Ch-Ch-Check It Out

Sassy Rant (Here’s a crappy, free, version of what I’d like to see.)

from Lily, Director of Effervescent Collective

I've been pushing for a well-built, well-managed, and well-designed calendar for dance class options in Baltimore for two years. And NO, this isn't so we can list our own classes. (Our class is Free!) It's so dancers of all kinds and experience can FIND F*CKING DANCE CLASSES.

What we need: When you want to go to a dance class, you just look at today's date on the calendar and you know your options. You're hyperlinked to teacher websites and class descriptions. You can plan your week as an aspiring professional dancer, or you can close your eyes and point. In order for our dance community to mature, we need to spend more time looking outside our own pretty little shoeboxes of classes and performances. We need to invite and listen to critical voices. We need to teach and reach outside our family business.

There are five universities with dance departments in a 10 mile radius of Baltimore city. There are over a dozen professional dance companies of wonderful variety in Baltimore city. But we just can't seem to get all our info listed in one place. We like to make our potential students -- who are already tentative, anxious, and nervous about a new class -- we like to make those nice folks do half an hour of online research before they take a blind dive into something new.

So my next task is to prove why the dance community needs an umbrella website. Apparently, this has been tried before and folks didn't participate. So, I'm trying to figure out how demonstrate that just because you've tried a tool once (eg. online resources) and it didn't work, doesn't mean the tool doesn't work. It means the tool was not well-built or managed well. Just because your IKEA bookshelf fell apart, it doesn't mean that all bookshelves aren't worth the investment.

The more conversations I have with folks inside the arts funding community, the more I realize I need to manufacture a sense of community - or at least produce a statement of intent - in order to get the $$$Support to build the tool. The tool - the website - is what we want in order to create better community. See my chicken-egg situation?

F*ck that noise. Here’s a crappy, free, version of what I’d like to see. A version of an online resource that could help build community. Ideally, this calendar would be easier to read, administer, and allow user-generated content for if we could pay someone who knows about web design/programming to spend some time on it. Make classes easier to find, list them all in the same place, encourage your students to shop around, and let’s see what happens to class attendance, let’s see if we can build our mailing lists.

If you want to list a class, email me and I'll give you the password to add/edit.