 and the speakers are all good. Okay, thank you. Thank you, guys. Let me get, okay. While they're figuring that out and at the risk of making myself go totally broke, if anyone will buy a t-shirt for $20, I will match your $20 in a donation to LMDA. We have, I believe, mediums and large, no, we have smalls and mediums, is that right, staff? We have smalls and mediums, medium and large, but if you need other sizes, then at least six of you need that size. Nicole has assured me of any size, so if we want the extra... Come on up! Your chance to make $20, $40, medium. You know, it's not in the bank. I need a lot of money. And you need to drop off, so that you may claim any pictures that you would like. I try to get as many people as I can. But otherwise, please don't buy the t-shirt. Mediums and large. Oh, that's a large. Can you guys try again? Okay, seriously? It helps make an extra $20 for the organization. We make some money off the t-shirt. You have a fabulous t-shirt to wear. Last call, my understanding is they are not gonna be at the banquet tonight. Anybody want a t-shirt? T-shirt, t-shirt. Okay. Thank you. This is our town. It's the most high-tech session we have, so... Well, I probably don't even wanna talk about the digital network. And I'm very happy to welcome you all back. And... Sorry. Special thanks for that. Here is a very embodied experience. We have to be here in the room together to do together. And this virtual reality is something that we approach with a little bit of levitation. What do we do with it? It's such a disembodied experience because sitting by the computers and talking to each other or reading emails and tweeting and all of that. It's all happening out there in the virtual space. And we have to do it with a disembodied experience. But perhaps there is a way that we can use the tools, the new digital tools in the virtual networks to help us make theater to connect with other people, to learn about other cultures, but also to add theaters, the work that we do, and to expand our cultural universe. So today we have super cool five digital networks. And I'm gonna go in order to introduce them. And then they all will do their short little speed of the network and we're gonna put them up and show them to you guys. So three of the people are actually here, present. And then two are on Skype, one is in Spain and the other one is in New York. So we have a digital virtual network happening right here. So the five participants today is General Ruth and William Sueban from the National New Play Network about New Play Exchange. So here they are. Let's give them a big welcome. We have Heather Manson and General Manson from Contemporary Performance Network, what they have done to use digital tools to archive and to promote Polish theater. And we have Fentanyl Media from District Archibalds whose second occupation is Archivist and he's going to introduce a very cool project, American Theater Archive Project, a very important project for archiving in American theater. So let's give it up for Ken. From Spain, we have Beatriz Habur who's going to be talking about a new international theater experience, the Newton News website that they have done which is basically about collaboration different artists from across the globe collaborating on different projects. All right, so we're gonna start with Sonja and William and these are my feedbacks. Hello. Okay, now it's on. I'm the Associate Executive Director of the National New Play Network. And as I'm sure many of you know, the National New Play Network is a member service organization. So we have 29 core member theaters and 43 associate member theaters, all of whom are dedicated to the development production and continued life of new plays. Our flagship program is the Collaboration Fund where three theaters come on board to do a rolling world premiere. So they premiere one single play within a year of each other. It's three separate productions across the country. And the hope is that it rolls on to more place and has a continued life after that. But what we're here to talk about today is the new play exchange. So this is our newest program. It's our eighth program at NNPN. And over the past three years, we've spent traveling around the country talking to artistic directors and playwrights and literary managers and managing directors and dramaturgs, talking about what they wanted for a new online system to ways to connect playwrights and theaters. We got a major cornerstone grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as additional funding from Mellon and from the NEA. And with our partners, LMDA being one of them, Chicago Dramatists Playwrights Foundation and the Playwright Center have created the new play exchange. Right now we're in beta testing of it, which means that it's just rolled out to playwrights alone. And actually, tomorrow, you all will be the first among the first readers, what we call readers, who will be using the tool. And then after that, we'll go to theaters. In this fall, we'll sort of go back and continue working on it before we do a gigantic launch to the entire new play sector as of January, 2015. So very exciting. We're all really thrilled. It's really been in the making for three years since we've gone around the country and have a lot of really awesome feedback. So I'm going to turn it over to William who's going to tell you how this works. Hi, I'm in the room of some really great friends. And many of you, I haven't met yet, so I hope to get to know some more of you over the next day or so. Please let me know if you can't hear me. Here's what the new play exchange is. I'm going to give you one sentence and then I'm going to unpack it for about seven minutes. It is a neutral platform for connecting players and producers filled for the common good of the American theater. So now what is that? Why are we doing it? There are about 15,000 playwrights in the United States. And I'm just going to use the United States but we all know America is plural in LNBA. 15,000 playwrights, I won. And we produce on average about one new play a year. So 15,000 new plays enter the American theater every year. Same time there are about 1,500 role premiers. So somehow we choose 1,501 out of 10 to produce every year. And the mechanism, the technology we are using to make that filter happen is the submission process. Everybody love that, right? That's our current technology. And it's broken, it's bad software. It results in huge stacks and overwhelming amounts of information to money through and playwrights madly looking for places to show their work and gatekeepers and this and that. And nobody is happy with the 1,500 that gets selected and nobody is happy with the way those 1,500 get selected. We have all kinds of patches we've applied to the software agents who act as interlocutors in intermediaries to determine quality, we have submission windows, we have contests where we pit plays against one another. So what we believe is that it's time to actually throw this entire system out the window to let it go completely and to replace it instead with a completely new paradigm, new metaphor for connecting plays and producers and that's the new play exchange. So I'm gonna talk to you about it from three different perspectives first, what it's like for a playwright. So if you've got four plays or so at any one time that you're trying to shill out in the world and you're surrounded by this universe of thousands of theaters that you're trying to parse and figure out who's right for what. You have no idea and you end up with massive Gmail folder full of plays you sent out and you have no idea when you're gonna hear back and you're sending to theaters that really don't like your work and there's no mechanism for getting feedback and you're completely confused and you have bad spreadsheet and sticky notes and where do I go and oh my God, it's horrible. Instead of submission, instead of making sure you have the right criteria and cowtowing at the institution to say, please will you have me with my work, we will replace all of that with sharing as a paradigm, with sharing your work with the new play exchange. So the task of the playwright will change from trying to find people who will listen to me to talking about my work, tagging it in an effective, accurate way and making it considerable, putting it one place where it can be found. Instead of a thousand places where no one really is ready to see it. Now one place is the new play exchange. Very simple, it's a database of new plays. You upload your script or a sample of your script, you tag it with a variety of criteria, metadata, keyword subject, metadata, number of characters, the ethnic breakdown of those characters, synopsis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So now let's flip that around and imagine what that's like for a theater. You've got one new play slot you are trying to fill and you know your budget can handle no more than five actors and the theme of your season is climate change or the planet and you know that you need to investigate Asian American women writers. Right now what do you do to fill that slot? Well you might email your dramaturg on staff and three of your friends and five other people that you have to know to say, hey, do you know anything like this? At least some hope something falls in your lap and it's imperfect and it's a bad system. But with the new play exchange there is now one place you can go to go look for work. So instead of opening up a submission window and taking the first thousand plays that come in to try and find that one climate change play by an Asian American woman author with a cast of under five, you can go right here, plug in those search criteria and find all of the plays in the American theater that meet those criteria. It gets cooler than that. So the third perspective is yours, in this room. People whose job it is to read, think about and evaluate plays. In the main, there are other things that we all do as well, but in the main what that process entails is two things, right? Endorsing plays, like saying this play is good or this play is promising or this play sings, this play is great in seven different ways and this play is great for you, theater X. The other half is matchmaking, endorsing and matchmaking. And let me guess, there are more plays that you love than plays you can do, right? So what do you do with that energy? What do you do to support the plays that you care about that you're passionate about? In the new play exchange, we'll be able to recommend them. Log on, find the play and write one to five sentences about the plays that you care about, to however many sentences you want. So that when the theater comes in and does a search and finds the global warming plays by Asian-American authors with under five characters, they see, wow, this one was recommended by Julie Dupner. I know her, I respect her, I believe in what she has to say. And this one was recommended by Liz Engelman and I know her and love her and what she has to say and sustain yellow motto and this one is genuine so I can, wow, I am now suddenly relying on the wisdom of the most important professionals from throughout the country and not just the one I have on set. The other thing it does, and I don't think there's anything like this right now in the American theater, when you all write coverage for the plays that you're thinking about and considering for the theaters for which you work and that might be your day job and the passion theater that you work for on the weekends and the contest you read for, you write coverage and you store it in somebody else's database. And when you change your job and you go to someone else, that database is done. It's still there but you don't have access to it anymore. Racking up. Racking up. Well again, well like when you can. So this will be a permanent archive of your relationship with plays and playwrights so that you can always access forever. So this was a little commercial. Tomorrow we have an hour, we're gonna be showing you this incredible depth and you'll have a chance to sign up for yourself with the free beta code. As will every member of LMDA. I can't wait to talk to you more about it. We've got like an hour long presentation tomorrow. So gone. Woo! Yeah. Thank you. And for everyone who will be staying tomorrow to come to this presentation because it might be awesome. 11.30. All right. The second person you have to change the order a little bit. But the second person today that we're gonna have hosts is Anna Daras from the Polish Theater Institute. And Anna will present for us something called E Theater which a Polish government book for the benefit of theaters and audiences. And Anna will talk about this particular book. So I'm gonna give up for Anna again. I'm just trying to get her away from the audience. All right. Hello. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's really a pleasure to be here with you. I will just start telling you a little bit about the place where I work, the Polish Theater Institute because probably you've never heard about that. We are the institution of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. And we were founded in 2003 by the ministry. And we are basically the organization that is documenting and promoting contemporary Polish theater. And to make our aims accept this both is that the other aim is also that we do many educational projects in the field of contemporary theater. We have few departments. And later on the project, this E Theater website that I will tell you about is in frame of the documentation department. So basically this documentation department is like very important part of our activities. It was also one of the reason why the institute was open actually in 2003. And it owns the biggest collection of contemporary theater documentation in Poland that includes photographs, press clippings, posters, programs and much more. And it is also responsible for this, actually the biggest single internet website entirely devoted to the contemporary theater, this E Theater PL. The second issue is the theater pedagogy department in which we do many educational projects for children and teenagers. And one of them which is like really important, it's called a summer in the theater grant program in which we give grants for theaters that normally will closed during the summer. And because of this grant they can organize workshops and many activities for children and teenagers. The other department is project department. Basically we give grants in a few theater programs. One is called Tad Polska. It's like have theater will travel. It's a program that supports mobility of theater in Poland and national competition for staging contemporary Polish drama that supports realization of contemporary Polish plays. And the main price is like 50% of free amusement of the cost of the production. And the other one Classic Alive is a special program prepared for the next year because we are going to celebrate 250 anniversary of public theater. And it supports productions of Polish classical text. We have, we also edit many books. Like you can see a few of them. However, I will just say that, for example, last year we published completed text of Jeshe Grotowski. It was a three years research project. And in this book we edited all his essays, interviews and text of his lectures. The department where I work, which I direct, is the International Project Departments and we organize many different international projects. One of our task is also publish the internet newsletter called Poland on Stage, in which we three times a year we inform about the most important issues of the Polish theater. Okay, so now I will just pass to this e-theater website. This website actually was founded because of the closing of one magazine called Rukta Adranne, which is like the theater movement. And it was a magazine that was actually publishing the most important theater critics and theater texts from all other different newspapers and magazines. And it was appearing like three times a year. And when it had like financial problems and it had to be closed, our director decided that, sorry, okay. Our director decided to like to move this idea and to do such a website that will basically take these responsibilities. We have four persons working for this website constantly and they update it every day. You can see the website here. At the beginning, it was only the website that was in putting the, or putting on the internet, the most important text that was appearing in different press magazines and newspapers. It was also like a repertory tool, another that was informing about premiers. But of course, during this 10 years of existing, it was getting bigger, bigger and bigger. And right now it like has got many, many tools. Like normally in the middle, you can see the text that is like a text of the day. So they are publishing like the most important text that was appearing recently. There are some videos as well, photos. We have like every day different person that we are promoting. It's like a person of the day. On the left side, you can see like the tool to look for the repertory every day in different cities in Poland. There are also premiers of the month, et cetera. And on one side, you can see a place which is like 2014 theater in Poland, which I will tell you a little bit later about that. There is also like a second part of this website, which is like e-theater TV. And of course, with the whole process of using tools of internet, we decided that it should be also a part where the theaters can publish short videos about the performances. Okay, this is this theater in Poland tool. It's really interesting because every year we prepare statistics about all Polish theater life. And there you can see like, unfortunately this in Polish, can be really inspiring I think, where you can find through the city, information about dramatic theaters, music theaters, puppet theaters, et cetera. Then you have like the institutions and through different ways you can find information about theaters, but also festivals, also theater schools, et cetera. And if you choose, for example, a dramatic theater, there will be a list of all dramatic theaters that are in Poland, and choosing this that you are completely interested. Like for example, I choose here like TR Warsaw, which is one of the most important stages in Warsaw. You can have all the database about this website, also about its budget, the number of stages, the number of seats in this theater, and in frame of this tool, we also publish like every season statistics. Quite important tool that we are having on this theater, it's the virtual archive. And during the process of digitalization of all our archive, we decided to have such a tool on this website. And it's really where the arrow is, it's written in Polish virtual archive. And you can find information about actually all the performances and people involved in Polish theater from fifties. So here I just put the name of Jerzy Brodowski, and when you look for that, you can find his biography, and also the list of all performances he did with the dates of premiere, and exactly information in which theater it was premiered, and also about the people that collaborated in frame of this performance. And if you choose performance that you're interested in, like I choose Acropolis, you can find articles that are about this performance, but you also have a tool to choose. Photos, program, and multimedia if it exists. I will just skip for a moment and open this website once again to show me also another possibility because you can look through the person, but also we can look for the information through the title. If we put Hamlet, do the search, then it will appear all the performances or the titles connected with Hamlet. It can be William Shakespeare, but it can be also another one. If we choose Hamlet by Shakespeare, the all performances of Hamlet will appear with the date of the premiere and the place of the premiere. So we have like, you can see. Yeah, and if we choose, for example, this Hamlet, we are interested from 1985, you will have all the information about the people who was starting in this performance, and also you can download the program. Okay, and just, I will back to the... And the last thing I just want to say is that we are in this process of digitalization, so it is really interesting that at the beginning when we started it, we decided we choose 10 titles, 100 titles that were digitalized, and right now there is like a special tool where you can click and order the materials of the performance that you are interested in. Normally during one year, we digitalized about 600 to 700 titles of the performances, but right now we have like 10% of all the listed performances done, so we still have a lot of work to do. However, we also think about the next tools to do and I will just end it saying that right now we are preparing the new website, which is at Adro de Cascona, and it is devoted to educational projects, and on this website, for example, teachers from school, they will find the script for the lessons and the program, how to teach about the contemporary theater. And the last one, the last project that we just started to prepare, and it will be also a tool for this e-theater, it's the Electronic Encyclopedia of Polish Theater, and it will have like personal database and tires by subject, but what is really interesting is that all articles will be created by the specialist of Polish theater, so it will not be exactly like Wikipedia, but it will be more like a very professional tool that people can look and read articles that are really prepared by professional researchers. Thank you very much. Thank you, Anna, I know you have some handouts, you want to pass the microphone. Yes, sorry, I have just some materials, well, I put it there, so there's not so many, like the maps of Polish theaters and also some information about the institute with my contact that, you know, if you will have any further questions or you would like to contact me, you know, you can, you will have my mail there. Okay, thank you, Anna. I think it's ready for that, please. Yeah, the answer is visual. All right, okay, all right, so our third participant is going to join us virtually from Spain, and the answer is a little, she's going to talk about meeting news and the corp, and that's ready, and Hanife is our assistant today helping us, she's going to be acting as proxy of batteries, with the batteries on top through the screen, and we will see the screen over here, and Hanife will help out, all right, are you guys good? Yes. All right, do you want to turn it up through the laptop so we can see here? All right, batteries, yeah, we can see you. Everybody, hello, batteries from Spain. So we point the website at the batteries moment, batteries, it's here, so you guys can start. Hello. You guys can start, Hanife, are you ready? We can start. Hanife is ready, so we can start. Batteries, we can start. Yes, we can hear you. So, I think that I'm going to stop this. And I have the how-round feed in my screen by then, so the thing is that I was counting and watching the big screen through the how-round streaming. Yeah. Can you do that? Like you were showing the screen before while Anna was talking. Oh, I see, you can see the screen from the phone, yes. Oh, wow, this is sophisticated. That works, that's your specialty. She doesn't know that the consumer is crazy. She does, she wants to see it. She wants to see it. Thank you very much. So, it's okay, it's okay. Yeah, sorry for the delay, I'm going to try to tell you the annoying, you will be fixing. So, that's the homepage of the site called New International The Other Experience, which is the company I co-founded with that how, some of you may know him, he's from, he's a theater director from New York. And you can go, and if you don't mind, you can go through the second tab that we have opened, it's divisions. Because what interests us in life is the international scene. So, we had this plan that, in a second, sorry? There you go. Okay, so we did the plan on how to build what we wanted to exist. And the first thing that we were missing was a site in which you could, you would find theater related news from all over the world with high quality. For example, if you go to the Guardian, you can find some news on what's happening in the United Kingdom. If you go, there's a lot of different sources where you can find news like Scouter all over. But where can you find news from, I don't know, New Zealand and Mexico and? Testing, testing, testing. It's okay, go ahead, let's see. Something happened? No, no, it's all good, it's all good, go ahead. The idea is, some people are helping us, writing news for us, and we are doing our best in aggregating material, to have some good, collected news, but we try to be polite in the sources. So when the news are aggregated, we go through them, we make a little extra for you to understand what the news is about, and then we don't post the whole thing, just the beginning of it, and then we link it to the source. If you can show them, Hanifet, the interview that we chose before, which is, yeah, that one. We also have, give me, sorry. Okay, yes, you will see that you've enjoyed it. There you go. Okay, yeah, it's in the website for sizes, for different devices, so if you would see it in a big screen, it would look differently. It's the responsiveness, it's really, really annoying. When you're deciding things, I'm sure, some of you know. So if you click on the one we set, Hanifet, the one with bed. Sure. Do you have that? Yeah. So you can see that the material is there, and then we have, there it is. You have at the beginning a little picture that the staff of Night News writes. That's not from any side, even if the material is aggregated. And then at the end, you have the source of it that you can click if you're interested in reading the rest of the material. And then one thing that we do is at the section called Spotlight, which focuses on some part of the world. We started the Spotlight with Chile, and we created different interviews to be able to fill online by the playwrights that we were interested in featuring in the Spotlight in Chile. Can you click on Spotlight, please? So what we do in the Spotlight is try to show you like a panoramic of what's happening in some particular place in the world, in there. Yeah, you have multimedia content as well, like videos, live channels, these channels is their feature as well. And what else are we doing? We have a lot of collaborators from all over the world. We have collaborators in Slovenia, for example, and in Mexico and in, I don't know, I'm just giving you examples from places. You have a page in the site called Publish if you are interested in writing for Night News and you can click there. Can you show them? You can, please, in the footer section. So if any of you want to publish an article, you just click on Publish and you can see the guidelines and feel free to send us any article that you're interested in. We don't publish any critics or listings because that would be way too much for the idea of the site. And we are planning right now where we have a couple of developers working on making it more social than it is because the next step for Nightcore is to create Night Network, which will be based on this, basically. More or less, that's that. I'm sorry I didn't show my parents when I was young. Okay. And that, which was supposed to be there just got better yesterday. So I'm excited. Yeah, that was getting married yesterday so that's why he wasn't going to be here. Well, I guess that's a good enough excuse. All right. Thank you so much, Betis. We're gonna keep you on. Thank you so much. Thank you all for Q&A, so don't go away. The next person is Ken Sonia, who's going to be talking about American art through the archive project. Great, that works. That's a great sound page. I don't know about you all, but I'm completely geeking out on these other projects. I'll just run away to my computer and start clicking through. The American Theater Archive Project started as an idea in the fall of 2009 at the American Society for Theater Research Conference. There's a number of people in this room and also members of that organization that primarily serves theater scholars. And we're talking about the fate of theater collections and established theater archives and what possibly the scholarly organization can do about it. And we also then started to talk about, well, there's sure a lot of theater that's being produced that is disappearing as quickly as closing night. And was there something that we could do as a community, primarily, initially of theater scholars but was quickly expanded to stem that loss. And so, the following summer at the LMDA conference in Bath, I had a couple, I've said a couple of conversations about that and other people in this room made contributions towards this idea. And then the name started to come about of the American Theater Archive Projects. So it started initially as an ad hoc committee of the American Society for Theater Research but then quickly got other support of a theater library association, Society of American Archivists, Performing Arts Round Table, and LMDA to support it. We came up with a mission statement. So, American Theater Archive Project, our ATAP supports theater makers in archiving records of their work for the benefit of artists, scholars, patrons, and the public. And we got a number of volunteers to start talking about what this project could be from all over the country. And so, it was a couple of years really of talking and blue-skying it. And then, about two years ago, we came up with this idea of creating this initiation program. So, it's a collaboration of, ATAP's collaboration of scholars, dramaturgs, literary managers, archivists. Primarily, they will work directly with theater companies in a conversation about what they're creating and how they're saving it, which is a very long-term process. So, this is a little weak connection. So, we started with some companies in New York City. We got a grant from the Lucille Artel Foundation to start working with a few theater companies, the Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theater Workshop, Cherry Lane Theater, primarily, to pilot this idea of going in and having a conversation with hopefully the entire staff of the theater company to talk about what's important to them, about the work that they do, and what they think the mission of their theater is and what the mission of the archives might be, what's important to save. And then doing an initial, the second phase is doing initial assessment of interviews, kind of in-depth interviews with people from all departments in a theater company and then coming out with recommendations for what can be how an archival program can be started and that can be as diverse as the theater that's created. There's not one way to do it. And then to come up with a plan to start working on it in terms of what needs to be saved and who's gonna have access to it. And then at the same time, we created a manual which we published online last year which I'm quite proud of. People are using preserving theatrical legacy and archiving manuals with theater companies because even though we have established some teams across the country, there's not, there's personnel resources in all areas of the country. So, and here's just the table of contents of it. It's a free download. And a number of people have started using it, not just in North America, but actually it's gotten comments from various places around the world. Just to start thinking about this because most theater practitioners don't think about the documentation process and what happens to the theater after they're done, after the live event is over. But it extends into greater conversations about legacy, about, we talked a little bit about before, cultural impact. Most theater companies get interested maybe in the project, in our archival program around an anniversary to be like, where is the stuff, where is the evidence of everything that we've been doing and also partly for funding and to connections with audiences to talk about this is a long relationship. This has taken place over time. It's not just this evening that we're spending together. So, this is a very long-term project. ASTR, this past year committed to it as an integral part of that organization. And it's now writing into the bylaws and is given in a budget. And we're also doing some other fundraising around it. But the best model we've come up with is really this local team model, a local ATAP team. There's teams in New York, in Seattle, in Austin, here in Boston. They're conversations beginning at a blue company one. And also a local funding model. We had initially thought, we were like, oh, let's go for the big money, the NEHA. For the, you know, there's a lot of competition there. And we're also talking about, you know, other sources of government foundation. But the most useful relationships have developed on the local level. When local funders can see, can talk about giving money to their communities and talking about the local impact of fear and the fabric of cultural life. So, the website itself is just quite simple now. And it's just initially was built as a way to just connect people who are interested in being members of teams with one another. And now we're trying to figure out a way to open it up more to theaters now that we have both our archival, the initiation program and the manual available. But it's a long-term project, and we hope that SCR, MNDA, these other organizations and TCG will continue to be committed to it, because any kind of archival program on start is, it's gotta be woven into the fabric of an institution. So, we think about saving the documentation of our process and product as we create and share our shows, and it just goes into our archives. So, we can dig into it if we want to open up a show. Again, we can share it with other, with our own staff, with other staffs. But the idea is that these archival programs are in residence, but stay close to the actual practicing theater company. And then we can have ongoing conversations, perhaps with local repositories or other repositories when, at the end of a theater company's life. When it's no longer gonna be producing, where does that stuff go so it can still be accessible? But primarily we're having conversations with active theater companies so they can have their own archives and use their own archives and share their archives. And at the same time, save time and money, which always gets the interest of the addition. So, that's all for now. Thank you. All right, thank you so much. So, one of the others is a team, Kaden Manson and Gemma Nelson, joining us from New York. Hi, from New York. Hi. A contemporary performance network. So, you guys, I have space. I just want to see, they want to look at the screen. I'll go on to the screen, okay. Hi, my name's Kate Manson and this is Gemma Nelson. And we're here talking about contemporary performance network. I'm gonna briefly give you some information to overall information about the network. And then Gemma's gonna talk a little bit about some of the projects we do. Front page of the network. We started it in 2010. And today, now it's about 5,900 members on the network. And that extends into about 46,000 members on Facebook and 9,000 on Twitter. And it's primarily focused on artists, presenters, scholars and festivals. And it's meant to be a social sort of, like a community organizing tool for artists either to meet each other or meet scholars or meet presenters and to collaborate. You can see at the top of the, where the members are. And then below that is some of the newest members that have joined. And then a feed from the blog, which at the moment has a lot of opportunities and was just featuring the queer performance at BAM that was last night in New York as forums. And this is where network members can post ideas. There's a lot of posts for calls. Well, I don't see people are looking for people to be involved in projects or festivals or commissions. And then under that as a video, we'll come back to the book project that we did this year. That's an annual book project. And then you have the activity stream. So it's like a mini Facebook for the contemporary performance field. Under that is events. So these are network members who are posting their events. These can again be open calls. They can be performances. They can be workshops. A lot of people are posting about workshops that they're doing in different countries. And then the below that is member blog posts and then photos and some of the top members who are posting at the moment. If you go back up to the top and click on members, you can see a listing of some of the members. These are the most recent members that have joined in the last couple of days at the top of that where you see the search to the right of that says advanced search. And if you click on that, this is how artists can find each other and scholars can find artists and presenters can find artists, everyone can find each other. And you can look by the city or the state, the performance discipline, keywords in the bio and the bio and also a special keywords. So let's say we're looking for artists from Albania. If you go to country and click, scroll down to Albania, which is the third one and click on that and then scroll down and search. Then you'll see at the bottom there's, you have five members from Albania. The bottom one is Arnold and if you click on him, you can see an example of one of the member sites. So this is Arnold, he's posted some video of his work, some photos, he joined in October 2013 and then underneath you have the bio and keywords and things like that. Next up if you look at groups, scroll back to the top and click groups. So these are network member created groups and they can be anything from thematic to ramp sites to people working on their own projects, different facets of the field. If you go to the top to featured groups, you can see far to the far left, digital media performance and you can click on that. That's one of the groups. This group was created by Whitney B. Hunter who is a sort of performing and multimedia artist in Brooklyn, I think. There's 141 members in his group. There's a discussion forum and so artists sort of post to this, or curators or scholars post to this and then people can post inside the forum and they can also just comment on the wall. So I was gonna show you, you can click around, there's a lot more. I would say this project is sponsored or is funded by sponsors. So we sell, if you look to the right, we sell sponsorships to really educational programs, nothing else. So you can see there's University of Roe Hampton, there's the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, there's Naropa in Colorado and there's Doss Arts in Amsterdam, I think. And then Jim was gonna talk a little bit about the two projects. If you go back to the homepage and scroll down to the book video, you can hit play and it'll, that's just a little flip through the actual book. So this is the first book project that we produced. We produced it last year and the idea was to make an open call to members of the network for projects that they'd done over the previous year. So this is a collection of whoever wanted to contribute work that they produced in 2013. Members gave us their information and each got a spread in the book which tells about the project, the bio of the company and how to contact them. We then took all this information and printed the books and sent them to 200 presenters and more actually as a collection of work, examples of work from the network and a way to extend the mission of the network and the reach of it. We got about 350 responses this year. It was great, made for a very big book. So that's the contemporary performance book and it's an annual product we'll be doing it every year and we will be producing other books as well. If we, if you have the other link that we sent you which is the special effects festival, if you could go to that now. So this is a festival that we produced in New York during January, the festival time, APAP. And again, this was pulled from people from the contemporary network. We did this very off the cuff this past year so we asked people who were already in the city or going to be in the city, some international artists. If you scroll down, you can see a little bit of who the works are that were in the festival. We had a mix of performers from different disciplines and we had a great time doing it. So that's, it gives you an overview of yourself, the work that we've done with contemporary performance network and that we're continuing to do as we expand the network and continue to reach new audiences. That's it. All right. Thanks. The boundaries and this way. Yeah. And we're gonna go to Q&A and so many, many have any questions to any of our presenters today. But I'm gonna be curious. All right, go ahead. Which is basically all of this just in the office and so I've been kind of sorting through it like that. Yeah, it's a, we do have some people in Southern California also working on archival projects so I can connect you with them. I think that the most important thing that we found is with a lot of our work is the conversation and community discussion around our work, whether it's creating the theater or archiving the creation of the theater. So yeah, I mean, these are big projects. They require a big assessment of a space, whether it's a physical space or a digital space and there are, there's some best practices which we're trying to share through our programs in the manual but really these local networks are the key thing and we found in, and I know that Russ is here who's head of the Austin team that our work with the theaters is I think important but I think the theater was worked with each other is the most important in the conversations that they had and when people who are on the Archive Committee for a theater go and visit another theater company and see how they're viewing it, that's when the most exciting work and connections happen. So yes, we can help. Awesome. Thank you. Sure. I should send you Surrell. I just want to make a comment. A lot of you are doing archiving and as you look at what these people do you will say thank you because it's not so much the throwing it up today and putting it up to the team because it has been done. It's the maintaining it and what these people are really committing to. I mean, just me keeping my archive on my campus. It's a killer and they're making a commitment that deserves such respect from us. So think about that and then do it. It'll keep growing. Right now there are about 180 playwrights in there and 250 plays. We'll figure that out between now and then. I'm not trying to bring it into this. No, I know what I do too and we do too. I mean, we think of it as a like a 10 year project to get it where it needs to be and then we'll see what it's transformed after that. But yeah, eventually this might become an archive of the American theater over the past 50 years, previous 50 years. But if what you're also asking is, will it still then be a database of new plays? It will be because there will be tools that will allow searchers to parse out all the new stuff from the stuff that's been around. And how you're gathering people that are working with our four partner organizations to beta test. LMDA is one of those four. So every member of LMDA is going to be invited to participate in the beta test. Is there any plan to pay dramaturgs to apply the expertise to the database or is it just assumed that as part of the institution? More in the latter, but there's a more nuanced answer. And may I suggest that come tomorrow and we'll be talking in great depth about what this may mean for dramaturgs. I'll also say that we're still figuring it out. That's why we're in a beta test. So your participation is going to help us answer all of these questions. So that's my 30 tomorrow. I have a situation going on as you all know right now with one that what they've done in their analysis is discovered that like every is costing them one person. And so we're betwixt the between because as scholars and as dramaturgs we want to be able to slice the dice that couple of five different ways and go in and find more and more and more. But as Americans and as Canadians so again, that's a challenge. One person. I think one of my ones. Yeah, just a quick one for the Nikolay exchange. Will the actual like PDFs of the play is beyond the site or will it just connect surgery for the writers? Yeah, the PDFs will be there for those playwrights who decide to upload. So essentially the playwright chooses that if the player is responsible for their own contents they choose whether they want to put it at full play, 10 page sample or if they're represented by an agent we imagine that the agent will be on there. Okay, any other questions? Yeah, it was when Kate and Gemma were talking about that they had gotten funding from the educational program. So I was wondering if the other co-panelists could talk about how do you thought about sustainability of these amazing new projects both in terms of labor and fundraising. Because I think we're all working on things that are long-term projects that we're talking about. It'll know what it is in 10 years. Well, what's the plan? Because for those of us who are founders of projects there's a certain amount of energy that you have for what it's new. But what is the plan to sort of keep it going and hand it off and bring more people on and share the load? I think the really quick answer is it's a non-profit and there's been conversations around the new play exchange about sending it off into its own non-profit down the road, but it's a combination of granting and there's a very low price point for users that come tomorrow. Yeah, 10 minutes, that's it. And I don't think we can talk about that. What? Sustainability. Sustainability, so. Is she gonna do it for the next 10 years or? Are you gonna be able to do this project in 10 years? So what is your future plan? Whoa. Okay, explain to you. If you go to nightcorp.com you will see that we have different areas. We are producing shows, we are organizing conferences, we are helping other projects to happen as well as keeping Night News alive and running and moving on to the next projects which are creating Night Network and then Night Nation. We, yes we will. And it's because we are working in different areas which on our experience is the way we learn to survive in theater and this sounds a little bit strong but it's been difficult to just stay in the theater, doing theater, it's hard enough and I think that that prepares you to start difficult projects and go through with them. Am I making any sense? Do you understand what I mean? Sure. So if you were asking a business plan that's the longest and more boring question, I mean answer, and just rightly you're interested in that. Okay, just with a question. Well, these three panels, the building digital networks, building inter-institutional collaborations and energy leadership are kind of my trifecta thinking because if you have the network, you can find the institution with which you can take the leadership and collaborate with it. So it's supposed to be kind of the theme of the conference in how do we work in the future? Do we work by collaborating with partner people and how do partner people gonna connect with them and maybe not take for leadership on those connections? Okay, other questions? Jokes, I have a question. What do you want to pose to the government? Well, they've got only a week, they propose a British communism so they're very persistent in pursuing the goals. I'm not sure whether it is the immemorality of that particular sort of flow or the need of how it makes itself visible. So I guess for me it would be curious to know if anybody has, I know there are some things that have gotten funding started like yours do. Are there institutions and grants that you all can name that you've been particularly successful in articulating both the key and the demonstration of those funds or places that you see offering funding for other kinds of things, but not this, how do we start to say how integral this network is and how do you... I want to say that it's of course a big advantage that we have the governmental support for that. However, like thinking about your question like how it will look like in 10 years because we also have a serious cuts in our budgets. So actually this is that we right now have like contracted for people that they work constantly only on updating this website. But I don't know if we will have money for these four people in next 10 years. Maybe we will have only for two. So it's also the issue that, well, it's great, it's great idea. And actually also this website was for many years like the only website that was providing information about contemporary Polish theatre. But it's also a question, you know, how it will look like the, well, in three years I would say that maybe it will look the same, but in 10 years I'm not sure about that. I mean, this is kind of all the for-profit startups and I've started virtually, but I'm not sure if the art-related startups can start virtually, or if they don't need some kind of institution granting. But I'm not the organization, you know, the institute was first, and then the website came out. And so perhaps having partnerships again between different institutions, even between academic institutions and large libraries and theaters to be able to sustain those kind of networks. Not that I might be the answer. Can I just jump in just really quickly? So National Endowment for the Humanities is certainly something to look at and they're really big into virtual libraries. And I think there's also a lot of talk about Silicon Valley and ways that for-profits out there can support non-profit internet world things. I mean, there is a lot of, a lot coming from Sanford. There is a lot of interest, but besides that, although others are partnering with corporate, I mean, I know we are kind of all scared of that, but I think we should not be, we should kind of go into the other possibilities. You guys wanna go ahead? Well, we wanted to take it that when we started net for any support at all, because it seemed like it needed to be made people wanted it. And then after we had it for a while, institutions came to us and made us do sort of supported and to run their programs on the slide. And it's very important to us that the network is free to the people who are inside of it. And also on the posting opportunities, we try not to post any opportunities that cost the artist or the scholar or anyone who's participating money to apply. Intuitions, but freelance artists, so say for example, will playwright be able to search for a job or a job offered with particular expertise and then is archiving a working development of part of many of them. Yeah, I think right now during the beta test, we don't have that functionality built into what we're doing, but yes, the intent is that anyone who is a member of the new play exchange is fully searchable by a bifurcated criteria so that we can help foster networks. Networks being what we are all about. That was an excellent comment. We live in the era of the age of the network right now. And so in terms of archiving, it's not in our intent. We think it is something that's going to happen as a matter of course. We're planning to have big, fat, meaty databases ready to handle all of the content that will end up being added to them, but it's not why we exist. Any other questions? This I guess is for everybody that I'm specifically interested in contemporary performance network. As these sorts of networks like multiply, we have LinkedIn and things like that. Do you guys as founders of new networks feel a lot of responsibility to partner with the existing ones or to think of ways that they can streamline or do you see yourself as offering alternatives that work better for people in our field? Well, the network really is focused on the contemporary performance field so it's really only the people who are involved in that field that are on the network. Sometimes audience members wander into the melee of the network and enjoy being there, but we don't partner with other networks but we do feed them our streams so that when someone posts a workshop or something on our network, it immediately posted into the expanded sort of social presence of the network like on Facebook. So they post to the 5,900 people on our network and that goes to 4,646,000 people on Facebook. I just kind of give a thumbs up to share enthusiasm and another for saving coverage in the terms of that second category. I was wondering if I'm using it as a dramaturge, is it storing my script reports for me to be able to access or is it uploading them for other people to read the play reports? So we're going to go into tremendous depth tomorrow but it's the latter of those. It's actually only one tool with different modes for people doing and accomplishing different tasks and recommendations are not thumbs up, they're just, they're written. So it's not just a ping or a number of stars, it's actually your thoughts about a play that you love and your private notes about a play, your coverage is, this is the whole point is that it's now accessible both to the theater you've written it for and to you for your archive becomes your archive of your intellectual property you're thinking. But so it's not viewable by anybody else except so it's private. So that's very separate from the public recommendations which are public and signed by you so people know that you're writing them. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? Any more questions we have? Yeah, go ahead, just a question now. Just that experience creating digital archives Did you guys hear about the question? Any concerns about the stability and longevity of the networks and the software that supports them? So you're asking what software are we using? Stability and longevity of the networks that you guys are using and the stability of the software that you guys are using. Are you concerned about it ever? Looking for the new place. No, I mean we're using an out of a box software called NING and they're pretty good at securing that. I don't think they've had any security leaks. And we don't really collect any data that people could use like birthdays or social security numbers or home addresses or anything like that. Yeah, I don't have any concerns. We're built on an open source platform called Drupal. There's a wide community of developers that it's lasted for forever. The White House uses it. Nike uses it. Half of the nonprofits I know that I've worked for for the last 20 years have used it. And I'm not concerned. Yeah, our website is also built on people. So, but what we do talk about in terms of born digital archives, we know a lot of the things that we're creating now, whether they're scripts or designs are almost everything is born before using computers to generate work that's gonna be in the theater. And so the archive, so much of the archive now being generated is digital and based on certain kinds of software to open it up. So that's a big discussion when we talk with theater companies about the stability of your archives, which is different from the stability of your website, which I'll be thinking of. It's just the thing now that websites get refreshed every couple of years, if not more often and so the portability of the contents is just part of the discussion. But some of the other stuff in terms of archiving we have to think about just because it's on a CD or what's that, it doesn't mean it's permanent at all. So we have to think about that. All right, we have a wrap it up. Thank you very much for participating and thank you all on this for bringing the web information to us and from coming from all over the world for this conference and to exchange ideas and maybe collaborate in the future. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much to all of our members. So on this first now, you guys can go to the nurse or can open up for the banquet. And I see everybody in the evening at the banquet and afterwards, we're gonna go have a drink at the restaurant in the high-end hotel after the ideas are there. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.