Software, precisely built.
Culturalyst, A Network For Local Culture
Culturalyst is digital infrastructure for both discovering local culture and sharing the resources that can help it thrive.
When Sam Bowler, a writer, sculptor, and technologist based in New Orleans committed to building his vision for a platform to serve local artists, he reached out to Futurescale for technical assistance.
The platform was not just an idea to Sam, it was an attempt to address the economic disparity that plays out in New Orleans and for most cultural economies globally. He had this to say about the impetus to create Culturalyst:
I started Culturalyst after learning about the inequity in the cultural economy of New Orleans. To give some context – New Orleans is one of the cultural treasures in the United States and as a result, benefits from a tourism economy in which tourists spend around $10 billion per year while visiting the city. This spending is on hotels, restaurants, etc, but about 10% is spent on entertainment, which equates to about $1 billion per year in New Orleans, which you’d hope would be funneling back into the cultural community. Unfortunately, it’s not. Artists and culture bearers, the producers of culture, bring in roughly $20,000 in annual income, a large portion of which is already lost to rent, which has been driven up by over 60% in the last five years, due in large part to the pressure Airbnb has put on affordable housing.
Sam taught himself to program, in order to make his vision a reality. But building a complex platform can be a daunting task.
The Culturalyst platform has a separate deployment for every city in the network. It is live today, and serves New Orleans, his hometown, where he interfaces with artists, local government, and arts councils about how to improve the system. More cities are already in the pipeline.
Futurescale provided a lot of input to the project:
- Designed the domain model, which contains all the objects that the application will manipulate and store in a Firebase database.
- Created the MVP application architecture in Angular and JavaScript.
- Wrote cloud functions that index data and generate static HTML artist and organization profiles.
- Documented the process for bringing new sites online.
Culturalyst
- Visit the Landing Site.
- Visit the New Orleans Site.
- Read an Interview with Sam.