Imagine...THE NEW PLAY MAP - #NewPlay

by Jamie Gahlon, American Voices New Play Institute Coordinator

Imagine if you will, a comprehensive map of the new play development infrastructure.  Imagine a bird's eye view of all new play producing and presenting theaters and development centers nationwide.  Now, imagine being able to track a new play's journey through the infrastructure, through time- all the while seeing the relationship between artists, institutions, and the new work.  This, is essentially the guiding impulse behind the New Play Map, one of the American Voices New Play Institute's pilot programs. 

The New Play Map will be an real-time, interactive map that aggregates all new play activity from across the interwebs into one user-friendly hub where theater practitioners- producers, playwrights, presenters, developers will be able to congregate to see the new play sector work-it in real time.

Last fall we hired Quilted, a web development and design cooperative, to develop the platform for the New Play Map, and in late November Ben Mauer and Colin Sagan came to DC for a two-day planning session.  We talked about our goals for the project, its functionality, and gave the Quilted team a crash course in the complexities that make up the millions of pieces of the new play sector.  We wrote everything down.  Here are some photos we snapped throughout the process:

 

From this meeting, we developed four high level goals for Version 1.0 of the project:

1) Make the new play infrastructure visible

2) Make new play activity visible within the infrastructure

3) Make the journey of a new work through the infrastructure visible

4) Automate mapping the journeys of new work

The building has begun, and in a few weeks we launch into beta-testing with a small group of organizations. In the meantime, though, expect to hear a lot more about this project from myself, Vijay Mathew, and Ben and Colin.  We aim to make this process as transparent and accesible as possible and have invited Ben and Colin to blog as much as they want about the journey.  Hope you'll join us for the ride!