Herald

Herald was developed to streamline the application process for the participants of Medeltidsveckan på Gotland. It unified the application process for performers, vendors and more, enabling the team to more effectively handle the high volume of complex applications.

An introduction to Medeltidsveckan

Medeltidsveckan på Gotland is an institution. Founded in 1984 it has been a yearly fixture of the cultural life of Gotland. 
Every year more than 50.000 re-enactors, market vendors, performers, musical acts, guests and much more come together in Visby to mark the 1361 invasion of Visby by the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag and the subsequent fire taxation of the city of Visby. 

The problem to solve

For forty years the assembly of the festival was a manual process. Initially letters, phone calls, and later on emails and post-its made up the foundation of how the programme, the market and the festival itself came together. It worked. Kinda. 

But it did often lead to miscommunication, forgotten agreements, and missed details. This naturally frustrated the dedicated team at the Chancellery (as we colloquially call the festival HQ) and it especially frustrated the numerous participants who want the festival to succeed. 

A better process was needed. 

We needed a Herald

Herald
/ ˈhɛrəld /
an official at a tournament
a person who announces important news
the intermediate rank of heraldic officer, between king-of-arms and pursuivant

Essentially, we needed a uniform and directed approach to bringing any sort of participation to the festival. 

And so we created Steward. Steward is our web-based portal containing three tracks for applying for the festival:

• Vendor; food and non-food, active craftsmen, weavers, tattooists, and more.
• Performance; concerts, storytellers, fireshows, magicians, tournaments, etc.
• Activity; workshops, lectures, classes, tours, and so forth.

While we initially experienced some resistance, over time the community has come to value the simplicity and uniformity they experience. Deadlines are more often kept than before, agreements are remembered, and the team has less stress and burnout. 

And finally, we estimate that the team has saved something more than 15.000 hours of work since we launched Steward. 

Tell us about the technical side of things

Steward is developed as a bog standard PHP and MySQL application. The result of this is that the application can run on about 90% of all web servers out there.
It is made up of an assortment of modules we’ve added on top of the base application over the years:

• Scheduling; a visual drag’n’drop schedule component enabling the programme schedulers to ensure we don’t double book venues, that performers get the right amount of prep and teardown, and that we have adequate coverage throughout the festival.
  With over 50 venues and stages for shows, performances and concerts, making it easy to get an overview was critical.
• Contracts; for our activities and performers, we built the Contract module that pulls from a boilerplate template hosted on Google Docs, which we then inject the custom contract parts that are relevant for the specific applications. This is, for Swedish locals, shared via eBox for digital signing, and with everyone else a PDF is generated for them to download, sign and upload. 
• Invoicing; our market vendors lease a market stall, and are charged for power and water connections, and more. 
  We use Stripes Invoice products and the accompanying webhooks to send invoices and track their payment status. 
• Programme Sync; with Herald being our One Source of Truth the data often changes. As a result, we’ve built an automated sync that pulls data from Herald and other sources and uses that to automatically keep the programme on Medeltidsveckans website up to date.
• Ticket Sales Reporting; Medeltidsveckan operates on a “pass access with addons” model, meaning that you buy a cheap pass to access the festival and then add on all the shows you want to experience.
  We integrated the API from our ticketing partner to give each applicant insight into how the ticket sales for their activity are going.

It’s been three years since Herald was launched, and we’ve iterated over the format and scope of the project in the years since then, integrating feedback and improving the application.