Purpose
Let's change our "mental map" of the theater field. Let's widely distribute the power to map ourselves to a diverse community of theatermakers so that we can acquire new narratives about who we are and about how new theater and artists get supported.
The New Play Map is a project of the HowlRound: a Center for the Theater Commons, Emerson College on behalf of and in collaboration with the field that seeks to develop opportunities that internet and communication tools have for enabling collaborative, culturally transformative, and globally-scaled resource sharing.
The principles and strategy grounding this initiative are influenced by the culture and ethos of open-source software development communities, by community-sourced collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, Ushahidi and Open Architecture Network, and by a large community of thinkers and doers who wish to reclaim the notion of "the commons" as a primary mode of organizing human culture.
Get News and Contact Us
Track our developments and news via the @NewPlayMap Twitter account and through the New Play Map blog posts. Additionally, you can email us through the Help System, leave a voice message at +1 617-800-9627, or email newplaymap (at) howlround (dot) com.
The New Play Map is Open Source and Available on GitHub
The source code for the entire project is open, free, and publicly available on GitHub, a social coding repository. Take it, use it, adapt it, and build with us! We would like to encourage any organization or individual to adapt this project for their own community within the U.S. or even beyond our borders. We could imagine a "New Play Map: World" if, for example, another nation’s arts service organization wanted to take the lead on creating a Map for its particular constituency. Or, one could imagine Mapping something entirely different based on some of work that is already built here.
The New Play Map's Website Development Team
Quilted: Ben Mauer, kiran nigam, Colin Sagan, and Rocket.
Independent Developer: Chacha Sikes
HowlRound Project Directors: Jamie Gahlon and Vijay Mathew
Development History and Timeline
Since the Fall of 2009, HowlRound (formerly known as the American Voices New Play Institute) has been collaborating with the web development company Quilted which is a worker-owned, cooperatively-managed company stitching together technology and social change.
In the Spring of 2010, several member organizations of the National New Play Network contributed to early prototypes of the New Play Map website and provided crucial feedback and ideas for the current version.
January 10, 2011: Version 1 released for the field's participation.
January 26-29, 2011:Feedback collected at a national convening From Scarcity to Abundance – Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector.
June 2011: Version 2 completes development.
July 2012: Version 3 completes development.
October 2012: Version 4 completes development.
What were the functional goals of Version 1 of the New Play Map website?
- Make an open platform for the field to create a Map of itself in order to make visible—for the first time ever—all the organizations, activity, and generative artists that comprise our yet unknown infrastructure for new work. The New Play Map aims to be a community-generated, real-time map of the national new works infrastructure. It is designed as an information aggregator and a platform for the collaborative editing of content. All content is provided or “patched in” by people to whom the information pertains or by anyone who is knowledgeable about a particular event, organization, or artist.
- Facilitate discovery and learning about the new works infrastructure.
- By using various category filtering and search features that aim to help the user sort, discover, and learn about our sector.
- By visualizing how a project journeys through time, space, and relationships within the different support systems that comprise the national new works infrastructure.
- Collectively capture and identify the New Works Sector's most compelling ideas for shaping the future of this tool and resource. The field's ideas will determine how to design and build version 2 of the New Play Map. There was and continues to be feedback capturing system here that will enable feedback and discussion from anyone.
What did the New Play Sector collectively determine are the potential uses of the New Play Map?
Feedback gathered from the January 2011 convening, hosted by Arena Stage in Washington, DC and through the online feedback system was synthesized and articulated into four major tool-set descriptions. Tools 1 and 2 were addressed in Version 2's development. The following statements are responses to the prompt "The New Play Map is _______."
- A Scouting/Discovery/Learning Tool : Follow specific projects/artists/orgs by email alerts, and RSS feeds. See an Event Calendar.)
- A Demonstrate Your Impact Tool : Play, playwright, organization showing what she/he/it has done. Exporting and sharing play journeys outside of the website—online and printed.
- An Artistic Development/Dramaturgy Tool: Artistic process tracking on the Journey, production notebooks, patching in feeds, uploading dramaturgy.
- A Matching Need to Opportunity/Resource Tool: Resource filter, mapping resources, I have rehearsal space, residency opportunity and you need what I have. I want to champion this play and am seeking partners. I want to broadcast what show I'm looking for.
Website Technical Specifications and Hosting Service Provider
The New Play Map website is built using Drupal, an open source content management platform, and is hosted by GAIA Host Collective, a worker-owned cooperative dedicated to environmental and social sustainability.
Terms of Use
Intellectual "Non-Property" Statement (aka Knowledge Commons Statement)
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.