Page 121 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

of participation and tools, also dependingon our goals and approach to the festival. Crowdsourcing is taken to mean a clusterof practices in which a ‘crowd’ generally not belonging to the organisation and not necessarily experts take over small tasks, such as comingup with ideas, and minor collaborations in the case at hand (outsourcing), generally distributed among the whole crowd of participants.Indeed, crowdsourcing and participation can be viewed as processes that give impetus to audience relations and involvement, allow data to be gleaned on what they want in order to attempt to improve the project by tailoringit more to their demands and, ultimately, if such a focus is chosen, generate a common cultural event in which the boundaries between organisation and target audience are more blurred (the audience practically becomes a community), thereby enhancing the social and cultural impact of the event.In the past four years the San Sebastián International Film Festival has been experimenting with audience participation ina particular task: choosing the poster for the upcoming edition. This is done exclusively online, by creating a website speci cally for this purpose.During the initial phase, any individual or agency can propose a design. The organisers tell us that they received some 1,700 proposals from all over the world for the 2015 edition. During the second phase, the designs are voted on; anyone who registers (free of charge, naturally) cantake part. There are also buttons for sharing the options on the social media and accordingly for supporting favourites. More than 70,000 votes were registered for that edition.In its past two editions the Grec performing arts festival, together with the Cooncert platform, experimented with the possibility of allowing attendees to choose some of the bands in the line-up. The message was: ‘You make Grec, choose your concert.’It is interesting to learn a bit more about what Cooncert does.17 It is both a platform and a promotor that is based on the possibility of giving a say to fans interested in getting to see a band or artist perform in their city. Anyone can submit a proposal for an artist to give a concert in their city (for example, when the singer is starting a tour but their city is not included), and other people who see it can also vote for it. They will see it because the person who submits the proposal shares it on the social media, and also if they perform a search.If an artist secures a su cient critical mass of votes, the platform will analyse the feasibility (the resources and minimum budget required) of including this artist in the line-up and will put the proposal to various venues until itis successful. In this respect it is a genuine crowdsourcing process in which the curating is performed by, and subjected to, a crowd.Returning to Grec, for one of the concerts the organisers subjected the process to the same phases Cooncert proposes for all its concerts: people propose options, this phase ends after a month and the proposals are then voted on during another month until the one with the most votes is chosen. For 201418 the artist with the most votes, who accordingly performedat Grec, was Ólafur Arnalds, and for the 2015 edition,19 by which time the festival had fullyAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2016121Focus: Use of New Digital Technologies at Cultural Festivals