 This is Jojo, who is our Associate Executive Director, and Gwinnian who is in charge of this project which is called the New Play Exchange. Gwinnian, I want to talk to you about the history and development of it, but we've been working on it for more than a year now, and we are in the beta testing phase headed for a full public rollout in January. We've been traveling across the country doing these type of introductory sessions, gathering information about what the field wants this product to look like, and we're very excited. You guys are one of the first groups to get to see it when you're all mixed together. We've been doing sessions specifically for playwrights and sessions specifically for readers. Jojo, we'll explain in a minute. We're actually leaving tomorrow. Tomorrow we won't be with you for the rest of the weekend because we are headed for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs Association meeting in Boston where tomorrow afternoon we'll be presenting it to the L&A members. So, yay, congratulations. Glad you're here. Glad you're here to share this with us. You're going to have a bazillion questions. We're going to have plenty of time afterwards to do that, and like I said, we'll be around the rest of the day. So, citywrights, welcome to the New Play Exchange. Awesome, I can hear you. That's great. Thank you all for coming. This is way more people than I thought we're going to be here. I love each and every one of you, and I hope you love me and us by the end of what we're going to say. This is NMPN and we're here to talk about the New Play Exchange, which is a new technology platform built for the common good of the new play sector to connect plays and producers, and I'm going to unpack that really weighty statement for you with about 45 minutes of my time, and then you're going to have so many questions you're going to want to kill me with them, and I'm going to sit here, and we're going to have a great dialogue. So, a little bit about what this is, a little bit of context. This is not just an initiative of NMPN. We have partners all around the country who have been working with us for a long time. Some of you are here. Haley, a fan is here from the Playwrights Center. LMDA has been a partner of ours, a Playwrights Foundation in Chicago. So, this is a sector-wide initiative. We're not just going rogue trying to transform how everybody does their work. This is the sector coming together, joining hands, building a new platform as one. You see that we've got theaters represented, and playwrights represented, and literary managers and troublemakers represented. We've even met with agents. We've met with people from Publisher. We have met with people in every single part of the new play sector in the American theater. So, this is the wisdom of crowds coming together to build a new solution. We're also not just doing this ourselves financially. We have partners. The work we've been doing is built on a major cornerstone grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and very recently a very large grant from the NEA. So, again, this is a foundation, major foundations are behind what you're about to see. We're not just in this tech startup to make a quick splash and make a profit. We're not about profit. We're about helping to transform and stabilize the sector. So, what have we done so far? Until about March of this year, as Nan mentioned, we went around the country interviewing people to help understand how we could build a technology platform that actually served the real needs of practitioners in a variety of roles. We then engaged a development team and we built the prototype, which you're going to see later. We are now in the beta testing field, so we are going around the country signing people up for our beta platform, specifically people affiliated with our partner organizations. And they're in there and they're testing the platform and using it and finding all the mistakes and the things that we can do better and the things they love and they're writing the emails all the time and we're having great conversations because then we're going to go into redevelopment at the end of this year and release it to the public in early 2015. So, what you're going to see later, you will have a chance to access before long and use. So, I want to talk about exactly why we are doing what we are doing. The context for how things are working now in the American theater. There are about 15,000 playwrights in the Americans. A lot of research on that number is in approximation. And they're producing on average one new play a year that they consider finished or ready to go. At the same time, there are about 1,500 world premieres every year. Not great math, right? And we have technology that we are currently using to filter 1,500 plays out of this pile into those slots. That technology is the submission process. Don't you love it? No, you don't love it? No, I don't love it either. Nobody loves it. It's horribly broken, right? But it's what we've got. It is the technology we've got. And we have patched it. We have used all kinds of software patches to fix the bugs and glitches that we all experience. The giant stacks of scripts and the overwhelming amount of work we have to consider. And for playwrights, the places we have to send and keep track of all the work. We've got agents trying to act as a filter. People who need to have the right credentials from the right graduate program. We've got submission windows, which is open for a short amount of time. We've got contests to pit plays against one another. We've got fees for things. We've done everything we can to try and make this process work. And it's dying. We're at the point now where many theaters have just shut down. They've admitted that it's an illusion, that it isn't working. And actually, bully for them, right? They said, this software isn't serving us anymore. This technology isn't serving us anymore. Now, obviously, we'd like to open more slots and change the math equation. But until we can actually do that, what we have done with NNPN and our partners is offer a replacement for that entire technology. Instead of the submission process, we are building the new play exchange. I'm going to talk to you about what that is from three different perspectives. First, from the perspective of a playwright. So a playwright has, say at any one time, four plays that she or he is putting out in the world in various states of completeness, actively thinking and working about. And a playwright is surrounded by a universe of theaters in the country. Thousands of them. Only that playwright's knowledge of those theaters is really incomplete. There are theaters you don't know about, theaters you misunderstand, they're out there, but you're unaware of them. And so you send play A there, and play B there, and play C there, and play B there, and you're just, you've got a spreadsheet. How many playwrights here have a spreadsheet somewhere in their computer where they're tracking other submissions? Or a Gmail folder, or some kind of, or a piece of paper. Or something, or nothing. I feel like, whoa! You don't remember me sending it out? Whoa! Or you get an acceptance, which is great. Where did this come from? It happens all the time. There's chaos, and you can't keep up with it. And it's, the work becomes about email management instead of about actually building relationships with other artists. So what happens worst is, you might have a play, and there might be a theater that's exactly right for it, but you don't know them. They're out there looking for the kind of work you have. And there's a theater you send a bunch of your work to, and you get pro-former rejection letters that tell you, keep sending us your work, and so you do, but they don't really like your work. There's a theater that you really want to work for. That's gone on a business, and you have no idea, because you're looking at the Drums and Source book, or some other outdated information source for knowledge about where to send your play. So this is the world we're living in. This is what the technology of the submission process is doing for us. In the new play exchange, we are getting rid of submissions. Submission doesn't exist anymore as a paradigm, and instead of submission, we have sharing. When a player finishes a play, she or he will share it with the new play exchange. Put it one place where it can be found. We're going to talk about what that looks like, but essentially, you upload a script. You tag it with a bunch of metadata, which is the number of characters, their ages, their ethnic backgrounds, the genre keywords for the subject matter, et cetera. You put it up there, and boom, there it is. It's a national database of new plays. So now, let's think about this from the perspective of a theater. So you're, on the average, one of the most theater, our best friends, the people in this room, the people who have embraced new work and are championing around the world. You've got a four-play season, except, you know, one is Romeo and Juliet, one is Fences, and one is Venus and Fer. But you've got a plot for a new play, and it matters a lot to you, and it's worth your mission. And how do you find and choose that work? What is the process for which you choose that work? So you're surrounded by 15,000 playwrights, right? 15,000 of us out there in the world, and your knowledge of them is imperfect, too. You don't know them all, you can't possibly. There are some that you have relationships with. You've done this person's work, and you've had this person as a resident artist, and you've done a reading of this one and read it. So you've got some relationships, but mostly there are names that are out there and names you don't even know. And then you open your submission window, and you get submissions from all the people you know, and a lot of people you don't know. And you end up with giant stacks, and you don't know how to process it all. It's too much information, it happens too fast. You're overwhelmed, you can't value, you can't find your relationships in the stack. You can't have meaningful connections with artists with a stack in front of you. So, in the world of the new play exchange, we have eliminated submissions, right? It's gone, that word is dead to us. You'll never find it anywhere within the new play exchange. Instead of accepting submissions, we have a place you can go to discover work. The new play exchange is a sharing and discovery engine for the new play sector of the American theater. It's a place that you, if you're a theater with that slot open can go, set your criteria, do a robust search, and find the work you're looking for. Let's talk about this from the third and final perspective. That of the reader. Which is a term we're using to cover a multitude of people with a multitude of labels in the American theater. People whose job it is as literary managers or as dramaturgs or as directors or in whatever capacity to read scripts, think about them for the American theater. We're going to talk to LMDA tomorrow when we get on the play. These people stand between a playwright on one side and a theater on the other side. Except it's actually a little more like this, right? And it's actually a little more like this or in fact like that. So they've got a day job and they've got a passion theater that they were on on the side and then they're actually reading scripts for a national contest and then while they're reading scripts, they know other theaters and they know, boy this would be right for so and so and this would be right for so. Their job is actually twofold. The first thing that a person in this capacity does is endorse the play as they read. By which I mean they say, this is good. This piece of work is good. It's promising, it's beautiful, it's on its way to being transformative, it's a work of high quality on its own terms. And the second half of what they do, which is where it gets tricky, is matchmaking. It's not only good, it's good for you. And what we have heard from these people as we have gone around the country is there's a lot more of the former than there is of the latter. There are more scripts that they love and then that they can produce or that they can then share with a specific person to produce. So we have given them tools in the new play exchange to do both of those things and we're going to talk about what they are. So what do they do with all that energy? What they do is they write recommendations. So right now what happens is they have this knowledge that they're slowly accreting as people who evaluate plays and they will occasionally get an email, or a play about climate change by a woman with less than five characters. Do you know anything? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. They send out emails to their network of friends. Everyone does this. And it's really hard to find. So in the new play exchange, they will be able to, when they find work that they care about, find work that they value, write a recommendation of it. Now what is a recommendation? In the new play exchange, it's text. It's not a thumbs up. It's not three stars out of five. It is actual written text. I'll show you some later. It is, this play is manifestly important because of blah, blah, blah. It really needs to be seen by a wire audience. It's not damned with faint praise, kind of praise. It's not, this play will be great when the second act is fixed. It's not, of all the crappy work I've seen by this play, right, this is the least crappy. It's unabashed praise. It's positive, it's text, and it's also both signed in public. When you are in the new play exchange, you will see who wrote it, and anyone will be able to see what you wrote. So there's no hiding. This is just praise for people whose work you value. So what then happens if you're a theater and you're using the new play exchange to find work? Again, you're surrounded by this, right now this bizarre universe of playwrights and you don't know anything about them and your knowledge is imperfect. So when you've got plays in a database and they're all tagged with metadata, this one is this length, it's by an author from this state of this gender, it's about this subject, it's about this genre, et cetera, et cetera, they're ordered. And you can slice and dice them any way you like. So a theater goes into the system and immediately finds out exactly the plays that are suitable for what they're looking for. My budget can only handle eight actors, so I've eliminated all the plays with nine or more actors. I really want to build up my presence with this kind of audience and I'm really interested in this subject matter, et cetera, so it's all slice and dice. And then, because these recommendations are in the system, you can find the ones that are endorsed. Not only by the literary manager who works for your particular theater and the people you've got in your email network, but by intelligent professionals all around the country. You have the wisdom of crowds from the smartest people who think about theater in the United States. This is a radically different experience for a theater looking to fill a slot than ever before. And instead of just opening up and saying, all right, send me your work, America. And then you get 300, 900, 1,000 plays that you have to sort through. There's no opening up. I'm going to go hunt and I'm going to decide what I'm looking for and be surprised by things I didn't know about, that people that I value have recommended. I'm going to find things I'm looking for that I didn't know existed in ways that were never before possible. In addition to recommendations, we've given people who read plays another tool that's also the first time they'll ever have this before, and that's the ability to write private notes about the plays that they are thinking about and keep those notes. So we can think again about what this experience is like when a reader of plays, a person reads a play for that theater, writes a note about it, and it gets stored in some database that that theater keeps. Some awful database that they hate, that they paid a lot of money to build and to maintain. Or maybe it's a spreadsheet like us playwrights have. It's a small theater. That's all they've got. And then the reader is writing notes for another theater, changes jobs maybe. And now that first theater has access to the note that was written, so right now, the theaters that you write coverage for as a literary manager or dramaturg, it stays with the people you write the coverage for. In the new play exchange, you will always have access to your thinking about plays and playwrights in the American theater. As you move through your career as a literary manager or dramaturg or anyone who thinks about plays, you will accrue knowledge that you can always access. You will always be able to search through what you thought about a specific artist and her or his work. This is again a track record. You've only had that up here before or if you stay at one theater working for 20 years, you always have access to their database. Now you're a free agent and you have a permanent record that you always have access to. So we've gotten all these features and functions built into the new play exchange and then we added another layer that we're calling the social layer. Not social like Twitter. Not social like Facebook. But social like this. If you are a theater or a reader of plays and you have favorite playwrights whose work you want to stay abreast about, you can watch them in the new play exchange. So that the next time Steve Yaki adds a play to the new play exchange, I get a bing in my profile learning me that he's added in the script. So I can know immediately when there's new Steve Yaki work and read it and be aware of what he's doing in developing his career. There's no like waiting and hunting and being passive, waiting to be passively told the work is there. I can decide that's a playwright whose artist value the playwright's relationship matters to me. Likewise, if you are a theater or a person who evaluates plays you can also watch people who are reading plays. I may not have Liz Engelman on my staff of my theater but she's a genius, right? And I want to know what Liz is thinking about the new play she's encountering in her daily work in the theater. So I watch her and every time she writes a new recommendation I'm made aware. There's a bing in my profile that says, hey, take a look. Liz said this about Steve's play. So I am benefiting on an ongoing way staying abreast of the work and maintaining the relationship with the artist I care about and leveraging the thinking of people beyond my immediate circle. And as I move through the system and encounter plays and encounter other people's thinking about plays I find other people who think in interesting ways to me about plays I can watch them and slowly grow my network of people who are supporting my mission of my theater without actually knowing that that's what they're doing, right? They're working on my behalf passively just by expressing their love for plays that they find when they're doing their day trip. So that's the new play exchange. What does someone else do for playwrights at the end of the day? Is it the platform on which you can share your work instead of submit your work on your own terms? So right now you've got one theater who wants this kind of query packet one theater who wants a submission but only on Wednesdays and only before 5 p.m. and you have to carry there by dog sled and you've got one place one 10 page sample the one place is 11 page sample and none of your name doesn't need to be on any page except page 3, right? It's crazy to name. Now you put your materials on the new play exchange you are responsible for being savvy about how you talk about your play about how you write a synopsis about what kind of samples you put up there whether you put up the full script or not is up to you whether you write a savvy description whether you use the right keywords how you talk about your work and that's it your job is to make your play discoverable and that's exactly what you do when you add it to the new play exchange your work becomes discoverable in a way that it isn't right now because where are your plays right now? they're on your hard drive no one who works in the theater is searching on your hard drive for plays but if you put all your work in this one shared place and there's one place for them to go instead of emailing their five friends who email two other friends on their behalf they can go to one place and find work and if your work is there and you've tagged it right it'll be found it still has to be good but it can be found in a way that yeah that's a catch it's gotta be good so what is the new play exchange for theaters? well it's a smarter way than ever to discover new work you know right now the way you have to discover new work asking our friends flying to conferences seeing shows in other cities networking and the submission process all of that is inefficient right no one is happy about the 1,500 plays that make it to that other side no one is happy about the process of getting them there we're gonna try and do that the other thing new play exchange is for theaters it's a cloud based so that someone else maintains the database for you script research and evaluation platform for small theaters trying to build their own little databases where they store thinking about plays the new play exchange immediately can take the place of that effort and as we grow the capacity bigger and bigger theaters will eventually decide hey we can run our platform on the new play exchange as well and then for readers it's an easy way to finally support the plays they're most passionate about that they can't do two sentences there are two positive sentences about a play and then when someone else looking for a play like that finds it ooh there's some nice words about that play I want to read it it's also a permanent archive of their relationship between plays with plays and playwrights not the archive isn't just here anymore gee I remember I did a reading with that guy what was that play like again I don't remember it's a permanent digital archive of their thinking that they can access forever what is it for everyone I said this at the beginning and now I'm going to re-pack it up for you it's a platform for connecting plays and producers built for the common good of the new play sector we didn't build this for playwrights we didn't build this for theaters we didn't build this for dramaturgs for literary managers we built this for all of us that's why we're going around to places like this to talk about it to all of us and answer every question that is probably now simmering in your brain and you're dying to ask because we want to make sure because we're not perfect not far from it we're doing the best we can with the knowledge we've acquired from people around the country but we get smarter every time we do one of these presentations we get tough questions so I want your tough questions when the time comes and if you think it's a tough question I've probably been asked before nine times out of ten you're right ten times out of ten that is important right because that's what makes us smarter and it's a lot better so whoa, look at it let's see if our technology will allow me to show it to you pardon me for one minute the browser on here somewhere where? on the train on the car no no there you go Internet Explorer Firefox are we already on the network did you make that happen? the problem comes up no oh can someone get me on the network please if you would get on the network and then launch that page newplayexchange.org I'll start taking questions so questions while we get this loaded up oh let's see there's more to do I'm going to go to the distinction John Jordan before we start I'm interested again to make sure I understand so the endorsers are people who are reading for theaters actually any member of the newplay exchange can endorse any other play anyone who belongs right so you me Jojo Steve Yachty anyone in this room who joins can then endorse another play but doesn't that then create a new elite if your mom can endorse a play does that is she a member of the elite well she's dead actually yes she was doing a lot of amazing things with technology well that's all I'm asking is do you see any problem in no this is a super democratic platform it is meant so that anyone can join not in the American theater anyone who wants to join can join so we have actually made a basic membership that's free that allows you to go on look up a play by the play title or by the playwright's name and if you care to read it and if you care to write a recommendation of it and then the pricey not pricey the priced memberships are the bar is so low that we want to set the bar so low that no one should reasonably say I cannot afford that so we're talking about ten dollars a year that's for playwrights yes so yes copyright protection what about copyright protection how are you ensuring copyright protection of the play the United States of America ensures the copyright protection of a play not the new play exchange if you are worried about anyone stealing your play I wouldn't add your play to the new play exchange generally we have found that I William Sullivan at 45 years old seemed to be the mind anyone younger than me is like yeah put my play up there I want people to find it download it do it great anyone older than me is like a little worried and I can see both perspectives because I'm right there in the middle so I can only tell you that I think that's the way things are going and and I understand your concern at the same time but you don't have to put the whole thing down no you can it is up to playwrights decide whether they want to put the whole script just to sample the script or not or nothing it's up now which recommendation where that's going to go we have an idea a whole script that's what I think but that's just me not all the images are loading but I'm going to log in at first I'm going to show you me and for those of you on HowlRoundTV I hope this is like scintillating something if your connection is not very fast in here for some reason or this is a super old version of I think this is actually a super old version of the Internet Explorer I've got to explore the software on the laptop yeah so this is not actually what it looks like you would normally see my big old handsome face in the upper right hand corner but essentially if I can give you some sense up here Playwright's name Playwright's bio and then plays that Playwright has uploaded adding another play my agent's contact information my website my Twitter handle just the contact information I've decided to upload Georgia if you click artistic statement so you'll see that if you want to get to know me in other terms you can read more about my work globally as an artist if you go back pick any one of the plays and click I actually picked one that has a recommendation on it so yeah and that's a ten minute play so perfect you just see the sort of my synopsis about the play I've added a few other things because it's published I added a link to the publisher recommendations that have been written about it Georgia was very kind to give me her password so I could write one you see the development history of the play you see the production history of the play and then you see all the metadata I'm talking about the genre the keywords the length of the play the cast size the breakdown of the roles by gender the roles the breakdown of the roles by race the age level appropriateness of the play there's all sorts of stuff so if you go up and click Georgia on library you will see that as I have moved through the system there have been this one play that I added to my reading list and that's it because I'm a playwright I'm here mostly to share my work but as I was wandering around I found a play I wanted to read click on activity you will see that I have that it's telling me that Bayes with Primandell added this play and that's the only playwright I'm watching at the moment so if you log out under profile and log in please as yourself it actually looks really pretty normally it's really gorgeous actually that's the thing people are saying universally like sexy firefox firefox so JoJo is in the system wow it's really bad on this browser for me it's like firefox yeah good for her JoJo is in the system as an administrator of a theater so I'm going to show you what that's like JoJo is in as the administrator of the welder which is a playwright's collective she might come to an NBC and which you can hear more about at 330 sexy sexy you win sexy we're bringing sexy back to technology yeah yeah we're definitely going to have another round of questions there you go there's JoJo's base okay so you see again JoJo's bio JoJo's website and her Twitter handle and here are the recommendations that she wrote by the way I warned Steve that we were doing that so it is a smart piece of work it is really I know so you see all the recommendations she's wrote and I did a bunch more stuff for her so if you click under profile actually see that she's also the administrator of the welders you can see that she administers the theater profile within the system and again all I put in there was a bio and the sort of general nuts and bolts about the theater click on library you will see that in her library because she has the reader powers she has plays that she has set aside to read and then you click on private notes she has written she has written two private notes about two plays that she's written and obviously this gets a lot more robust and more work that you do click on activity she's watching five playwrights including Mr. Yaki and has written a bunch of plays so spots what is somebody she follows so she got notified when he uploaded Wee Tiresias again when he uploaded sisters Valerie Hollow and this play etc so again when there's more people in the system this is going to be a robust feed of stuff that's happening you know the stuff that people are doing people you may have decided to watch so go to the search so because Jojo is a theater in the new play exchange she has more than just look at play by play title and play her name she has this robust set of filters that she can use to search plays so if you scroll down you see genres and she can add keywords and she can add her cast sizes and get into some great details about what kind of cast she's looking for kind of what she's looking for she can look for work just by women for those of you who have been following the list in the Kill Royce she can just click that box and then boom the only result she'll get will be plays by women so if you just go up and just type the letter A immediately all of the plays and play titles that have A in it that's it so add any other letter next and see what happens so it's slowly winnowing down the plays until there you go boom the one play she was looking for so it's like this dynamic immediate search and actually it had filters she can add the filters remove them so it's like when you're looking for flights on Kayak and you're like yeah these dates and these times and then you get four flights you're like oh maybe I can leave a little earlier and then all of a sudden you've got 38 flights you're like let me start these play prizes you're trying to find exactly the work you're looking for these are the tools that we have given people looking for plays to find them so so I just went in and did only female playwrights and at least a cast size of 8 that has a letter A in them and this is with only about a hundred and seventy or a hundred and eighty playwrights in the system look at how many came up I'm curious so more questions than you first I just wanted to ask do you does that provide a form for the actual play to be seen is it I'm just seen in what way well for example I came back from a workshop with the Broadway team and within their workshop they have something similar I think it's an international alliance of theaters where they have an opportunity to come to the event and actually do their performance so it's seen amongst different other playwrights and writers and producers and I'm wondering if your forum has a platform where they can actually see the play it's just technology so now so it's basically like an internet like a website where you can access all these things can network with all these different genres of people but then the play itself is not seen it's just kind of like to show your I'm just curious like it would be wonderful if there's a way to put like a video or a sample of the play so if you click on sorry Jargo any play actually you might have to log out and log in with me to do that solid in a female at the same password part of the things you can add to the profile of a play are any links to supporting video links to supporting PDF so if you're writing a musical you can put up links to MP3 recordings of a song you can put up sheet music you can put up other supporting material my plays didn't have any of that it looks like are there any part credentials that you have to have to do a lot of websites so if you scroll down you can see that I could have added this is my play Hot and Cold down there you go sorry you can see I could have added a lot to keep going I have only added a draft of the play I could have added a sample I could have added a blind version I could have added a score I could have added links to MP3 files and I could have added links below that to video we're going to be adding more we don't have a link right now to the published version of the play and that's a known thing we need to do I'm going to take a few other questions from other people it's accessible it's accessible to everyone everybody can see it people are commenting what if there is a comment that you're so negative that you have to dispute we want to be ahead of trust the community but also provide the policing mechanism so if I were to if you cancel out of editing the play and go to the one you had cracked I'll show you Joe's recommendation if I were to read this and go wow that's terrible you see that report button or anyone else in the system who finds I can flag it and then that enters it into a system where by me or Joe or anyone else in that MPN can remediate remediate the situation in any way so we want to give the community the tools to kind of police itself but we're there to step in as necessary so here's my worry if I were a professional play reader and this is human nature I love David Rivera he's awesome everybody knows he's awesome and so me and a whole bunch of my colleagues are the minute that he publishes a new play put something up I'm going to totally read that new play but let's say my capacity is I can only read 10 plays a week or only comment on 10 plays a week it means all the playwrights who are already nationally known with high name recognition are going to be immediately shot up and shoot up in recommendations whereas playwrights who are just breaking in are not no one's going to know about them it will be very hard to discover them you saw when Jojo did the search that there's just a list of plays there's not the ones that are most recommended are higher at the top there's just a list of plays that meet the criteria there's no way for her to say there's no selection filter that's only shown me the most recommended plays it's just when you find the play you might see some thinking by people but you really care you really care about the work and the recommendation is a way to make you feel more comfortable and to maybe understand it more one follow up question to that the search mechanism means that if I type in A it's going to be like a play that starts with A always at the top it will always be seen which means I should name all my plays Arvark Arvark 1 I'm going to answer your question I'm going to answer your question more generally speaking as with Google any time you build a technology there are going to be people who try to engage the system and find ways around that I know that I can't predict what they're going to do pay 10 friends to join and write recommendations I don't know what it is I know that we're going to pay attention I know that we're going to watch what happens I know that we're going to do what we can to address and fix those things I also think another one that people ask a lot is what if I go in and add 100 keywords to my play so that I always come up with keywords I think what happens to a play like that is that when someone finds it and sees the 100 keywords they're going to say this person does not know their play very well and I don't want to work with a person who can't be an interlocutor for their own work so again I don't have a specific answer to what you're saying but I can't tell you that I'm here to pay attention to those problems and fix them when they arise I can't proceed in the future I'm going to go to the way back because I have ignored them I actually have like in Facebook your own sort of network so people that can follow right? Facebook is a two way relationship this is one way so if I follow them they don't know I'm following them right but then you said that there was some sort of alert so I only get alerted by them when they upload something I'm not alert right? if you watch me when I add a play you get an alert that I add in a play and then you follow and you recommend or you write you will get a notification that I wrote a recommendation okay so that's really cool so if your friends with Jose Rivera he wouldn't necessarily know that she's their friend right exactly because what would be so cool is if he did because then you can read her play and then recommend it yeah I mean I think less stuff into it than we might have wanted to on the thinking that we should do a small number of stuff and get it right and figure out where we didn't get it right and then get it right rather than try and build all these complicated interactions and then do it all wrong right so we're just going to do little successes and grow from there yeah so the LinkedIn recommendation algorithm is really really complex yeah with the black yes that's how they find us or our plays but how do we find the theaters you don't because your job is not to find them and submit your work to them anymore your job is to put it in one place right here on the new play exchange then they find your work so we are taking the standard paradigm when we're trying to find them we do the work we're not doing that anymore we're saying here's my work come get it that's not here now I will say having said that we are working on what we're calling an opportunities module so you guys should all hear this again right now when someone wants to run a contest they open the gate and say we'll take any piece of work we'll use these criteria from July 1st to July 31st and what happens is they'll say we want only plays by authors in Kentucky and then come on some of you will say I used to live in Kentucky or this place is about Kentucky or was he by Kentucky Frog Chicken when I wrote it and so we overwhelm him with plays that really do not actually meet their criteria and then they have 900 plays to read instead of 100 I'm exaggerating from our point of view how do you find all the places how do you find all the opportunities there's the official play rates of Facebook which announces its list of opportunities there's the amazing play rate center which is like the leading if you ask me the best database of opportunities in the country that most curated historically constructed database of opportunities and so you can stay abreast of all of the sources but it's still hard to know if you've found all of the ones for which you're right so in the module that we are building theater will be able to log into the new play exchange and create an opportunity and say this opportunity is only for Kentucky play rates and then the magic of the new play exchange will only notify Kentucky play rates of the opportunity but every Kentucky play rate will know that the opportunity exists so all people who are appropriate for the opportunity who because the theater using the criteria that we have in the system the theater will say these are the things that must be met so then any play rate who has a play that meets all those criteria the activity being saying your play crack is eligible for this opportunity then you can click through and see the opportunity and if you decide that it's something you want to pursue and maybe it isn't you can pursue it but it is not a submission mechanism at all we're trying to eliminate the noise for both play rates and the people who post opportunities right now people who submit to opportunities and I do not submit to more than 80 here submit to 100 to win 3 and I always say to the people wouldn't you rather submit to 9 to get those 3 and not waste your time the 9 that you're really right for and still get the same amount and to the people who are submitting opportunities they boast about we got 1200 scripts this year that means their opportunity is desirable 1185 scripts to get the 15 that they want and at least 300 of those are just totally not right and we're not going to do anything about quality but we're going to eliminate the ones that don't really meet the criteria and reduce the noise so I have seen your hand several times and then I already got used then I'll go to you can you talk a little bit about what the next step is a theater encounters a reader well let's say a theater they like it so they downloaded it they read it well so I have my agents contacting from my profile and they can go to her actually crack this publish so they can put on the link where they can copy and paste the link into their browser and go buy a copy or go to my publisher if I don't have either of those things they can use my contact information to reach out to me and negotiate with me directly okay one quick question I'm assuming this is going to be going to be like an iPad it's not going to be like an issue with Adobe or anything like that right? no it's cross platform mobile friendly so now this is a question it's actually a two fold as a player will I have the ability to read other people's work okay great now maybe a suggestion for future let's say right now as a reader you use a reader like so-and-so's work and so-and-so's work and you have recommendations right? so does Jojo so now Tom Smith comes on as a reader and he tends to agree with certain plays so in other words kind of like you guys have the same taste would it be possible in the future to have kind of like Pandora like recommendations so yeah so that's actually on our radar screen down the road we will be able to say like when you're reading crack right now it doesn't say other plays by William Sullivan in the right column or it doesn't say other plays in this genre in the right column so there's that discovery that a great radio station does for you a great radio station doesn't play the songs that you already know or only those it plays some of those and some that are like that and some that and you get guided into new experiences discovery that sort of sponsored what's the word I'm looking for synchronicity stumbled onto this the other thing we want to do eventually down the road on the home page of the new play exchange is 10 new sci-fi plays that have been uploaded or 10 new horror plays that have been uploaded or 10 new recommendations or one random play or all kinds of things to sort of stimulate all of us to think outside of our known networks to find people we just don't know you I saw you first I don't know if this is already an answer but because earlier somebody had asked a question about putting up like only a piece of the work not the content so then would I be writing a recommendation based on that piece or would I have access to the whole play this is the other reason that I think people are going to put up their whole plays because people are not going to write a recommendation of a synopsis they might say this premise sounds interesting to me but it may be so like someone might know my work from another source like so again you've got that dramaturge who is reading plays for the O'Neill and they're like wow these are great and as soon as the O'Neill picks its finalist I'm going to go in and pick the five that I really love that didn't make it and write recommendations for them may not have uploaded the script but the person has read it another way so the recommendation can still exist was that what you were going to say gentlemen blue shirt are these plays unproduced? great question no they're not unproduced so maybe as my next question can you accept a positive critical reception from a journal as a recommendation well again that will be on the playwright to decide whether they're comfortable with a recommendation or not so again to be clear this is a database of new plays that will be in some cases plays that are new to the world and some cases plays that are new to you right so people will be able to upload their work and eventually theaters will have a tool when they're searching to say show me only unproduced plays that have had one or two productions or just show me anything because I just don't care so eventually 20 years down the road this will be a chronicle of the last two decades of the American theater and then we worked it was produced so that's a lower answer to your first question you had shown us a category for uploads for a score to envision this whole network to include music over plays with music totally yes that's why we've got all that there then as a follow up what search field do you have for the theater that says plays with music or musicals we don't and we need to and in fact that is today's first meeting thank you break it down got it she's behind me the blind search as you mentioned I don't know how many people are reading their plays that's correct this was something that we had to figure out and negotiate so players were like I want to know who's reading my work I want to know I want to be aware every time someone clicks on it and dramaturges are like if you tell them I'm reading your work they're going to faster me for what I thought about their work let me finish answering the question you just asked I've got more to say so we are going to be given playwrights and we haven't done this yet data about the broad interest in their work so you will be able to log on and say 15 people have added crack to their reading lists 15 people have downloaded it 78 people have viewed the this page so you will have some assessment of the level of interest in your work but it's not specific information that you want to have second question was all those people who are reading anonymously the agents, the theater and managers do they have to be how does that work in terms of the system so it's a great question I'm going to answer with a question for the audience so I've already revealed that the price that we are so let's be clear about some context we are a non profit organization we're not getting rich off of anyone nobody in this room has any money we don't keep it our job is to serve the American theater and actually I don't consider it my job to build the software I want I consider it my job to build the software that we want and I and EnergyN and our partners are the locus of that energy but it's you all who are going to support it and so we wanted to give away for the people who are going to use the tool in an ongoing way beyond the work beyond the resources we get from the foundations who have supported us today so the price is really a way to contribute to the ongoing evolution and development of the platform to have me there to answer your tech questions to have someone there when someone flags a recommendation as inappropriate to have us be able to build all these other features that I'm talking about to be able to pay a firm to do that I've already revealed that we are leaning toward and none of this is final because it's all free right now if you have the codes that we're giving out to our partners but we're leaning toward $10 a year for play, right? $10 a year think about that two lattes $10 a year, one pack of cigarettes if you're still a smoker and please quit just quit and buy one year membership so so we have two other packages that one can buy on the nuclear exchange one is the reader package which is literary manners and drama jerks and directors and anyone looking for new work and then one is the institutional package that allows for a bunch more right now it's just those three packages and you have to choose one or the other eventually you'll be able to choose multiple and eventually you will also if you will buy an organizational package you'll be able to give out five reader licenses with your so that's all that's set up in context I want to know are there any literary managers and drama jerks in the house right now? just people with their hands raised no one else gets to answer this question what would you pay to do what? to have all the things that are to show me the ability to do these robust searches for plays along certain criteria to keep a permanent archive of your relationship with plays and plays that follows you from job to job and it's a tool that helps you do your job better like when someone says have you heard about this playwright you can be like right now you go to google but instead you can go here and find out more information what would you pay? I'm really shoestring so I do 30 dollars 30 dollars a year? yeah and I did have a question hold on I want to get on the number from other people I think there's in a way there's two answers to the question one is because there are people who are that and they're institutional meaning they're part of some place and there are people that are that and they're freelance which is what I am imagine you're freelance that's right for the latter idea it's kind of phenomenal what you're talking about because it allows me to carry essentially like all my coverage that I've ever done of anything with me it's only talking about an aspect of the notion of lit management and dramaturgy that's about new plays which is not the only thing that I do but it covers that in a way that nothing else has before give me a dollar for you 42 cents it's hard to say and it seems like the right answer would be like compared to an LMDA annual membership or something like that 60? give me another number just shout them out 50 no just answer from this one god new playwrights every time I do this exercise playwrights are the worst can I dramaturge your question before I answer I have a question no give me a number I will answer your question after you give me a number okay just give me numbers numbers I'll talk to you about your idea after you have a number 50 okay so we're now zeroing in on the year we toyed with making that 10 as well again we want to set the number so that anyone can get in right we want to set the number so that anyone can get in but everyone is contributing to the ongoing support of the tool so is there anyone here who runs it can I jump in just for one second it's interesting as we've done this to go around to different cities when we were in New York people in the room the playwrights in the room said $100 a year that's their point of reference because you can only buy a latte for like $8 but then you go to Iowa city and they were more around like 15 or 20 so wanting to make sure as we said it's across the board that anybody in the middle of America if you're in a major city everybody can afford it so does anyone run a theater here okay so now imagine the same thing for a theater to maintain your theater profile and get to do opportunities in the system I wouldn't know what you would pay and again just give me a number Suzy first what's your number $200 $200 going once $50 $50 you're still at $30 okay any other numbers so we're angling around $50 for theaters and again that's a price point that allows a storefront theater in Chicago right to afford it ish if they find it useful and it also lets a giant theater pick giant theater acts in your brain whatever you think of as a giant theater in your community to buy this for their staff as a a rounding error in a lunch budget right it's a it's a small amount of money to have acts for this cool thing where they can find out work about new players so that's where we're headed now I know there are probably people saying you know what you should really do is a point system where for every play you review you get X dollars is another lot and believe me we have considered all of those and we have decided not to do them for now but our minds are not closed like down the road that might prove to be a smoother way to do it we might create packages of the different kinds of profile Jojo would you log out and go to the guest star's page so you can see I have a question to the guest star okay so you'll see these are the three user types and these are the features that we've listed for each type eventually there will be a lot more for institutions than for and that's also a little bit why it's more expensive so there are other models yes my question is I get plays from people who want it set in New York I'm never going to do it set in New York so is there on this little search thing the setting of the play either it's generic or South Florida or wherever I happen to be that I need my play but am I going to do it in New York there's the geographical criteria we have now is the authorship so if you want an authorship like people in Iowa write about New York too so that's new no one has mentioned that either so you can get two in Miami I don't know how we tackle that honestly my gut is that while that's complicated because setting plays multiple settings how would I describe the setting if someone else we just need to have a setting field well I don't know that's something for us to figure out but I thank you as much as I thank you for the you've made us smarter today thanks will playwrights be able to search on other playwrights yes but only by name and play title not region because I think it'd be good for networking too because you can see the type of people who write in at least this value respect to create writer's group you know that's a cool idea if not there it's broken today it's not a thing we can do now a lot of people ask that so I signed up maybe 170 playwrights and the most frequent feature they ask for is I want an alphabet of a list of the other playwrights who are in there and I understand intuitively why they want that because they put in their friends names to see if their friends are there or if someone they know is in there and that's cool and I understand why they don't want to feel alone and they want at the same time this isn't intended to be a network built for the common good of the American theater to connect playwrights to playwrights and producers and so we're trying to foster that connection that's where our main efforts are so maybe down the road I want to call someone I haven't called you because I think that any kind of matchmaking service which is kind of what this is the more matches you actually create the more value it is to the people who are in the system so I'm wondering what kind of interest you've had from literary managers and artistic directors about how much they'll actually use this so we can determine is it really going to create a match for us so this is really the classic question it's one of my favorite questions I love this question I've mostly, as Giorgo said or Nan said we've mostly spoken to people who are all of one user type in the room together all playwrights, all literary managers all etc and they always say some version of I know why I would use this and we all know why we would use this why would this other group use this I'm not sure I say oh I see the benefit of this for players but why theaters and theaters say I can see why I would use this for my theater but why are playwrights going to put their work there everyone has doubt about the other group so all I can say is trust us trust us to all the groups and they all want however I do think that as we build our capacity to talk about the tool and again we're in beta there's a total in the tool right now as we start to make love connections which takes a while like from finding a script to opening night takes a long while right so maybe two years before we have a lot of success stories to share but when we have them we're going to use them to talk to people about why it matters and why it works there'll be no e-harmony commercials I promise you really yes what about notifying playwrights of specific opportunities in order to do that when you have something that's only for female playwrights or African-American playwrights or Asian are you going to be asking those demographic factors from the playwrights yes we are asking them but all questions like that are optional to answer fully in compliance with best practices I think about how people want to or not choose to identify themselves we've also been super diligent in stretching out of our white male privileged blinders to make sure that we're looking at every perspective we can and asking people to make us smarter about things to make sure we're being as inclusive as possible which is really important to us really really important to us yes earlier I asked about universities and I'm listening to all this going I've been teaching conservatory acting for the last seven years I generally spend about $200 just buying new plays every year just hope I'm interested in one of those out there and I want my students to have you work as opposed to the other I'm thinking that this is perfect for people who are teaching in university to have this access because I can sit at my computer and go to 14 women in my graduating class and have no play for them I personally buy my stuff the school doesn't buy it for me and I would easily spend $50 to have this like I said at my computer and go for this so leaving that access with you out before down the line this would be something and also playwrights if you're thinking of participating in this and know that you can speak about the issues of which you probably have 17 and say this exists for you on the planet now it really is a fabulous still for my perspective we really do think that there's a strong university theater market here and I will confess that we have not done enough research into what would be useful for university theaters it's something we have to do and probably will do as soon as we can next year the other audience we haven't fully got agents right? you can see how agents might be like whoa I'm not sure about this we met with like 25 of them at Abrams last year and I was like okay what do you think? are you afraid of this? we love it it's going to get our playwrights second productions which we can't do it's going to help us in a way that we never thought before so they're fully signed on publishers we need publishers so Craig and other people here in the room Amy and etc we'll round you up at some point and we do better for you than we have so far yes which ties into the question about the agency as representation is there a membership profile that would allow me to administrate multiple writers pages? that's something that we actually proposed in New York and they were like not so much it is definitely something that I have mentally considered that I have written what are called the user stories to build I figured it would be intuitive so that you can administer all 25 or whatever of the playwrights you can administer their profiles for them and maintain that you know make sure that the bios were good and that the synopses were good and consistent etc but not yet however I think your the plans you represent are happy they can give you their username and password and you can log in and you know it's like I log in and there's Joe there she wrote some fairing there I yes if the players can be downloaded with how do you get your license for production if someone wants to produce your work they have to negotiate with you to produce it and that's part of the user agreement when you sign on, when you join you play exchange as a user agreement that says what you can and cannot do with the material and everybody that comes into the exchange will have to sign that is this going to be up a worldwide or just on the United States side worldwide the A in Flutters and Managers and Drums in terms of the Americas is plural including Canada and South America what about across the pond sure I mean really the only thing we've actually built the tool so that down the road we'll be able to translate it so that it could have a Spanish language version Mandarin language version and technically the foundation of the code is such that it could be polylingual at the moment it's just in English so the limit of using it will be understand the ability to understand English to know which buttons to click but it is we were determined to not shortchange the future of the tool and make it English specific and it's definitely international already I mean it's on the internet so anyone can get to it whose country doesn't block their access to the internet right, sure Dan just mentioned a bit about the user agreement I'm just interested to hear about that because I'm sure it'll cover something like what you said that the what you do with this material that I would assume would include respect to producers as well like if you would just then not build a rider it doesn't actually include much about that okay please read the terms and conditions and I'm actually very dead serious about them please read them if you are wanting to wait for the legalese because it took me a half hour to not get back but I worked super hard because I care about intellectual property Amy here in the room, I'm sitting on a panel about intellectual property and the drops is killed in a week I sat on one of the Library of Congress I care about this stuff a lot I worked super hard on working with lawyers who are very heavy and smart and protect everyone but it's a software usage license agreement all of the other copyright laws of the United States still exist and they're independent the R Usage Agreement is just for using this tool if you break the law that's on the books that's bad but there are certain rules you agree to do like writing positive recommendations it's like not squatting and trying to be someone you're not that sort of thing that was baked in there so here's what I say I seriously mean if you personally I'm looking right at you would like to read those things and give me any thoughts I will listen to them and I have the power to take me to the lawyer and say, lawyer what does this mean and is there something valuable here now I extend that to anyone in this room we do not want to be an impenetrable wall about anything especially about something as touching and sensitive as that we want to be as transparent as we can so if you have intelligence to bring to bear we accept I just want to make a comment I think some of the writers might come from when they're reading something online that they think it's printable but this is not printable material they could read it but they can't print it they can actually so I mean again I think this is where this dividing line is older than me I don't want anyone printing out my play and reading it and younger than me they're like I just don't care the more people who print it that's the goal the more people who print and read it that's what I want because someone will then find it and produce it so we've made it so that people can do what they want and by people leaving playwrights yes so players can do what they want there are technologies that we have not integrated that allow only on-screen reading and for the moment we've decided not to do that A, it's technically super complicated and it doesn't work on every device I think when it goes I'm just thinking about her question going globally I can't track what's going to be done in a moment as a writer I get a little trepidatious it's again and I totally understand and there are young people who are like they're doing what they're doing in Poland awesome, they don't have any money there send me the copy of the poster that's fine so then you can also write draft you can emblaz in draft as a watermark there are PDFs that actually disintegrate an hour or two after a certain date that they've been down there are different technologies that are out there for instance my publisher said please do not put the play up there to be downloaded so I didn't I put the synopsis in a 10 page sample and I'll link to where they can buy the play from my publisher that's fine you should ask for a 10 grant a 10 grant technology why not 10 I've given you 10 talks but do they do grants for big ideas 10 wish did you have a question John yes, you've had your hand up for a while yeah I love you is first question no there's no way to monitor quality because I can't possibly do that it is open to all but not without a fee or I'm not actually sure I understand the other half of your question I want to download the same Japan yeah would they come up as a little thing to us saying the happy Japanese company is it going to be open to download in your play? no because you never know who downloads your play it's anonymous and in the future is there a way for someone to download it that a little screen would pop up and say the cost of this is X no that's what we said earlier people want it to be anonymous the people who are downloading plays want to be anonymous yeah jumping off like the university environment marketplace for using the tool I mean I'm certainly sure right now regarding the evil word submission process that some places will say hasn't ever had a production before or at least not a university production before maybe that's another thing to put into the filtering so we do actually yeah we do when you're adding the steps to your production history your play university production is one of the options so yeah that's the thing we're planning for that level of filtering we have about 10 minutes wow that went fast anyone else so even the basic free anybody can actually download these things as well and friends them it's for everyone or just for members can you just go up to the search search for me search for butcher search for abstract new actually no I'm actually going to tell you five minutes and you just wasted two minutes oh yeah thank you go back to butcher it's a great play you'll notice that even though the script is up there you can't download because you're not logged in so only people who have created a profile can download it yeah I feel like there's not any sort of difference between submitting your play to a company and having them Xerox it and give it to whoever we all have Xerox copies many plays that I don't pay for I don't pay for but like I'm done playing the other thing is which we didn't really talk about at the beginning but the new play exchange came out of collaborative literary tools that NNPN has had for a decade basically where twice a year all of our members gather and they pitch plays to each other and they share scripts and this happens across the country I mean Morgan loves the play and she knows that Liz will love it Liz's Englman will love it too but she knows she has read it because it just came out and Steve Yachty just wrote it so she'll send Liz the play and this happens right now so I'm going to add your circles of positivity and the people that you know to more corners of the country there's going to be another button that isn't here on the display I don't know if you can read these this is a recommendation download and save to reading list there was a button here that we had to eliminate because we couldn't get the feature done in time for our beta release suggest the idea is well I've read this play and I know the theater that this would be great for so I can just hit the suggest button type their name and click enter then that theater will go to its activity page and see so and so suggested this play for you and you can ignore it or not but it's there so that way people can proactively hunt for plays for you there's other features I could talk about where you'll be able to assign plays to readers to read and provide coverage for you the stuff coming down the road in one minute do you have a rollout plan yes sorry rollout plan and then I'm probably going to go to the sign oh yeah if you go to the contact page go down Jojo so right now we are going around the country rolling out this beta version to our partners we'll be done through September doing the world tour and then we'll have some a couple of months of redevelopment and we're going to open up for the public sometime in early 2015 if you want to be notified when that happens so that you are the first to get in go to the contact page and just put your email address here don't use this form which is really about tech support and media inquiries just put your email address right here and hit subscribe so it's newplayexchange.org slash contact okay that's right you all have a jillian questions if you check your schedules there is a breakout time later this afternoon where you can meet with these guys a little more closely and I might even recommend going up to the cabana and having a break and then the end breakout that's what we like to do and that will be all about general information about NSPN in addition to any further questions thank you