Through visualisation of employees’ contact lists, a new online tool aims to help arts organisations understand their professional relationships and discover new opportunities.
A new online tool for the arts aims to help the sector build new and better working relationships and improve organisations’ internal communications. The free-to-use tool, called ArtsAPI, invites arts organisations to upload lists of their employees’ email contacts, then analyses and visualises the data to help them identify strengths, weaknesses and new opportunities in their professional networks.
According to developer FutureEverything, the tool can assess how well an organisation is connected in a particular field or location, and how information is being shared within their networks. It describes a number of scenarios in which the tool could help cultural organisations, from a touring company looking for a new region to tour to, to a funding applicant needing evidence of how well connected it is in a certain field, or an organisation developing a new youth programme trying to understand in which areas it needs to build stronger relationships.
FutureEverything developed ArtsAPI in collaboration with the University of Dundee and Swirrl with support from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. Several arts organisations fed into the development process, including the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Culture24 and Blast Theory.
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