System complexity, alternative, weather, Olympics etc

@ martin burns

You heavily underestimate the complexity of such a system - the fringe is a whole scale larger than any other event and the ticketing system needs to cater for huge numbers of variables - shows can be on different times on different days or even several times in the same day, with multiple price bands. The tickets must also be sold through multiple systems - fringe website, phone, fringe office, venue, venue's website. While someone is booking online you need to ensure that the tickets in a basket are not sold to someone else. The number of queries means you cannot have one central database. Also you need to cater for communication breakdowns, so individual systems can still sell their own allocations even when they cannot communicate with the centre or with each other. It is a hugely complicated system. The reason the fringe office chose the wrong system was because they were too ambitious and chose the system with the largest promised feature set, without taking adequate consideration of deliverability of that feature set. The Liquid system had never sold a single ticket before being selected to sell tickets for the largest arts event in the world. Had they chosen a proven system, there would have almost certainly not have been this fiasco.

@ Amos

The dominant venues do have their own ticketing system, called Via, and it was this system that was installed in the fringe office and a number of the other large venus that had been intending to use Liquid in just a few days before the fringe started at the end of July and which allowed the fringe to go ahead. If the big four venues had not decided some time ago to invest in their own choice of box office system and have this ready for 2008 and not to rely on the fringe office, then the fiasco might have been a complete meltdown.

Once the independent enquiry has published it's findings, let's hope that they find the Fringe management had better reasons for recommending the Liquid to the board than the following factors that might have crept into the decision-making process:

1. The Fringe Office tender documents and other statements made by their management indicated that they were looking for features in the box office system that could link it to the other festivals in Edinburgh - an extremely ambitious project when may of the festivals have different ticket systems of their own - even though the fringe venues had all told the Fringe Office that they did not want such features in the fringe box office system.

2. Pivotal Integration's Liquid software was in large part written by a person who has been working for several years as the Fringe Office's box office manager.

3. The Fringe management was reluctant to choose a system that had been developed partly in conjunction with, and was already in active use by, the major venues because the Fringe management wanted full control of the development of the box office system.

If these factors had been taken into account, then this would smack of self-serving empire-building, rather than working in the best interests of all the fringe stakeholders - in particular the venues and the performers who actually rely on those tickets sales for their income.

As for weather - it makes a big difference to the big outdoor bars, eg the Pleasance, Spiegal Garden and Udderbelly, but does not have much effect on ticket sales. As for the Olympics - this actually might have helped, as if you were into both, you could take one holiday and do the Fringe from 2pm to 3am every days and then watch the Olympics from 3am to 2pm - the timing were perfectly complementary!!

OSS Central Reservation Systems

@Justin

Interestingly, there don't seem to be any major OSS CRSs out there.

Surely it can't be *that* hard - a wee bit of complexity around reserved seating perhaps - but otherwise it's N venues with X performances of Y shows on Z dates, each with inventory of A seats. Not *that* complex a product catalogue, particularly if you can import a CSV. Hook it up to a commerce engine, host it somewhere with a bit of scalability[1], and your ma's bro should be called Rab.

[1] If you trust it, Google's App Engine's Django implementation might just be the fella.

What software would YOU use to run the Fringe?

There must be some freeware or Open Sauce available for doing this kind of thing. Maybe that's what Pivotal did - or maybe it's where they went wrong.