PorchFest Community Music Festival Organizer

*** Project Team Complete ***

Client

Robbert VanRenesse, Research Professor, Computer Science Department
Email: <rvr@cs.cornell.edu>

Background

A "PorchFest" is a community event in which musicians play for free for their neighbors. For example, last year, 185 bands played on their porches in Ithaca's Fall Creek neighborhood during a 6 hour event, and was attended by thousands of people. There are now about 70 communities in the U.S. and Canada that organize annual PorchFests. These events are run by volunteers but organization is difficult. This project proposes to create a web site that simplifies the task of organizing a PorchFest.

Project Summary

The web site will have essentially three classes of users: organizers, musicians, and attendees. An organizer can "create" a new PorchFest, specifying the time slots and area in which the PorchFest will be held and ultimately schedule the bands. Musicians register information about their bands and the locations of their porches. Attendees want to find out which bands are playing when and where. Using the last Ithaca PorchFest as an example: the organizers picked a Sunday in September, specified the Fall Creek neighborhood as their area, and gave six possible time slots, from noon to 1pm, 1pm to 2pm, and so on until 6pm. Musicians registered their porches (by address) and the band or bands they play in, as well as which time slots they were available. The organizers then solved a constraint optimization problem in order to assign bands to time slots. For example, musicians cannot play in two bands at the same time, and you also don't want two band playing right across from one another. The organizers ran their tentative schedule by the musicians and had to make some changes before posting the final schedule. The posted schedule used Google Maps and supported various listing and search options for attendees, and was also easy to access from smart phones. In addition, a PDF of the schedule was posted.

The project will involve designing the web site, the database tables that are necessary to store the information, mass email for organizers to notify registered musicians and attendees, and the algorithm used to solve the constraint optimization problem to schedule the bands. A web site like this could become extremely popular and could stimulate more PorchFests being organized around the country and possibly the world.