Eisteddfod Events?!
Around two years ago Bill Allitt approached Digital Fusion with an interesting proposition: he wanted to develop a tool that would help manage eisteddfods.
Well this sparked our interest, mostly because we didn’t have a clue what an "eisteddfod" was. After a quick Google we were not a great deal wiser so it took a call and meeting to finally work out what they are, and what Bill had in mind for a solution that would help manage the day to day running of eisteddfod events.
So, to try to explain what an eisteddfod is in the easiest manner possible: it's a show consisting of mainly music or dance events, but may include other things such as public speaking and presentation events, contested one to several days, with eventual winners in each category and age group. The term is Welsh, meaning a festival of literature, music and performance.
A Collaborative Development
Bill required Digital Fusion's support to develop this, but he wanted to work on it as a collaborative project, with both himself and one of our team working on it together.
The collaborative part was driven on two fronts, one Bill had an interest in FileMaker, the other was Bill running this as a side project, away from his day to day business of picture framing.
We partnered Bill up with one of our developers (Greig Jackson) and the two of them went to work. As the budget was tight, we would work to a set amount each month and then either Bill would carry on or we would defer the next round of development to the following months.
Slowly things started to come to fruition, a solution that could be supplied to eisteddfods to run their events.
The app is primarily to allow event organisers to create and then organise events into a schedule which will become the day plan for a given event. Additionally, it allows the event organisers to manage a contact list of all participants. Finally, it also covers judging, including a scoring system and championship event management.
Key features of the solution are:
- Import events and contact into the solution
- Manage event ordering based on location, sessions etc
- Track entry items i.e. paints, livestock etc
- Manage multiple events at one time
- Location and session management (stage and timeslots)
For Sale
Since Bill originally approached Digital Fusion his thinking has changed as to how he promotes his solution. It’s now viewed as a turn-key app that can be used by a large number of organisations, from eisteddfod organisers through to anyone that runs events, spanning multiple disciplines over multiple days.