Open Event, a distribution to empower culture and arts organizations everywhere

The digital team at Southbank Centre (http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/) are investigating how to build an ‘Open’ website. The journey started last September 2014 with a 10-week stint in a glass box where the team met 100's of people who visit Southbank Centre. Following this unique experience, the team grew in confidence and decided to open everything up to the public - including their website vision, processes, thinking, designs, and even the development backlog. They have now created the first version of an open CMS platform that any cultural events organisation could pick up, configure, change and use. In this presentation I will explain why the Southbank Centre opened up everything.

I will also present the Open Event CMS and how we think this approach could fundamentally change how the cultural sector develops future digital platforms. The Open Event CMS is a Drupal 7 distribution that provides a CMS targeted to cultural events with a self documented API that exposes the content via JSON endpoints that conform to the Schema.org specification (or any extension of this one) seamlessly.

Lastly I will talk about the process to create Open Source code as part of a standard development project, the challenges we faced and the solutions we chose; why the system was built in certain way and not other and what is the future roadmap.

As a companion to this talk I will organize two dedicated BOF/workshop sessions: one to explore further the current Drupal 7 version and another to kickstart the Drupal 8 version.

This session will be given in July at the DrupalCamp Bristol 2015 (https://2015.drupalcampbristol.co.uk/session/session/18).