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February 13, 2008

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Tony

That sounds like the kind of program that hopefully the league would have done.

Nick Keenan

Oh, tony, I have such good news, and no time to write it down.

First of all, the broadwayworld site is unreadable. My eyes are crossed. Ow. I don't know who they're serving, but it's not the audience.

Sat down with Ben at the League yesterday and talked about how best to push forward his plan for a web 2.0 solution that serves the need of the community, and by the end of it we agreed: it'll take a while to implement, but the final product needs to be an IMDB / Facebook / Craigslist / HotTix / Wikipedia / MoveOn.org (which are all built on the same basic web innovations) that becomes a centralized repository of information and networking.

It's a long way off, but it's being worked on, and we brainstormed some ideas to get the community working on that kind of bottom-up thinking model (and generating useful content) right now, this week. Will be talking about that soon.

I think sites like broadwayworld and Theater in Chicago are shims for what will eventually could be a real community-driven site, and the more I think about it, the more I believe the League is the only organization capable to act as that central hub where all the content can grow and be nurtured. They have a lot of reform that still needs to be done, of course, but what I learned yesterday is that they actually want the reform to happen, and they need the momentum to build first to make it so.

So our involvement can actually speed up the process. A practical thing we can do right now to get started: Organize visits and contributions to the League wiki, which I'll be helping Ben to optimize for easier access for the storefront crowd. That's an easy and ultimately useful project to cut our teeth on.

Sorry, Kris, for doing this all here in the comments. I'll stop hijacking you. More soon. Wheeee!

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  • Kris Vire
    I write about theater for Time Out Chicago. I write more about it here.

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