
organization. It's a different model that requires a deeper commitment
from the local partner, but we think it offers a number of advantages over
a sales commission-based approach.

For better or worse, we're reluctant to pursue this too aggressively
before we have something concrete to show/offer. If that means we miss out
on a deal with, e.g., A.R.T./NY, then that's a shame, but it's not the end
of the world and nothing's permanent.

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[Justin L. Karr]

Folks,

I wanted to reiterate one thing that may have been lost in my big email
below:

ANOTHER COMMUNITY DESIGN SESSION

We are currently planning a community design session for the Fall. If
you are interested in attending or (hint, hint) co-hosting it, please
contact me directly.

We are favoring an East Coast venue, but we welcome alternatives.

This is likely the last Community Design Session we will be able to hold
before ATHENA 1.0 is released in January.

Justin

--
Justin L. Karr
Director of Technology Programs
Fractured Atlas
o:212.277.8020 c:917.328.6279

[autumn.ames]

Hit me up - Orlando would be interested in possibly hosting :)

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

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